When the Actor Christine Decker  stood up to speak to the audience during the intermission of a play we were attending that she had just directed at the Old Castle Theater in Bennington, Vt., I sat up.

Christine had acted in a short version of a play I wrote that was performed at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, N.Y., several years ago.

She played the wife of the farmer struggling to deal with the collapse of their dairy farm, a story that was all too prescient and is not all too familiar.

I was knocked out by Christine’s remarkable understanding of my character and her respect for what I wrote. Her presentation of the character was stronger than my own creation of her.

It was a thrilling collaboration for me, a kind of mind-blower.

I thought then that I could learn from a person like this.

I have hardly seen Christine since that play, and I didn’t know she was offering classes at the Old Castle, or even that she was working there, until she told me.

Instantly, I surprised myself – and shocked Maria – by whispering to her, “I’m going to take that class if she’d let me…”

I went right home and sent her an e-mail asking if she would let me in the class. She wrote back and got it completely. It would be an honor she wrote, she was sure the class would help me with my writing.

Since I have no wish to be an actor, this was what I wanted to hear

And so she did let me in  and I am taking the class.

People have asked me why I’m taking the class, and the truth is, I don’t know, I can’t really say. I have no desire to be an actor or be on the stage, as much as I love audiences and applause.

I guess I’ll find out soon, the first class is tonight from 7 to 9 p.m. Maria wants to pay for the class – the  fee is $200 – as a Christmas gift.

Two things come to mine today, I have this feeling it will be an important day. I admit to being nervous, this out of my comfort zone, for the bulk of my life I’ve worked alone in dark and quiet rooms.

I am not the collaborative type, I’ve regretted it every time I’ve done it.

Maybe it’s time to open up a crack or two and let something else in.

One thing driving me is the idea of the inner creation, a process that exists inside of me all the time, every day. It isn’t that I need lessons to spark creation, life itself is the spark of creation for me, and for Maria as well. I am a bundle of need: for love, for support, for information, for protection, and for my creativity.

The desire to receive for the self alone dominated my early life and has recently been transformed into a desire to receive for the purpose of sharing.

Joseph Campbell said the joy of aging is that we finally have learned something about life, and even learned how to laugh, and  the responsibility of aging is to pass along what we have learned in the hope it will be useful to others.

For me, this is the true path to eternal life.

What I know can live on and on, long after I’m gone. That’s not a morbid thought for me, but a joyous one.

I call it the Mysticism of Aging. I know our culture denigrates the elderly, sees them only through the prism of decline, deterioration,  sickness and death. The  young know nothing about us, really, and how could they and why should they?

Growing older is something one has to feel to understand. It is mystical.

It is not, for me, a period of decline and pain and misery.

I have felt some of those things, and have no illusions about where I am heading, or what the outcome will be. I see it all the time.

For me, this idea of inner creation is a way of understanding not just the creation of the universe, but the process of self-creation and rebirth in which  I participate every minute of my life. So does my wife and partner in creativity.

I see this as a rich period for me, not a bleak one. I reject old talk in all of its creepy forms.

The real death in my mind comes when I stop thinking, learning, changing, loving or growing. When I begin the downsizing of my soul, enabled in this shallow idea of our culture that the task of aging is to disappear and then die.

It’s too small a window for me, the inner creation that fuels my life would just wither and die, and I’m not ready to wither and die.

Christine has the magic inside of her, she is just one of those passionate people on fire with her creativity, she is excited to be living in the world. She wants to share what she knows. I want to learn what she knows.

I guess I’m taking the class because I have this very strong feeling that she has something to teach me that I need to know.

I’ll share the experience, of course.