By bye blackbird

“Pack up all your cares and woes…”  Don’t know why that popped into my head.   I just listened to Joe Cocker sing this 1926 classic.  The song is about going home to the one who loves and understands me.

Isn’t that what home is?  It is where you are fully seen.  Home can be anywhere.  In a mansion down Country Club Road or a tent in the trees or between your breastbone and your solar plexus, wrapped inside your sheltering ribs.

Seems like so many of us look for home outside of ourselves.  It is inside of us.  We carry our world inside of us and choose who we share it with.  Home is where the heart is.

 

On a different note, it seems like some critters are making a home out of my old car Mona.  I thought she moaned because her joints were stiff but apparently she was trying to tell me that little mice are chewing on her innards.  Poor misunderstood Mona.  Home can be anywhere, just not in my car please.

I am Old (but not ancient)

I’m coming out.  I’m dropping the curtain, telling the truth, lifting the veil.

I am old, best beloved.  I am old.  There, I said it.  Not only do I say it, I embrace it.  I am aged.  I am over the hill.  In fact, I’m over a few hills.  I am lucky to have survived.

Now I can hear the hectoring, lecturing voices —:  “you aren’t old, 70 is the new 40,  you look great, you’re only as old as you feel …blah, blah, blah”.  Shut up.  Attitude is no replacement for reality.

I feel old.  My head aches, my fingers seize up at odd moments, my hearing is going and occasionally I stoop.  So what?  I am old.  I embrace my infirmities.  I earned them and I earned a few more I don’t have yet.

I worked at a school for bad, weird boys in Redmond many years ago.  I shouldn’t call them that.  They had had terrible things happen to them, done to them and then they just continued to do horrible, bad, things to others.  But that’s not the story.

One day at the end of the school day we were waiting in front of the bus for the boys to board and get the fuck away.  Two of the boys started a vicious fight and then they teetered into a rather deep ditch at the side of the road. The bus driver was yelling “what are you going to do?  I don’t have the rest of the afternoon to wait.”

The male school teachers just looked at each other.  I yelled out “What do you want us to do?”  No one responded.  They were a lame lot.  Then inspiration hit.

I looked across at one of the young women who worked there.  We nodded at each other, and jumped in the ditch.  Boy, did that fight break up quickly.  They didn’t want to be throwing punches with this young woman who they loved in there and they certainly didn’t want to be trapped in a ditch with an old broad like me laying on top of them.

The older I get, the less I hold onto my pride.  I mean, I have certain standards.  I don’t deny that.  But age confers a kind of freedom to be who you are.  I welcome that freedom. I become myself.

Why do we have to deny our age?  Is it because we fear death so much?  Death is always right around he corner.  Anyone can tell you that.  We’re born, we age, we die.  What we do in between is important, very important, a life well lived and all that, but we die.  Like a pair of well worn shoes, eventually our soles give out, our toes break out the front and our utility is used up.

Okay, I know, I know, I’ve created a simile and now I have to live with it.  My soul will never give out, but my uppers are shot.  I can wear them a good few more years, but decline is, without a doubt, setting in.  Oh well, they’ve taken me a lot of great places, and done a few great things.  They’ve filled with tears and blood and sweat and more laughter than you can ever imagine.  They are big shoes.  They are full of memories and wonderful people.  I embrace them.

I embrace my age.  I embrace myself.  You do you.

And for your consideration:

 

 

 

 

…a little cake

We worry about our kids, the weather, global warming, bird habitat, bee die-off, old age, finances, and on and on.

Have a little cake.

Blackberries

I’m pulling up, pulling out, trampling, smashing and hopefully annilihating the blackberries in the backyard.  They are fighting back the m…f…ers.  So far I’ve fallen over backwards, had a long barb attach itself to my ear and barely escaped with my life.

It’s so damned exhilarating.  I love this kind of work but I fear, alas, that my age is creeping up on me.  I can only go full bore for about two hours and then I collapse.

Not for long though.  I’m coming back blackberries.  I will destroy you.  For now.

Aunt Fran has a different take.  She says “live and let live”, “they will only come back”, and most disheartening, “so unimportant.”  Her take is not war, but coexistence.  It’s so unAmerican.  Aunt Fran says “phooey, have another babka.”

I will, but, I’m coming for you blackberries.  I will destroy you.

For now.

Hello. There you are

Do we ever know another person?  That’s a difficult question, as how can we know what we don’t know?

If empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes, I think knowing another person would be to walk in another person’s soul.

The soul is a two story house with a basement.  The front room and dining room would admit you to the part of a person contrived for public consumption.  Upstairs is for family only (dirty clothes, unmade beds, toilet, and bath, and sex if you’re lucky.

The basement.  Now that is a whole other world.  That is where the bodies are buried(quite literally that is where serial killers and others not quite so serial, bury their bodies).

When we are younger, it seems to me, we have more to hide.  Our secrets are held close to our chests.  As we open up, as indeed we must if we are to grow and prosper and use all of who we are, we fully inhabit our souls.  Every damn room with all the lights on.  What a relief.  We can let down.

A little different metaphor—the soul is a many petaled flower.  Our final flowering is our beautiful destiny—to be fully open, fully alive.

Why do we fear this, and we do?

As children, our souls are encouraged to gradually contract;  like toilet training, we learn to control ourselves:  don’t be so sensitive, don’t be so needy, don’t be so YOU.

In order to be embraced, folded into the family fold, we have to move our questionable traits, our wants or needs, like old china into the basement.  If we want we can occasionally go down there and rifle through a few things, but all that detritus, that stuff, needs to be kept out of sight.  Except when it isn’t.

I believe that as we get older we can clean house.  We can get rid of the public furniture (or keep it for special occasions) and rescue the stuff in the basement.  We can bloom.  Every petal, every sepal, every damn bit of stuff we have crammed away can be brought into the light.

This will not be comfortable for everyone, hardly anyone.  It is growth, though, don’t you understand.  It is the whole of you.  It means unpacking the china, carefully, with compassion, with love and either setting it aside or using it.

It is a witnessing of our larger more complete self.  It is “Hello.  There you are.”

 

 

My Aunt Beth

I was coming back from picking up a dinner from our local Thai restaurant.  Tired and a bit morose, I passed a meadow, a long sloping meadow where cows and their calves usually lay, and what did I see but sunlight flowing over empty meadows. I thought of Beth.

Aunt Beth, who is herself a glorious presence, a long play of sunlight on new green grass.

When we talk, Beth and I, we talk of many things—sad things, tragic things, difficulties, struggles in ourselves and also in those we love.

Our conversations are not all light and airy and yet at the end of them, I feel like her love light has shone on me and I hope she feels the same way.

Life is not easy.  But, if, at the end of a long, difficult week I can talk to my Aunt Beth, I feel better.  I feel capable of coping.  I feel that life in itself is a gift, no matter how hard or soft or any old way it is.  Life is a gift.  My Aunt Beth is a gift.

I don’t know why I was given this wonderful woman to spend my life with.  Thank you universe for your gifts of Beth, of breath and of long mellow, buttery rays on a green meadow.

So sue me

I’m still chaffing under the sobriquet “Pollyanna”.  Women feel, men act.  Is that the assumption?  I think that’s sloppy thinking.  I think that under all this hate-mongering and hate crime, this domestic terrorism is a lot of feeling.

Unacknowledged feeling.  Feeling that has morphed.

We all feel.  We feel sad, we feel shame, we feel worthless and left out and angry.

I can have compassion for someone without believing in what they are espousing.  I can feel someone’s pain that underlies their bad behavior.