No one told me it would be like this— how growing older is another passage of discovery and that aging is one grand transformation, and if some things become lost along the way, many other means show up to bring me closer to the center of my heart.
No one ever told me if whatever wonder waits ahead is in another realm and outside of time. But the amazement, I found, is that the disconcerting things within the here and now that I stumble and trip my way through, also lead me gracefully home.
And no one told me that I would ever see an earth so strong and fragile, or a world so sad and beautiful. And I surely didn’t know I’d have all this life yet in me or such fire inside my bones.
~ Susan Frybort ~
I think this says it all. The perfect complement to Monday’s post. The intention for this next span of life I’ve been gifted. Perhaps fitting for you, too.
Thank you for your kind birthday wishes, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards.
It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.
And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.
I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.
“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”
I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:
“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”
In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.
Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.
(It’s Sunday night when I typically sit down and pen a post for Monday morning. I’ve just finished responding to time-sensitive emails and polishing my submission package for one more look-over by my editorbefore meeting the month end deadline. Clock ticking and keen to keep my blogging commitment, I sat for several minutes to see what might emerge. I haven’t tapped into my usual sources – podcasts while I walk, newsletters, something that pops on social media – and given my focus has been quite singular in preparing poetry, the creative pump needed priming. So once again from the draft folder, this one originally penned in April, still pertinent with some reworking enhanced by today’s photo memories in Jasper 2021.)
catastrophe real or imagined? Athabasca Falls, Jasper Alberta, 2021
“…while the difficult parts of aging are unavoidable, we can try not to add to them. For example, I have seen, throughout my life, the tendency to rehearse some catastrophe and thereby live it several times. So, I think the first question is always, ‘What are we adding onto a situation which is already hard enough?'”
Sharon Salzberg, Facebook, December 13, 2023
Rehearsing catastrophes.
Do you do this? Live an unpleasant event – either past or anticipated – several times, each time adding to the stew of anxiety?
Currently it’s an event I must attend – a “no choice” choice kind of thing – that given experience is weighing heavy. I realize, in both its anticipation, and in the telling of it, I’m working myself into a corner, not allowing myself or the yet-to-be situation any space to become any different from my set-in-stone ideas. Once again, borrowing from Portia Nelson’s wonderfully pithy “Autobiography in Five Chapters,” I’m walking down the same street, heading for the same pothole, as if knowing this will somehow vindicate me.
While Sharon wrote this in relation to turning seventy specifically, and aging generally, she offers this glimpse into an aspect of our perfectly imperfect human condition.
“…aging is a mixed bag. Wisdom, perspective, gratitude—so many things grow stronger as we get older. But there are also distressing, growing incapacities from one’s body; the fear of what a moment of forgetfulness might mean; the sheer indignity of being treated as unimportant by some…”
Sharon Salzberg
I’m thinking of this in relation to how I’ve been feeling lately, seeing the tendency to overthink when feeling anxious or scared; worrying despite knowing it brings no relief nor clarity; impatience and irritability when questions of belonging lurk. The lapses in remembering that “this, too, will pass,” and that fatigue can amplify it all.
And then too, the counterpoint of moments and hours of contentment reading, immersed in a creative project, walking, sitting outside sky watching, steps consciously taken to bypass that street and its all too familiar potholes.
Maybe it’s as simple as remembering today’s photo memory from seven years ago:
“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
Anais Nin
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that we have a new dog, Walker. In the three weeks since arriving, he has settled in and is learning our routines in ways that amaze us. This is the first time in forty years having an “only” dog with no other to show him the ropes. And despite our saying “no” and “git” many times a day, we laugh and marvel as often. To quote my husband, he has become our “joy boy.” This past week, on the first anniversary of our Annie dog’s passing, I remarked to myself and wrote to my friend who took a moment to acknowledge the day, how utterly surprised I was to find myself falling in love with Walker. I wondered if and have since concluded that this is a gift of allowing myself to grieve so fully for the loss of Annie.
“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind
It’s a mixed bag, this aging thing. The messy catastrophes. The moments of contentment. Beings that bring joy. Breath that makes me live. Stars that pull my hair. Yes, to it all. With love.
You are confronted with yourself. Each year The pouches fill, the skin is uglier. You give it all unflinchingly. You stare Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care Runs with self-knowledge. Here
Is a humility at one with craft. There is no arrogance. Pride is apart From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt But there is still love left.
Love of the art and others. To the last Experiment went on. You stared beyond Your age, the times. You also plucked the past And tempered it. Self-portraits understand, And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death. Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose, The sadness and the joy. To paints, to breathe, And all the darknesses are dared. You chose What each must reckon with.
– Elizabeth Jennings, ‘Collected Poems’ Carcanet, 1987
First post in a month, and this poem fits the bill. To be confronted with one’s aging self – the fatigue that lingers from almost two weeks of jetlag; stiff and aching knees upon waking, and after playing pickleball; vision that increasingly, more often than not, needs the assistance of my glasses; hearing that fades in noisy spaces; crepey skin and protruding veins on my suntanned hands – I could go on, but suffice to say, with truthful changes and a new anguish, there is still love left.
Italy was terrific. She never disappoints, even though it was quite cool for a few days in Taormina, Sicily. The Fairweather Goddess made her presence known, only giving us showers when indoors at a cooking class, touring Palermo, driving in a small touring to a vineyard luncheon on Mount Vesuvius, and full out sunshine when it mattered most – during our drive along the Amalfi Coast on, what locals call, the “Via Mama Mia.” Having arranged this trip, I was pleased that all our plans came together, with the only travel delay back in Canada, where we sat for over an hour on the tarmac during our final leg home from Calgary. I had no idea, as I was sound asleep.
rain in Palermosunshine on the Amalfi Coast, looking down onto Positano
Home less than a week, Sig drove to Kamloops to fetch Walker, our sixth English Setter. Not a year old, he’s playful, eager to please, a quick learner and from one side, looks so much like Annie that I occasionally lapse and call him by her name. It will be quite some time before he becomes the walking companion I had in her, but we’re both amazed at how much he’s settled in six days. Too, we’ve concluded, given our fatigue with the full-out attention required (managed in part by putting a bell on his collar, silence signaling we might need to check out what he’s up to), this will be our last dog, a reckoning as we stare beyond our age, the times.
Walker… we all fall into bed after a full day
At the beginning of this year, I wrote here about “an eldering landscape,” that inevitable next threshold that defines this age and stage of life. Balancing the sadness and the joy, in this stage, in this poem, I think back to one of our seven touring companions in Sicily. Patricia, an eighty-five-year-old American who, with her sixty something daughter, climbed every stair, walked every cobblestone path, sipped every taste of Sicilian wine, cooked with us savoring every morsel. Late self-portrait, hardly! I’ll take a page from her album any day.
I’m happy to be home, and back here on the page with you, dear friends. Much love and kindest regards.
I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip, her erect bearing, radiating tenderness, the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket, beaming peace like the North Star. I wanted to ask, “What aisle did you find your serenity in, do you know how to be married for fifty years, or how to live alone, excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess some knowledge that makes earth burn and turn on its axis.” But we don’t request such things from strangers nowadays. So I said, “I love your hair.”
A Wabi Sabi Life 