As we head into autumn, and then the long winter, I need to remind myself that spring is always, always on the other side. Holidays are not enough to distract me from the short days, the low gray clouds, the rains and the bone-deep chill of the Northwest after its glorious summers fade. There's always a price to pay, isn't there, always another turn of the wheel. Good ol' yin and yang. This poem was sent to me and I thought it would be a good way to wrap up September:
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
~ William Stafford ~
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
The Pros and Cons of Flying High
At the beach today a couple of kids were fishing off the rocks. All well and good – a pleasant scene on a beautiful fall day. After walking some distance past them, I heard one exclaim that he'd caught something. I turned my head and saw an 8 year old boy excited to have even the smallest creature dangling from his line.
"Can you get it off?" called his mother from her blanket on the sand.
"I think so," he said. A twinge of anxiety shot through me. Hoping he wasn't going to do what I did as a kid with fish on my hook, I continued up the beach and tried to think about something else.
The dock and the fish and my cousin Tommy came flooding back anyway. I think of this every so often, how each summer at grandma's lake house we'd drop our lines over the edge of the dock and troll for sunfish. Sunnies, we called them. They were easy to spot through the clear lake water. Mother sunfish liked to build their nests - light colored circles on the lake bottom - right alongside the docks, almost directly in the center of each boat slip. They bit fast and were an effortless catch.
But once caught, they were not always easy to unhook. Tommy knew how to get rid of the toughest ones. He showed me how to slide the fish between the wooden slats of the dock, rotate it perpendicular, and yank hard.
"What now?" I said, eyeing the entrails on my line. A strange feeling hovered on the edge of my awareness. I watched the body of the ravaged sunny, stunned and dying, as it sank to the bottom of the lake. We kept on fishing and, when we couldn't unhook them, leaving them for dead. This went on each summer until we morphed into teenagers and outgrew fishing and each other.

Because I am now an adult who cannot kill anything without wrenching remorse, these kinds of memories deeply disturb me. Due to the increased anxiety I have from immense midlife changes, they’re occurring more frequently. Moderate and minor stressors from the past have a new sting, long after I thought the toxins had worked themselves out. They bring me into harder contact with my ongoing existential despair – that of being merely human in an unfathomable universe, and of feeling guilty for our contribution to the destruction of our beautiful world.
It's nearly impossible to walk out your front door if you think too hard about these things. Anything we do has detrimental consequences in some form or another. The only way around it is to remember that we know how to create as well as destroy. And to remember that regardless of our actions, we are part of the natural world and the natural order of things. As with any natural phenomenon, we contain darkness and light. Our consciousness is another duality, for it is both a blessing and a curse to be aware of ourselves, what we have done, and what we can still do.
That is the high altitude view, and that's where I spend much of my mental time and energy. Away from the messiness of being human, of unsolvable dilemmas and pain. It's good to have the ability to go to thirty thousand feet, but it can also be an escape. I fear that I have spent too much time off the ground, because now comes a growing awareness that I must descend into the personal in a way I've never been able to. My body and psyche are sending signals that they're ready to deal with old issues, with trauma still embedded at a cellular level.
For this work I have to be willing to let ego and my small, little self take center stage. I have to acknowledge what it is and was like to be me, one inconsequential person among billions, and to act as if I matter. (Sure you're special. Just like everyone else.) To act as if my needs matter as much as the planet's. I am being asked to revisit what it really felt like being discounted, yelled at, smacked, ignored, or made fun of those times when I tried to explain it away or shrug it off. I need to go to the narrowest view, to think of only myself. This in service of breaking up the stuck energy that has manifested as a chronic, low grade, agitated depression since teenhood. At least, that is my hope.
Most people spend most of their time in this small place, as if life is about them, as if their eyes and egos show them reality, as if they know the universe. I have always been discouraged by this fact and proud that I can see past such short sightedness. But I often take it past discouragement to contempt. Perhaps it's a case of "protesting too much." Any extreme position is usually masking something not yet conscious.
Could it be that what I need most to heal is where I've least wanted to go my whole life? To go back and affirm my personhood at the most basic level? This is certainly what the psychological and spiritual texts tell us. It's not that I haven't tried. Now that I better understand timing – from that high altitude perspective - I know you can't hurry acorns into oaks. I just want to make sure, being more conscious of aging and mortality these days, that I live long enough to see the treetops.
"Can you get it off?" called his mother from her blanket on the sand.
"I think so," he said. A twinge of anxiety shot through me. Hoping he wasn't going to do what I did as a kid with fish on my hook, I continued up the beach and tried to think about something else.
The dock and the fish and my cousin Tommy came flooding back anyway. I think of this every so often, how each summer at grandma's lake house we'd drop our lines over the edge of the dock and troll for sunfish. Sunnies, we called them. They were easy to spot through the clear lake water. Mother sunfish liked to build their nests - light colored circles on the lake bottom - right alongside the docks, almost directly in the center of each boat slip. They bit fast and were an effortless catch.
But once caught, they were not always easy to unhook. Tommy knew how to get rid of the toughest ones. He showed me how to slide the fish between the wooden slats of the dock, rotate it perpendicular, and yank hard.
"What now?" I said, eyeing the entrails on my line. A strange feeling hovered on the edge of my awareness. I watched the body of the ravaged sunny, stunned and dying, as it sank to the bottom of the lake. We kept on fishing and, when we couldn't unhook them, leaving them for dead. This went on each summer until we morphed into teenagers and outgrew fishing and each other.
Because I am now an adult who cannot kill anything without wrenching remorse, these kinds of memories deeply disturb me. Due to the increased anxiety I have from immense midlife changes, they’re occurring more frequently. Moderate and minor stressors from the past have a new sting, long after I thought the toxins had worked themselves out. They bring me into harder contact with my ongoing existential despair – that of being merely human in an unfathomable universe, and of feeling guilty for our contribution to the destruction of our beautiful world.
It's nearly impossible to walk out your front door if you think too hard about these things. Anything we do has detrimental consequences in some form or another. The only way around it is to remember that we know how to create as well as destroy. And to remember that regardless of our actions, we are part of the natural world and the natural order of things. As with any natural phenomenon, we contain darkness and light. Our consciousness is another duality, for it is both a blessing and a curse to be aware of ourselves, what we have done, and what we can still do.
That is the high altitude view, and that's where I spend much of my mental time and energy. Away from the messiness of being human, of unsolvable dilemmas and pain. It's good to have the ability to go to thirty thousand feet, but it can also be an escape. I fear that I have spent too much time off the ground, because now comes a growing awareness that I must descend into the personal in a way I've never been able to. My body and psyche are sending signals that they're ready to deal with old issues, with trauma still embedded at a cellular level.
For this work I have to be willing to let ego and my small, little self take center stage. I have to acknowledge what it is and was like to be me, one inconsequential person among billions, and to act as if I matter. (Sure you're special. Just like everyone else.) To act as if my needs matter as much as the planet's. I am being asked to revisit what it really felt like being discounted, yelled at, smacked, ignored, or made fun of those times when I tried to explain it away or shrug it off. I need to go to the narrowest view, to think of only myself. This in service of breaking up the stuck energy that has manifested as a chronic, low grade, agitated depression since teenhood. At least, that is my hope.
Most people spend most of their time in this small place, as if life is about them, as if their eyes and egos show them reality, as if they know the universe. I have always been discouraged by this fact and proud that I can see past such short sightedness. But I often take it past discouragement to contempt. Perhaps it's a case of "protesting too much." Any extreme position is usually masking something not yet conscious.
Could it be that what I need most to heal is where I've least wanted to go my whole life? To go back and affirm my personhood at the most basic level? This is certainly what the psychological and spiritual texts tell us. It's not that I haven't tried. Now that I better understand timing – from that high altitude perspective - I know you can't hurry acorns into oaks. I just want to make sure, being more conscious of aging and mortality these days, that I live long enough to see the treetops.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sex with Johnny
Johnny Depp won't have sex with me. I've asked him dozens of times, in my mind at least, and though he's only four years younger than my 50, I am a matronly older woman to him.
This is what a brain at middle age can look like. Vascillating wildly between calm acceptance and temper tantrums, this intelligent, sensitive and wise woman is still driven nearly mad by the conflicting messages of culture, biology and personal history.
We all know the youth = beauty mindset; it's inescapable for both men and women - especially women. But the equation continues: youth + beauty = where it's at. As much as I don't want to buy in, part of me does. I fight with this "truth" all the time. We like to think that we know better, but the messages of a lifetime are hard to shake. Images, implications and blatant biases are bound into every mode and method of communication that assaults us. How is the puny human mind supposed to fend for itself, for rationality and balance, in such an obnoxious, insidious climate?
But while I have a deep commitment to fight youth + beauty = where it's at, in hopes of reducing ageism and marginalism, there is some truth to what I'm railing against. This is part of the paradox of middle age, and maybe peri-menopause especially: the body and mind are making last ditch efforts to partake in procreation, to be aligned with Eros and not Thanatos. (Recall that Eros is the life force, the libido in the largest sense of the word. Its counterpart is Thanatos, the shadow or call of death, which feels closer in middle age than in youth. Both of these dynamics have inestimable influence on the psyche.)
One of the great tasks of midlife is to come to terms with the past – the roads not taken, the achievements not realized, the future that is now here and doesn't look anything like you thought it would.
So what is there to do when you realize, at 50, that you didn't take advantage of your share of youth + beauty = where it's at? That your Eros was distracted by factors outside your awareness or control, its energies drained or mischanneled trying to stay mentally afloat in an overwhelming world?
In particular, what do you do when you realize that Eros did not get its fair share of sex? And to add insult to injury, now you are attracted to men half your age, while knowing full well that their life energy and beauty is a reflection of how you are beginning to feel inside, if not outside, as a fifty year old woman – and that they think of you as their mother?
Channel surfing one day, I came across a painful illustration of this topic. A reality show featured a group of young, attractive actors hoping to be chosen for a film project. Of course, there were love scenes that needed rehearsing, and the boys were very eager to practice with the girls. But first, a coach skilled in on-screen lovemaking was called in: a woman formerly from the "industry." An archetypal grandmother type with a thick, wide body and floppy breasts (one of which she flashed, to the dismay of the young folks), she insisted on teaching the hunky young men how to properly kiss for the movies. One very reluctant volunteer got himself pinned to the couch and was so resistant you could see his gag reflex working overtime. I felt sorry for them both.
Maybe she still thought of herself as a girl, the way I do, full of hope for the future, interested in being where opportunity is, where life is. In other words, being where it's at – and expressing the full range of who we are, now that we know how: the wisdom, the love, the knowledge of what's important, the desire to connect all this in ways we couldn't before. What young people don't know is that middle aged women make the best lovers, their passion (once focused) igniting for a second but more powerful time and wanting expression in response to life itself, not just flesh. The title and contents of my friend Trebbe Johnson's book, The World is a Waiting Lover, describe this concept beautifully.
So Johnny, if you, and more importantly I, can get past my 25 extra pounds, past the double chin, sallow skin and graying pubic hair that age so thanklessly bestows on the juiciest women on the planet – us middle aged gals - you are in for the ride of your life. Call me. In the meantime, I've got a beautiful husband to practice on.
This is what a brain at middle age can look like. Vascillating wildly between calm acceptance and temper tantrums, this intelligent, sensitive and wise woman is still driven nearly mad by the conflicting messages of culture, biology and personal history.
We all know the youth = beauty mindset; it's inescapable for both men and women - especially women. But the equation continues: youth + beauty = where it's at. As much as I don't want to buy in, part of me does. I fight with this "truth" all the time. We like to think that we know better, but the messages of a lifetime are hard to shake. Images, implications and blatant biases are bound into every mode and method of communication that assaults us. How is the puny human mind supposed to fend for itself, for rationality and balance, in such an obnoxious, insidious climate?

One of the great tasks of midlife is to come to terms with the past – the roads not taken, the achievements not realized, the future that is now here and doesn't look anything like you thought it would.
So what is there to do when you realize, at 50, that you didn't take advantage of your share of youth + beauty = where it's at? That your Eros was distracted by factors outside your awareness or control, its energies drained or mischanneled trying to stay mentally afloat in an overwhelming world?
In particular, what do you do when you realize that Eros did not get its fair share of sex? And to add insult to injury, now you are attracted to men half your age, while knowing full well that their life energy and beauty is a reflection of how you are beginning to feel inside, if not outside, as a fifty year old woman – and that they think of you as their mother?
Channel surfing one day, I came across a painful illustration of this topic. A reality show featured a group of young, attractive actors hoping to be chosen for a film project. Of course, there were love scenes that needed rehearsing, and the boys were very eager to practice with the girls. But first, a coach skilled in on-screen lovemaking was called in: a woman formerly from the "industry." An archetypal grandmother type with a thick, wide body and floppy breasts (one of which she flashed, to the dismay of the young folks), she insisted on teaching the hunky young men how to properly kiss for the movies. One very reluctant volunteer got himself pinned to the couch and was so resistant you could see his gag reflex working overtime. I felt sorry for them both.
Maybe she still thought of herself as a girl, the way I do, full of hope for the future, interested in being where opportunity is, where life is. In other words, being where it's at – and expressing the full range of who we are, now that we know how: the wisdom, the love, the knowledge of what's important, the desire to connect all this in ways we couldn't before. What young people don't know is that middle aged women make the best lovers, their passion (once focused) igniting for a second but more powerful time and wanting expression in response to life itself, not just flesh. The title and contents of my friend Trebbe Johnson's book, The World is a Waiting Lover, describe this concept beautifully.
So Johnny, if you, and more importantly I, can get past my 25 extra pounds, past the double chin, sallow skin and graying pubic hair that age so thanklessly bestows on the juiciest women on the planet – us middle aged gals - you are in for the ride of your life. Call me. In the meantime, I've got a beautiful husband to practice on.
The Big 50
Wow, it's been a month since I last posted. Lots going on with a new job, trying to get up to speed and balance a life that was very calm with one that's much busier now. Quite a contrast. Plus my 50th birthday over Labor Day weekend! My new job requires me to be at my computer most of the day, so typing even more for this blog is not as appealing as it once was. But my friend Jeannette, whose blog ReinventedVoices is a must-visit for excellent, thoughtful writing, has kindly said she misses my essays. I complained to her about just not feeling like writing out my whirling dervish-like mind full of thoughts, but I also just realized how important it can be to get things written down. It's a healing process, this writing, but I suppose sometimes I write only when I am ready to take the next step in healing.
So here's the latest thoughts, which have been a burr under my saddle for a long time but are now finding expression. And to quote Ziggy, or some pundit from an earlier time,
You can complain that roses have thorns, or you can rejoice that thorns come with roses.
So here's the latest thoughts, which have been a burr under my saddle for a long time but are now finding expression. And to quote Ziggy, or some pundit from an earlier time,
You can complain that roses have thorns, or you can rejoice that thorns come with roses.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)