Feeling agelessly juicy and vibrant, I turn 65 while spending part of my 10-day birthday retreat copy-editing
my Monthly Journals manuscript and revisiting the five past years of my life that they chronicle.
The second big rains of the season, the first I’ve been home for, arrived last week. The California winter greening begins! Crisp air, voluptuous clouds, autumn’s special burnished light. And, southern California’s minimalist “riot” of fall color once again visible in the picture postcard vistas from my favorite mountain-wild-with-valley-views trail. Visible even from my study window in this new house: a blazing red maple and a golden young sycamore just over the fence.
During the rains and winds, I slept in the house: curled for hours in front of my first fires of this winter. Loving the crackling and popping of flames from the fireplace. At the other house, with nothing but the pinging of the metal of the woodstove to accompany the beautiful flames, I could only imagine those sounds. Reveling as usual in the rich creature-like companionship of fire dancing in the grate. Such a comfort.
As always, this month moves me inward. Brings me to experiencing such profound gratitude. Fills me with thanksgiving for the simple, gentle nourishing wonders of my life in this little village, in this precious and nurturing new home. I am grateful for the blessings and for the challenges that, by growing me, become gifts of their own special sort.
This is the month that I celebrate my birthday. A celebration that is, for me, inevitably braided with the Thanksgiving holiday–the one conventional holiday with which I seem to have a real soul connection. As ever, the anniversary of my birth is a time for reflection and gratefulness. A time of appreciating the harvest of another year’s growing, deepening and opening.
This year is a “big” birthday: I’m turning 65! It’s so astonishing to think that this is what 65 is, or is for me. The “package” surely shows the signs of the passing of these many years. The lines, the loosening of flesh from bones, the white hairs threading through the brown, the growing numbers of freckle-speckles. The changes in what it takes for me to rebound from periods of intense physical work in the house or garden. All of it a softening of sorts, a call for ever more gentleness and tenderness in how I treat myself. My many years of living in the slow lane have prepared me well for such tenderness with myself: I know the path.
I continue to be amazed by the complete agelessness that I experience in my inside self. This at the same time that I am utterly captivated and fascinated by the progressing signs of aging on/in the outside package that houses this ageless inside self. I always suspect that the women who get involved with endless plastic surgeries are trying to ameliorate this discrepancy–trying to make the age-changed image in their mirrors match their experience of their age-unchanged inside. Alas, it seems clear that in this business of fighting gravity, one is doomed inevitably to lose! I so wish we lived in a more age-positive culture! One in which the profound beauty and the expanding wisdom of aging women were everywhere honored and treasured. Anticipated and welcomed with joy. What a concept, eh?
I write this from the very middle of my 10-day annual birthday retreat. Adrift in total timelessness, with no agendas and no expectations for what the time may bring to me. As usual, I take the time here in my own cottage rather than at a “retreat” place. I like the freedom of having everything I might want all around me. The simplicity of not having to try to anticipate, then pack and transport what the me several days from now might want to have with her. Certainly, there is some appeal to having meals provided for one while in retreat. Yet, for me there’s always the question of whether what I might want in the way of food any particular day would have anything to do with what would actually be being made available. Or, even, if when it might be available would be when I wanted it.
The “benefit” of having no daily responsibilities or chores for the duration of the retreat has little interest for me. I try to arrange things to minimize the need to deal with chores that would pull me into the outside world. And, I usually arrange for not having any major maintenance projects calling my attention Simple garden and kitty tending as well as the variety of “chop wood, carry water” chores that support my daily existence all feel mostly welcome and nourishing. They provide a kind of grounding that centers me in my body being as I am otherwise adrift. Of course, this retreat has also been including my daily healthy bones regimen: the bits of Tai Chi, yoga and free weight exercises that have become a part of most of my days now.
Much of the time I’ve been reading and hiking and napping–not so different from ordinary life. Still, the silence and solitude–not having contact in person, by phone or through email with anyone, having only very minimal, mostly accidental exchanges on the trail or at the post office (I do pick up my mail, though usually late in the evening)–make for a very profound difference from ordinary life. Having the span of 10 days rather than the monthly 5 or 6 days of unpluggedness opens a much vaster spaciousness inside my being. Time expands logarithmically without clocks or contact. I feel blessedly untethered, open and totally available to whatever Spirit and the Grandmothers have in store for me. I love it!
Since I woke today I’ve been at the computer. First it was entering a second round of copyedits on the compilation of the past 5 years of monthly Bulletin Board journal columns. Then I moved on to writing an introduction for this “second manuscript.”
Two weeks ago, during my unplugged time, I read through the hard copy single spaced printout of the journals, did a first round of copyediting, entered those edits into the computer and printed out what might have been a final single spaced version. Not to be so. As I read through it all yet again these past 3 days, there were still more copy edits and more formatting. And, once the introduction was done, the tables of contents for both the single spaced and double spaced versions had to be re-done as well. I’d forgotten that bit about how adding the introduction would change the pagination. Oh, well. More paper to use the backs of! Glad I only printed the single spaced version!
A snippet of the old “hatchet lady's” eyebrow raising was sort of drifting in the background as I read the beginning entries each time around. Each time, as I got further along into the reading, that wisp disappeared. Along with her mumbled commentary about “too many superlatives!” (This particular comment, though, may well deserve some further consideration.) I guess it was a much simpler matter just rambling on about my days as if the web site were my journal space. Gathering all those entries and thinking about them as a “book manuscript” seemed to engage a bit of “outside eyes” here and there! Still, I seem to be over that now.
The latest news about the first manuscript is that there is news! What that news is, is not yet revealed. There was a phone message from Debra (the agent) on Monday (day 4 of my retreat) saying that she'd had a “breakthrough,” gotten some ideas about how to pitch/position/handle the first manuscript, was feeling really excited and was very eager to have a talk. She knew that I was probably already off into retreat but wanted me to call just as soon as I resurfaced. I picked the message up that evening when I did my daily check of the answering machine. (I've recently taken to doing this once daily checking-of-the-messages during retreats so that, were something to happen with either of our aging parents, my sister would be able to reach me without much delay.)
I did at first, in my excitement over her palpable excitement, briefly consider breaking silence to check in with her. But, very quickly, I understood that what I needed most of all to stay in my solitude. That I needed not to color the time with thoughts and energy about this big next step. So, I am saving the contact for when I return to “regular” life next week. It, amazingly enough, hasn't been at all distracting or at all difficult to put it completely aside. I've really needed this empty, open space and time.
Still, it will be such a trip to explore whatever the next steps will be when I do call her back!
Originally published November 2005
