Some reflections and gratitude on turning 60.

November is always my favorite month: It’s my birthday month. Thanksgiving’s my favorite holiday (actually the only holiday that I celebrate). And, it’s the time each year that I take 10 days to be in silent retreat, totally unplugged and totally adrift in my own cottage and in the mountains of Ojai.

This November I’m especially full with conscious gratitude for the harvest of all the enormous blessings in my life this year. Full with gratitude, as well, for all the gifts the natural world offers here in fall. And, this November has been special in still another way: I’ve just turned 60!

It’s being an extraordinarily magical and marvelous threshold in my journey. In this crazy youth-obsessed culture, it felt important to celebrate the very positive experiences I’m having of my own aging process. My hope is that as more of us do this “out loud,” we might begin to help build new and more relevant images of aging for women. In that spirit, I wrote the following to all my friends and family:

“Dear Ones,

Here I am just six weeks short of my 60th birthday!!!  I feel filled with an almost giddy excitement …this is what sixty is?! Well, sixty for me, at least…

Who would ever have thought that 60–which in my grandmothers’ generation sounded and looked very old and in my mother’s generation certainly seemed, at the least, very grown up–would feel like this!  I’m feeling so just-at-the-beginning of it all: so full of wonder and possibilities!

This year (really my sixtieth year which only ends at my 60th birthday) has been the most exciting, expansive, enlivening year of my life!   I feel more full-of-myself than ever, even more unconstrained than ever. Free, at last, from yet another layer of subtle “holding back” from all of who I might be and become. I feel juicy, lush, in the midst of a season of lavish ripening.

I feel profoundly blessed:

By good health, a strong body and still dependable stamina (although after intense energy times, it now does take a while to rebound).

By the beautiful, magical, soul-nourishing little space in which I’ve lived for getting on to 10 years.

By a small circle of extraordinary women with whom I share so deeply, grow so much, laugh so hard. 

By a family that seems able to really see and love the me that I am. 

By work that I love and that feeds me richly. 

By three creative collaborations that are growing me into ways of sharing I’ve never felt safe to risk: two of these are helping midwife my work out into the larger world (while I get to stay in my relative hermitage) as the third one is often a cauldron for distilling my understandings of the who that I am.

By a burgeoning of creativity that has most recently included becoming capable of navigating through enough computer technology to actually do the hands on work of building/fine tuning a collaboratively redesigned website that now publishes almost all of my recently copyrighted(!) writings and artwork.

By an incredibly dear kitty (Ms. Pretty/Pretty Girl) who’s lived with and loved me unconditionally for over 9 years and with whom I have the richest relationship I’ve ever had with a four-legged! (My two other long-time kitties died in their eighth year, as did my two long-term live in people-relationships!)

Through it all, there is an enormously deep, abiding sense of the Grandmothers’ (Spirit’s) presence with and within me. I feel profoundly nourished, supported and guided by this presence. I feel always protected and surrounded by it, in every moment of my life.

And, oh, the Little One in me!  She feels so totally loved and safe and free to be any and all of the ways she might be! I have become the magical, adoring and protective Mother for whom she always yearned and of whom she only dreamed. 

The Little One and I are safe to be little and big and young and ancient and everywhere in between. There is no way I/we can be that the Mommy Within won’t be there for us.

I still, sometimes, have cranky, irritable, rageful, sad, grief-struck and overwhelmed days or parts-of-day. They no longer daunt or alarm me. I can just surrender into wherever it is that I’m taken. The Mommy talks lovingly and encouragingly to me as she makes the space big enough and safe enough for all the feeling to just be. After a while, there’s always a shift into some other “where.”   It’s an enormously relieving and exhilarating process, even when it’s intense and difficult.  And, the greatest gift seems to be the no longer needing to “figure” any of it out!

I am filled with such profound gratitude for all this wonder in my life!”

Gentle and joyous solstice and holidays to all of you!”

Originally published December 2000