Spring exuberantly emerges while I feel still very folded inward, germinating;
recovering from the intensity of and reflecting on the amazingly inspiring experience of being with my family's vibrant, age-positive elders.
I walk the trails these late afternoons, through the coming of twilight and into the star-lighted darkness. While I wander, the last of the day-bird song quiets and owl calls begin. More and more layers of cricket song join the incredibly intense, raucous frog chorus. Sometimes, even though it’s still early in the evening, there’s a little treat of coyote vocal high jinks. The stillness in the mountains deepens around these sounds and it all feeds a deep hunger in my soul.
Spring is growing into its fullness now. Monkey flower, morning glory, wild hyacinth, wild peony, wild pea, poppy, lupine, paint brush, the bright yellows of oxalis, sweet broom and mustard add their blooms to the mix of wild flowers along the trails and back roads. Daffodils, asparaxis and freesias overflow the beds outside my desk window as the peach blossoms give way to green leaves. The rose bushes are radiant with the bright red of early leafing. Creamy white buds on the orange trees around me grow full and fat and begin opening. All the seeds and onion starts I planted in my new vegetable patch are lavishly sprouting. The rains have come at last (at least for a few days) and everywhere there is the lush freshness of green, the deep blue of skies filled with dramatically building, fast-moving clouds.
I am not, this year, feeling the vibrating energy of spring in my body-being as I usually do. Inside of me it’s still a more dormant, germinating, slow and quiet time. It seems a bit odd, unfamiliar to be feeling so “out-of-sync” with the flow in nature in this moment. To be so into hibernating, so folded in on myself when everything around me is bursting forth, opening. Yet, this is definitely just where I am right now!
Some of the inward pull has to do with having just come back from a long weekend with my extended family of elders in southern Florida. Twice a year I make this roughly 13 hour door-to-door trek to visit my dad, step mom, great aunt, aunt and various (mostly female) first cousins, once removed–all in their eighties and nineties. It’s always an intense two and a half day, round the clock marathon of eating, talking, playing cards while teasing, joking and catching up on family gossip. They’re an extraordinary, incredibly lively, voluble, vital, hilarious and loving group.
Though I’m often crabby in the approach to my departure day, I always have a marvelous time in the middle of this total immersion. I feel incredibly loved, appreciated and amazingly “seen” by my whole extended family. And, I always feel deeply enriched by the sharing with so many wonderfully juicy elders who are aging with such good humor and grace.
Still, it’s inevitably an exhausting whirlwind time for me. The week before the week that I leave, I do some prophylactic, anticipatory deep resting: lots of quiet, alone time drifting, reading, napping, meandering in the groves or the mountains. When I get back, I keep a week empty so that I can do some recuperative deep resting.
Every trip, the aunts and cousins go through the same routine with me, as if we’ve never been through it before. “How come you’re only staying such a short time?” one of them will say. “The so-and-so’s” (any of a number of other family members of my generation) “always come for a week, ten-days. You come so far, it’s a shame you don’t stay longer.” And, each time we do this, I say the same thing that makes everyone laugh. “When they come, they’re coming here for a vacation. My life is a vacation. For me, this is stress!”
The truth is that it is stressing for me to be with people interacting so non-stop, to be sitting so much, to be so much indoors, to be so far from wild places. Even for such a brief couple of days with such dear folks. When they stop (each time) to think about it, they all really do get it. For them, too, it is always a mix of joy and exhaustion to have any of us kids, grandkids or relations visiting. Taken out of their usual flow they, too, need a certain amount of “recovery time.”
Back home, in the voluptuous solitude of my ordinary life, I reflect on how blessed I am to have so many wonderful role models for “healthy,” natural aging. Almost no one I know has grown up with as many elders around as I’ve had all my life. I was raised surrounded by my paternal grandmother’s many sisters (all in their 50’s when I was little), her aging parents (then in their 80’s), my paternal granddad and the maternal grandparents with whom I had also lived for a magical year when I was 4.
The significant longevity and close connectedness in my dad’s family has created a tribe of elders in Southern Florida that all watch over, care for and care about each other. It is this vibrant tribe that gathers, in part or in its entirety whenever I come to visit.
My aunt, great aunt, step mom, and my dad’s cousins all are women who’ve never considered a face or any other kind of lift. They’ve all let their hair go gray or white. After losing their first husbands, none of the “Bobb women” has ever had any interest in dating or remarrying. Rather they seem completely delighted to be on their own in the middle of full social lives with good women friends and the family. They’re an extraordinarily outspoken, plain spoken and feisty bunch. Most of them various sizes of large, they’re all unfailingly, dashingly dressed, groomed and “put together.”
Every member of the tribe has developed or survived various medical conditions (Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, adult onset diabetes, heart attack, congestive heart failure, hip replacement, metal rod implants for an arthritic spine, glaucoma, carotid blockage, osteoporosis, cataract surgeries, etc.). A couple have been almost done-in in this past year by the vagaries and hazards of western medical treatment. Yet, they all have incredibly good-humored attitudes about the physical declines and numberless medications with which they’re dealing.
My 86 and 1/2 year old dad, (despite Parkinson’s that undermines his balance), and my 84 and 1/2 year old Step mom do league bowling twice a week. On separate teams, they get to hang out and interact with younger people (in their 70’s). They still occasionally golf. My 92 and 1/2 year old great aunt still is one of the mainstays of a used bookstore that fund raises for Brandeis University. She works there all day every Saturday and still occasionally helps with their books. They all play bridge (live or on computer), 727-poker, canasta or mah jongg in “regular game groups.” They read, are computer literate (my aunt and great aunt also use software to create their own hard copy greeting cards) hold subscriptions to theater seasons or participate in adult education.
They all agree that it’s sometimes hard to face the “next levels,” as they arrive. My dad–who never had an illness before he turned 72–acknowledges that sometimes he “gets disgusted with” finding himself not being able to do so much of what he used to be able to count on himself for. Yet, he and they each seem to fairly soon find their peace with the changes. They recognize and accept that these changes, pains and losses are a natural downside of living so long. My dad echoes his own dad (who lived to be 96): “when you live this long, you start wearing out the parts!” And, as he’s also wont to say, “I’ll still take this over the alternative any day!”
I watch with amazement and admiration as they accept the inevitable slowing down of aging with such equanimity. They do not fight it. Rather they figure out ways to do what needs doing over longer stretches of time, with more time-outs for rest and regrouping as they go. And, they deal with hiring help where they now need it. I watch myself approaching the changes of my own aging process with a very similar and familiar equanimity.
At certain quantum turning points I, too, feel some moments of poignancy, sadness or loss. Still, for the most part I watch and respond to the changes in my physical being with a kind of avid fascination. I live, in my small space with 6 full-length mirrors that keep me always visible to myself. That dear woman in the mirrors is my precious friend and daily companion. I watch her changing and aging while inside of me feels always the same ageless self I’ve ever been.
I am stunned to hear from one of my clients that all the women in her circle (of similar age) assiduously shun mirrors. That they practice putting on their make-up without actually seeing themselves! During my own daily ablutions, my aging mirrored face is surrounded by wonderful laminated photos of both of my grandmothers in their elder years, my Great Aunt Sophie’s radiant joy at her 90th birthday party, some anonymous 103 year old woman’s ebullient beaming smile and a gaggle of red-towel wrapped elder women laughing hysterically in a steam room. I love looking at my own face in the context of where I’m going rather than where I’ve been!
I am fascinated, too, by the demands my aging body makes on me for gentleness in pacing and for more time to rebound between surges of “doings.” I see how my moving into going slowly, being gentle with myself and treating rest as a sacred and regular part of my life has prepared me to be appreciative of the requirements of an aging, less forgiving body! I can still energetically do enormous amounts of gardening and yard work, but I take breaks and I skip a day between spurts.
Contrary to how the culture would have me see this slower paced existence, I do feel vital, vibrant and energetic at the very same time that I go slowly, moving in spirals of rest and activity! I feel full of gratitude both for the blessing of the family role modeling and for the deep inner/Spirit guidance that has awakened me to the slow lane as a way of living life tenderly at any age!
Originally published March 2003
