THOUGHTS ON AGING - Bertrand Russell, Kahil Gibran, Jane Ellen Harrison

In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears. But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad. But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn, And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring. But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles. Kahil Gibran

“People ask: ‘Would you or would you not like to be young again?’ Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible… You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.” Jane Ellen Harrison

•  Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.   Bertrand Russell

MY LATEST BOOK_LEDICIA'S KEY

This book took two happy years to write. Isolating with the Covid threat, gave me the time to research and consider the nature of what I wanted to write. It turned into a historical novel with a present day woman searching for family over six centuries, giving me the opportunity to learn about the people and places in a history I have never explored. It is both fictional and actual— populate with uncovered stories and imagined ones.. Meanwhile a romance began to develop.. What is better than history and love.

TIME IS NOW

Hannah Arendt Contemplating Augustine’s thinking about time.

 Even if things should last, human life does not. We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”; but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet. Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” where time can be conserved long enough to be measured, and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, transcend both life and time?

 Memory, the storehouse of time, is the presence of the “no more” (iam non) as expectation is the presence of the “not yet” (nondum). Therefore, I do not measure what is no more, but something in my memory that remains fixed in it. It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.

RILKE ON SOLITUDE

What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child.

About grief...the words of Seneca

It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it.

On Silence_David Whyte

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.

BOOKS ON GRIEF, LOVE AFTER 60, AND FRIENDSHIP.

My three books, quite different in content, still explore to one degree or another the issues of life and death. Death WHEN IT is close. Growing older, and friendship and endings. we all experience endings. It is the inevitable consequence of living.

Best Friends: I've followed this writer since I first discovered her remarkable memoir, "A Reluctant Life" and I've been well-rewarded. "Best Friends," too, is a kind of memoir, this one in the form of the actual 27-year correspondence (1961-1988) between two very individual women. Their letters are marvelous-- evocative, resonant; time travel back to not only Those Days but to "the way we were " --both bold and fragile, wise and perplexed, engaged in the moment, and eternally hopeful.  At one point in 1966, one of them writes presciently, "I sensed we were of our time. We would all move on in history eventually, some only as visitors but others will become heralds of our era." Prescient because their included such soon-to-be heralds as Sam Shepard, Dustin Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Shel Silverstein and Spaulding Gray. But don't construe that to mean this book is a name-drop. What it is--is an thoughtful, occasionally exuberant, occasionally wrenching story about friendship.

Clara at Sixty What a powerful writer. I am weeping again. In her first book, "A Reluctant Life," she broke my heart at the first page; in this one near the last. She shows us, in a real an visceral way, that love, compassion, and forgiveness are all that really matters. The well-drawn episodes, allow us to feel the palpable futility of looking outside ourselves. If I were to compare this book to: Eat, Pray, Love, I would only say this: Clara is true and authentic. No one understands what burning a life down to ashes feels like, until it happens. Clara's wisdom is earned through suffering.

A Reluctant Life: This is a moving beautifully written memoir. I felt similarities to Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking in its emotional impact; though, I give the nod to Nachmias-Baeu because it is much easier to read. Nachmias-Baeu invites the reader into her life as if she is having coffee with them. This informality allows the reader to be open to the, thoughtful, intense and rich life she describes.

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ARE WE BUT FLEETING MEMORIES

What I understand clearly now is that everyone I have known--each one is a brick along the path that I have built that I may never step on again. The memories will recede because there will be no further contact, therefore, no further moments. There may still be small doors,or a slightly open transom--just enough to remind people of us, whether we were a small or a large part of their lives.  Most often there will be no thoughts, but every once-in-a-while something will rise to remind me of this or that, sometimes fleeting, growing further and further away from any visceral or tangible memory.  Each layer of the skin that covers our moments will occasionally be peeled away— and at that moment we will remember the time we spent together, joined together in a particular way and at a particular time. but Then It will ends. It all ends.

ALBERT CAMUS’ WORDS MORE MEANINGFUL TODAY THAN EVER.

JULY 4, 2020

Just five more days and it will be the eleventh anniversary of Dieter’s death. I tend to have more and more thoughts about our life together in the days leading up to his death. It is sometimes hard for me to remember (viscerally) how those years felt. I do remember feeling pretty happy  most of the time, but what I am forgetting is what it is like to live with a husband, a person who is inextricably tied to you.  How your day had a lot to do with sharing it with someone else. Leonard Cohen called that special bond between a man and woman, the “content.” Each of the two, working together…each with their own special offering, different than the other. I understood what he was saying, feeling that is what Dieter and I managed to achieve. So different, but filling in the spaces where the other was less formed.  Being alone for 11 years has, and in particular over the past five years,  become days that I have spent on my own, or certainly think about from a position of being alone.  I have gotten used to doing things my own way, in my own time, but I can’t say that I am happier because I can. I would like to tell Dieter about all the things that happened after he died.  Eleven years is a long time to have lived longer than he ever had a chance to, but there are often times, when I can’t help feeling he got out of it while the getting was good. 

WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW AND HAPPENS WHEN. The world according to me.

The anniversary of my husband’s death passed eight days ago.  The date always leads up to a lot of thoughts about him and our life together. As always, I put up a picture of him on FB…this one was simple with no comments about grief…just a picture of the two of us in 1994 in France on the occasion of a friend’s wedding.

I have gotten used to being alone and actually don’t mind it at all.  I reach out from time to time to see friends and sometimes they reach out to me…so that I don’t feel entirely isolated…but the truth is I don’t mind being home, doing what I like to do. There is a freedom I have never felt before…even though it might be quite temporary and of course the specter of what is going on in America is unbelievably sad, terrifying and at the same time makes me angry.  I feel too many have developed an attitude, promulgated by one of the worst people in the world (Trump) -- that we have certain rights and that those rights have nothing to do with other people’s rights. I can’t help hoping that those people who are so opposed to listening to doctor’s who have studied infectious diseases, will not wear masks or social distance…and all those in governance who are in lock-step with the president, ALL…get a good and serious case of CO-VID…which seems to be the only way they may change their mind-set and begin to become more humble and circumspect.  I hope those who are avid and wholly unreachable find out how foolish they are when members of their families or friends actually die.  There has to be a reckoning.

Meanwhile, in my own little world, I think that I am now in the 12th year of being without my husband. Eleven years have passed and as I have already written about the events of those 11 years…I am still struck by the fact that I am still alive. But now, I wonder, I always wonder, if I will be here to see the next summer season…if I will see the garden and what I plant today grow larger…or will I fade out…and then all my possessions, all the archives of my journey, all the efforts into making my surroundings lovely…will be passed on…or will lie fallow and die with me. It’s funny to think that there will be a time when I will be no more…and I will likely not know how little it affects the rest of the world or the small microcosm that was my world.  Who will memorialize me ? I think very few…I will be another statistic, another obit.  A goner. I will join the army of my generation and the generations before me. Melt into history, hardly having made a dent.  So be it. Even those that have truly contributed, who have been memorialize,fade. We all do. but that shouldn’t prevent me for wanting another day. one more day.

TONY MORRISON....FROM HER NOBEL PRIZE LECTURE ON LANGUAGE, 1993

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Poem by Neil Gaiman for Rachel Carson

AFTER SILENCE
for Rachel Carson

Seasons on seasons. The spring is signaled by birdsong
coyotes screech and yammer in the moonlight
and the first flowers open. I saw two owls today
in the daylight, on silent wings.
They landed as one and watched me sleepily.
Oh who? they called. Or how, or how who?
Then they leaned into the trunk
into the sun that shone through the tight-curled buds,
and vanished into dappled shadows
never waiting for an answer.

Like the sapling that buckles the sidewalk
and grows until it has reached its height
all of us begin in darkness. Some of us reach maturity. A few
become old: we went over time’s waterfall and lived,
Time barely cares. We are a pool of knowledge and advice
the wisdom of the tribe, but we have stumbled,
fallen face-first into our new uncomfortable roles.
Remembering, as if it happened to someone else,
the race to breed,
or to succeed, the aching need that drove our thoughts
and shaped each deed,
those days are through.
We do not need to grow, we’re done,
we grew.

Who speaks? And why?

She was killed by her breasts, by tumors in them:
A clump of cells that would not listen to orders to disband
no chemical suggestions that they were big enough
that, sometimes, it’s a fine thing just to die, were heeded.
And the trees are leafless and black against the sky
and the bats in fatal whiteface sleep and rot
and the jellyfish drift and pulse through the warming waters
and everything changes. And some things are truly lost.

Wild in the weeds, the breeze scatters the seeds,
and it lifts the wings of the pine processionary moth,
and bears the green glint of the emerald borer,
Now the elms go the way of the chestnut trees.
Becoming memories and dusty furniture.
The ash trees go the way of the elms.
And somebody has to say that we
never need to grow forever. That
we, like the trees, can reach our full growth,
and mature, in wisdom and in time,
that we can be enough of us. That there
can be room for other breeds and kinds and lives.
Who’ll whisper it:
that tumors kill their hosts,
and then themselves?
We’re done. We grew. Enough.

All the gods on the hilltops
and all the gods on the waves
the gods that became seals
the voices on the winds
the quiet places, where if we are silent
we can listen, we can learn.
Who speaks? And why?

Someone could ask the questions, too.
Like who?
Who knew? What’s true?
And how? Or who?
How could it work?
What happens then?
Are consequences consequent?
The answers come from the world itself
The songs are silent,
and the spring is long in coming.

There’s a voice that rumbles beneath us
and after the end the voice still reaches us
Like a bird that cries in hunger
or a song that pleads for a different future.
Because all of us dream of a different future.
And somebody needs to listen.
To pause. To hold.
To inhale, and find the moment
before the exhale, when everything is in balance
and nothing moves. In balance: here’s life, here’s death,
and this is eternity holding its breath.

After the world has ended
After the silent spring
Into the waiting silence
another song begins.

Nothing is ever over
life breathes life in its turn
Sometimes the people listen
Sometimes the people learn

Who speaks? And why?

TO WRITE OR NOT TO WRITE

“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.” Anne Lamott

WRITER'S ON WRITING MEMOIRS

“A memoir is an invitation to another person’s privacy.” — Isabel Allende

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsburg

“I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. for me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.” — Koren Zailckas

PATTY SMITH SAYS...in a recent article.

“Seventy. Merely a number but one indicating the passing of a significant percentage of the allotted sand in an egg timer, with oneself the darn egg. The grains pour and I find myself missing the dead more than usual.”

I don’t have to look nice for anybody,” she says. “I feel like at my age I can do whatever I want, pretty much, as long as I don’t hurt anybody and that includes dressing the way I want, everywhere I go.”

On the subject of #MeToo, she looks at the big picture: “I find myself more concerned about the terrible atrocities against women globally. I just think, again, we have to examine what is an atrocity and what is an insult and what is somebody being a pain in the ass.” 

TEN YEARS AGO

A decade. Ten years. That’s a long time and no time at all. The days grow shorter, the seasons fly by and I am still here. I wait. Life goes on around me and with me and in me, but I feel the end arriving, stealthily and without warning. And yet I am reminded every day that we are all here for a very short time. We come and go and maybe come again, learning something from before and building on that rhyme we try again, and again, till what? Who really knows.

ON BREAKUPS

And, of course, the sweetness of those who have long departed. I have given up on wanting to bring back the dead, especially to a world that isn’t any better than when they left it. But I do long for the moments when they were alive. A hand brushing across a cheek or a 2 A.M. singalong. It is maybe unfair to have found myself again in so many different types of love, and still with so much desire. The dream of a wide and empty familiar street to stroll down. The marquee of a strip mall listing the names of everyone I have ever fondly missed. A song faintly painting the background while I dance myself away from sadness.

Harif Abdurraqib, Paris Review,.

SUNRISE

I like the room in which I now sleep. The sky is always present and changing. It has been said by others and I find it true, that sunrise is the most perfect part of the day. There is a sense then of promise. In these moments a warm canopy surrounds me. This time is empty of chores and mundane thoughts and right now I am not even thinking of you. I am not missing you quite as much. It is a pure sensation and I am comfortable. I think of Ovid’s description of Chaos: “the world was formed from a rude and undigested mass. No sun was lighted up, no moon did yet her blunted horns renew, nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky.” I am here millenniums later, an inhabitant of this planet and see the sun as the most vibrant thing. It sails away from the horizon quickly and the day lights up. That moment passes quickly as I try to embrace it.

~~excerpt from , A Reluctant Life.

THE JOY OF BEING A WOMAN IN HER SEVENTIES

--by Mary Pipher, Feb 27, 2019

This article originally appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review, on January 12th, 2019. and can be found on the website: dailygood.org

When I told my friends I was writing a book on older women like us, they immediately protested, “I am not old.” What they meant was that they didn’t act or feel like the cultural stereotypes of women their age. Old meant bossy, useless, unhappy and in the way. Our country’s ideas about old women are so toxic that almost no one, no matter her age, will admit she is old.

In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging. Our bodies and our sexuality are devalued, we are denigrated by mother-in-law jokes, and we’re rendered invisible in the media. Yet, most of the women I know describe themselves as being in a vibrant and happy life stage. We are resilient and know how to thrive in the margins. Our happiness comes from self-knowledge, emotional intelligence and empathy for others.

Most of us don’t miss the male gaze. It came with catcalls, harassment and unwanted attention. Instead, we feel free from the tyranny of worrying about our looks. For the first time since we were 10, we can feel relaxed about our appearance. We can wear yoga tights instead of nylons and bluejeans instead of business suits.

Yet, in this developmental stage, we are confronted by great challenges. We are unlikely to escape great sorrow for long. We all suffer, but not all of us grow. Those of us who grow do so by developing our moral imaginations and expanding our carrying capacities for pain and bliss. In fact, this pendulum between joy and despair is what makes old age catalytic for spiritual and emotional growth.

By our 70s, we’ve had decades to develop resilience. Many of us have learned that happiness is a skill and a choice. We don’t need to look at our horoscopes to know how our day will go. We know how to create a good day.

We have learned to look every day for humor, love and beauty. We’ve acquired an aptitude for appreciating life. Gratitude is not a virtue but a survival skill, and our capacity for it grows with our suffering. That is why it is the least privileged, not the most, who excel in appreciating the smallest of offerings.

Many women flourish as we learn how to make everything workable. Yes, everything. As we walk out of a friend’s funeral, we can smell wood smoke in the air and taste snowflakes on our tongues.

Our happiness is built by attitude and intention. Attitude is not everything, but it’s almost everything. I visited the jazz great Jane Jarvis when she was old, crippled and living in a tiny apartment with a window facing a brick wall. I asked if she was happy and she replied, “I have everything I need to be happy right between my ears.”

We may not have control, but we have choices. With intention and focused attention, we can always find a forward path. We discover what we are looking for. If we look for evidence of love in the universe, we will find it. If we seek beauty, it will spill into our lives any moment we wish. If we search for events to appreciate, we discover them to be abundant.

There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.”

Older women have learned the importance of reasonable expectations. We know that all our desires will not be fulfilled, that the world isn’t organized around pleasing us and that others, especially our children, are not waiting for our opinions and judgments. We know that the joys and sorrows of life are as mixed together as salt and water in the sea. We don’t expect perfection or even relief from suffering. A good book, a piece of homemade pie or a call from a friend can make us happy. As my aunt Grace, who lived in the Ozarks, put it, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.”

We can be kinder to ourselves as well as more honest and authentic. Our people-pleasing selves soften their voices and our true selves speak more loudly and more often. We don’t need to pretend to ourselves and others that we don’t have needs. We can say no to anything we don’t want to do. We can listen to our hearts and act in our own best interest. We are less angst-filled and more content, less driven and more able to live in the moment with all its lovely possibilities.

Many of us have a shelterbelt of good friends and long-term partners. There is a sweetness to 50-year-old friendships and marriages that can’t be described in language. We know each other’s vulnerabilities, flaws and gifts; we’ve had our battles royal and yet are grateful to be together. A word or a look can signal so much meaning. Lucky women are connected to a rich web of women friends. Those friends can be our emotional health insurance policies.

The only constant in our lives is change. But if we are growing in wisdom and empathy, we can take the long view. We’ve lived through seven decades of our country’s history, from Truman to Trump. I knew my great-grandmother, and if I live long enough, will meet my great-grandchildren. I will have known seven generations of family. I see where I belong in a long line of Scotch-Irish ancestors. I am alive today only because thousands of generations of resilient homo sapiens managed to procreate and raise their children. I come from, we all come from, resilient stock, or we wouldn’t be here.

By the time we are 70, we have all had more tragedy and more bliss in our lives than we could have foreseen. If we are wise, we realize that we are but one drop in the great river we call life and that it has been a miracle and a privilege to be alive.