Posts
We've had 15 inches of snow in the last week and I have a stack of grading at least that high (I exaggerate, but it is daunting), but I am thinking vigorously of things to write about.
"Like what?" you ask, full of skepticism.
Like a list of things, emotions, and ideas that folks seem to be experiencing in new and often difficult ways as 50 looms, things like
* Saying Goodbye, When You Thought You Were Done With Such Things
* Watching Young People Doing the Same Things You Did 30 Years Ago
* Sadness
* Taking Over the Reins
* Skin
I would welcome any additions or suggestions.
Showing posts with label mid-life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mid-life. Show all posts
Monday, March 10, 2008
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Life in the Tunnel
"Wow. That's some procrastination you've got there, missy."
Why, thank you. It's my specialty.
"Been at it long?"
Come to think of it, I have. 'Avoiding the Written Word Since 1977' Or maybe it was 1978. You get the idea.
Thanks for checking in, dear reader. No boring details on offer, no gushing revelations of midlife angst, no tear-inducing riffs on mortality (at least none beyond those last three passive-aggressive/narcissistic phrases).
Answer the following multiple choice question:
B. one of those annoying "optical illusion" posters at the mall, the ones in which you can never see what you're supposed to see
C. a yo-yo
D. Floam
E. A and C on even-numbered days, unless it's raining
F. B, if you can't get the knot out of C's string
G. all of the above, or none
Discuss.
Why, thank you. It's my specialty.
"Been at it long?"
Come to think of it, I have. 'Avoiding the Written Word Since 1977' Or maybe it was 1978. You get the idea.
*****
Thanks for checking in, dear reader. No boring details on offer, no gushing revelations of midlife angst, no tear-inducing riffs on mortality (at least none beyond those last three passive-aggressive/narcissistic phrases).
Answer the following multiple choice question:
Over the last six week,s my life, metaphorically speaking, has been
A. a hamster wheelB. one of those annoying "optical illusion" posters at the mall, the ones in which you can never see what you're supposed to see
C. a yo-yo
D. Floam
E. A and C on even-numbered days, unless it's raining
F. B, if you can't get the knot out of C's string
G. all of the above, or none
Discuss.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Meet me tonight in Dreamland...
(Yep, title nod to the B-52s.)
Years ago, during graduate school, I was discussing insomnia with a friend - let's call him Nightbird. Despite the fact that I loved sleep, it did not always come easily to me. I sought it with a vengeance. Said friend, on the other hand, seemed to avoid it. When I asked him why, he told me he didn't want to face his dreams.
For decades, I've had a mundane dream life, at least to my knowledge. Even when the bad ones come, they are firmly rooted in real world situations, peopled with familiar faces. Every once in a while I get to fly (more often, I run effortlessly), but for me a wild night in the subconscious is when, say, OF and I are asked by Benjamin Netanyahu to write the menu copy for his soon-to-open New York restaurant (don't laugh...this is an actual dream from about ten years ago).
But something's going on. Change is afoot.
It's not just the calendar, although I suspect that's part of it on both micro and macro levels. Fall is usually my sweet season. The glory time. I come to life. Frolic outdoors and such. But this is a bizarro autumn in Texas, and it's a bizarro autumn in my heart. Nothing is as it should be.
When I began this blog last spring, I remarked upon the number of friends and acquaintances going through difficult transitions. It appears to be my turn, but in ways I can't seem to identify, much less articulate.
I can usually find my way through the tangles with a comb made from words, but that's not working this time around (hence my sparse postings these days). But at night? Things are hopping.
My dream life is changing. I crave sleep, not just because I'm tired and not for escape, but for a return to the stories I'm telling myself, stories I know I'm hearing but can't always recall. Last night, as I was drifting off, I was reminded of this speech, Caliban's, from The Tempest:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
I can't begin to tease out all these lines have to offer, although I now wish I'd offered the first two to Nightbird back in the early 80s.
I do know that, most mornings these days, "when I wake....I [cry] to dream again."
Years ago, during graduate school, I was discussing insomnia with a friend - let's call him Nightbird. Despite the fact that I loved sleep, it did not always come easily to me. I sought it with a vengeance. Said friend, on the other hand, seemed to avoid it. When I asked him why, he told me he didn't want to face his dreams.
For decades, I've had a mundane dream life, at least to my knowledge. Even when the bad ones come, they are firmly rooted in real world situations, peopled with familiar faces. Every once in a while I get to fly (more often, I run effortlessly), but for me a wild night in the subconscious is when, say, OF and I are asked by Benjamin Netanyahu to write the menu copy for his soon-to-open New York restaurant (don't laugh...this is an actual dream from about ten years ago).
But something's going on. Change is afoot.
It's not just the calendar, although I suspect that's part of it on both micro and macro levels. Fall is usually my sweet season. The glory time. I come to life. Frolic outdoors and such. But this is a bizarro autumn in Texas, and it's a bizarro autumn in my heart. Nothing is as it should be.
When I began this blog last spring, I remarked upon the number of friends and acquaintances going through difficult transitions. It appears to be my turn, but in ways I can't seem to identify, much less articulate.
I can usually find my way through the tangles with a comb made from words, but that's not working this time around (hence my sparse postings these days). But at night? Things are hopping.
My dream life is changing. I crave sleep, not just because I'm tired and not for escape, but for a return to the stories I'm telling myself, stories I know I'm hearing but can't always recall. Last night, as I was drifting off, I was reminded of this speech, Caliban's, from The Tempest:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
I can't begin to tease out all these lines have to offer, although I now wish I'd offered the first two to Nightbird back in the early 80s.
I do know that, most mornings these days, "when I wake....I [cry] to dream again."
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Three-legged Race
So, dogs and people. A lot alike. Covered that, with cheesy triteness, in the last post.
But there’s just one more dog-related thing chugging around my brain…the missing leg.
It’s beautiful to watch the animals run in the park, ears flapping, muscles doing what they were meant to do, coats gleaming in the sunshine. Some are perfect specimens. The rest do all right. Even that miraculous phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me: the three-legged dog.
We’ve all seen one – leg lost in some traumatic way – that runs, wags, even leaps for a Frisbee now and then, perfectly compensating for his loss, never looking back. The disability is obvious, but its effects are invisible. Sure, it must have been hard to relearn some things, and maybe he can’t sit up and beg any more, but he’s done what a dog does. He’s just gotten on with the business of joy.
In some of the early entries in this blog, I mentioned the epidemic of change in the lives of my friends (and, of course, my own as well). While some of these changes are positive, many of them – even the good ones - involve loss. The loss is sometimes sudden, an amputation if you will. A parent dies, a job disappears, a child gets in trouble in a spectacular way. Such loss is brutal, ruthless, but is easily defined. Something Has Happened.
But what of more insidious loss? What if the limb isn’t severed but is slowly withering? What if the leg is there, even normal in its outward appearance, but is without function? When these losses happen in the confines of a family or an individual’s essential self, the analogy to limb loss becomes a little less stable.
When an actual limb begins to fail, a person has options: physical therapy, medication, adaptive technologies or supports. In extreme cases, amputation is the answer to creating a new whole. But people and their systems aren’t that simple, are they? Think of the physical and emotional erosion of chronic illness. The slow train wreck of substance abuse. The withdrawal of intimacy in a strained marriage. These traumas – and that is what they are, even if they are not sudden – happen piecemeal, painfully.
Sometimes the loss is a realization, an “I will never…” statement. Not the whining kind that calls up a response like, “Don’t be silly! You have plenty of time/energy/money to do a, b, or c.” but the peaceful, mature knowledge that the time for a certain action is truly past, that the skills required are beyond a person’s reach, or that some dreams will simply never come true.
None of these scenarios are uncommon, and none are beyond our imagination. They number as many as the grains of sand on the floor of the ocean. The challenge comes, as always, in how we react. Is a full recovery possible? Sometimes the loss is too great, the energy required long gone. People do hit bottom, and they don’t always come back up. I’m not a character-Nazi, the kind of person who believes that a stiff upper lip and a strong work ethic can bring you back from anything. And not everyone is capable of adaptation (see Island of the Broken…Siblings, June 14, below).
But what of those who don’t want to stop walking, who dream of leaping once again for a well-tossed Frisbee? Even if you do persevere through loss, even if no one around you has any idea that recovery is in process, you still must face the absence. The leg is never going to function again. You leave an untenable situation. You strengthen the remaining limbs. Perhaps you find substitutes.
The challenge lies – at least for me – in the choice of a metaphor to understand your life from the loss forward. Do you choose the four-legged-but-one-is-impaired dog image, or do you radically remake yourself as the three-legged dog?
The answer means the difference between staying in the crate or chasing the tennis ball with your ears flapping and your coat gleaming. You may no longer be the fastest dog, you may no longer have AKC conformation, and you may even elicit pity from those who stare at what is no longer there.
But you will have found your balance.
And you will continue to run on your three strong legs, and the sun will feel good on your back when you take a big slurping drink of cool water and collapse, happy, in the soft, green grass.
But there’s just one more dog-related thing chugging around my brain…the missing leg.
It’s beautiful to watch the animals run in the park, ears flapping, muscles doing what they were meant to do, coats gleaming in the sunshine. Some are perfect specimens. The rest do all right. Even that miraculous phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me: the three-legged dog.
We’ve all seen one – leg lost in some traumatic way – that runs, wags, even leaps for a Frisbee now and then, perfectly compensating for his loss, never looking back. The disability is obvious, but its effects are invisible. Sure, it must have been hard to relearn some things, and maybe he can’t sit up and beg any more, but he’s done what a dog does. He’s just gotten on with the business of joy.
In some of the early entries in this blog, I mentioned the epidemic of change in the lives of my friends (and, of course, my own as well). While some of these changes are positive, many of them – even the good ones - involve loss. The loss is sometimes sudden, an amputation if you will. A parent dies, a job disappears, a child gets in trouble in a spectacular way. Such loss is brutal, ruthless, but is easily defined. Something Has Happened.
But what of more insidious loss? What if the limb isn’t severed but is slowly withering? What if the leg is there, even normal in its outward appearance, but is without function? When these losses happen in the confines of a family or an individual’s essential self, the analogy to limb loss becomes a little less stable.
When an actual limb begins to fail, a person has options: physical therapy, medication, adaptive technologies or supports. In extreme cases, amputation is the answer to creating a new whole. But people and their systems aren’t that simple, are they? Think of the physical and emotional erosion of chronic illness. The slow train wreck of substance abuse. The withdrawal of intimacy in a strained marriage. These traumas – and that is what they are, even if they are not sudden – happen piecemeal, painfully.
Sometimes the loss is a realization, an “I will never…” statement. Not the whining kind that calls up a response like, “Don’t be silly! You have plenty of time/energy/money to do a, b, or c.” but the peaceful, mature knowledge that the time for a certain action is truly past, that the skills required are beyond a person’s reach, or that some dreams will simply never come true.
None of these scenarios are uncommon, and none are beyond our imagination. They number as many as the grains of sand on the floor of the ocean. The challenge comes, as always, in how we react. Is a full recovery possible? Sometimes the loss is too great, the energy required long gone. People do hit bottom, and they don’t always come back up. I’m not a character-Nazi, the kind of person who believes that a stiff upper lip and a strong work ethic can bring you back from anything. And not everyone is capable of adaptation (see Island of the Broken…Siblings, June 14, below).
But what of those who don’t want to stop walking, who dream of leaping once again for a well-tossed Frisbee? Even if you do persevere through loss, even if no one around you has any idea that recovery is in process, you still must face the absence. The leg is never going to function again. You leave an untenable situation. You strengthen the remaining limbs. Perhaps you find substitutes.
The challenge lies – at least for me – in the choice of a metaphor to understand your life from the loss forward. Do you choose the four-legged-but-one-is-impaired dog image, or do you radically remake yourself as the three-legged dog?
The answer means the difference between staying in the crate or chasing the tennis ball with your ears flapping and your coat gleaming. You may no longer be the fastest dog, you may no longer have AKC conformation, and you may even elicit pity from those who stare at what is no longer there.
But you will have found your balance.
And you will continue to run on your three strong legs, and the sun will feel good on your back when you take a big slurping drink of cool water and collapse, happy, in the soft, green grass.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Far Flung Nuts....
Just goes to show you. Tigers and stripes and such. Don’t count your chickens. I committed to a topic yesterday while ideas were swirling and before I’d started writing and then, when the time came, WHAM…nothing.
Lesson learned. I can’t give myself the gift of a “no pressure” situation and then start turning the vise. Won’t work. Never has. So I chucked the edifying and interesting morning activity I’d been planning for months, loaded up Large Dog (LD), and headed out to the ranch. It’s one of those good spring mornings, sunny and cool in the shade and the promise of warmth in the sun. I’m on the cabin deck, in the dappled shade of a huge live oak, and I just finished my coffee. LD is snoring. So let’s try again.
My friend over at “Do You Realize…” (we’ll call her DYR) wrote a wonderful entry this week about her childhood in a beautiful part of the rural Deep South and her adult realization that her parents did and still do live in ways that are in direct opposition to her eco-conscious belief system. Writers know that – no matter how much we want to – we can’t control the directions in which our readers take our words. DYR, I spun far afield from your words, but I’ll try to bring it home at the end, ok? I’ll spare everyone all the intermediate steps I went through and all the possible metaphors I tried to muscle into submission, and get you where I am now.
Acorns never fall far from the tree? Yeah, right.
What happens when you end up over with the elms?
DYR is lucky. She at least started out at home with and in her family and leafed out later. Me? Sorry, no big drama, but I was the elm in the oaks from the start. I just thought differently. I loved and respected the oak grove, but I didn’t want to live there forever. These are the kinds of feelings that lead 12-year-old girls to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly even though they live in Reader’s Digest houses. College, graduate school, heartbreaks, marriage into a very different kind of family…. each of these things took me farther away. It’s not fun to be bi-arboreal (humor me on the term, ok?) but it does get easier when you stop trying to feed the squirrels.
And the folks I call my friends? Lots of them are noticing that their leaves this spring are different. It could be an age-group thing, although that’s an awfully facile explanation. Maybe it’s just the kind of people I like (could the universe have plopped me down into a peer group titled “People Shipped to the Wrong Address at Birth”?). And these shifts, these sproutings from seeds borne aloft, are not always related to birth families. Saplings are seeking the sun away from marriages, jobs, and geographies they were never meant to inhabit.
And I do believe that makes for a healthy eco-system for us all.
This one didn’t turn out quite like I’d planned - a bit short, a lot surface - but this is all about no pressure, right? RIGHT? She mutters to herself, “Be an elm, be an elm, be all the way elm…”
Lesson learned. I can’t give myself the gift of a “no pressure” situation and then start turning the vise. Won’t work. Never has. So I chucked the edifying and interesting morning activity I’d been planning for months, loaded up Large Dog (LD), and headed out to the ranch. It’s one of those good spring mornings, sunny and cool in the shade and the promise of warmth in the sun. I’m on the cabin deck, in the dappled shade of a huge live oak, and I just finished my coffee. LD is snoring. So let’s try again.
My friend over at “Do You Realize…” (we’ll call her DYR) wrote a wonderful entry this week about her childhood in a beautiful part of the rural Deep South and her adult realization that her parents did and still do live in ways that are in direct opposition to her eco-conscious belief system. Writers know that – no matter how much we want to – we can’t control the directions in which our readers take our words. DYR, I spun far afield from your words, but I’ll try to bring it home at the end, ok? I’ll spare everyone all the intermediate steps I went through and all the possible metaphors I tried to muscle into submission, and get you where I am now.
Acorns never fall far from the tree? Yeah, right.
What happens when you end up over with the elms?
DYR is lucky. She at least started out at home with and in her family and leafed out later. Me? Sorry, no big drama, but I was the elm in the oaks from the start. I just thought differently. I loved and respected the oak grove, but I didn’t want to live there forever. These are the kinds of feelings that lead 12-year-old girls to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly even though they live in Reader’s Digest houses. College, graduate school, heartbreaks, marriage into a very different kind of family…. each of these things took me farther away. It’s not fun to be bi-arboreal (humor me on the term, ok?) but it does get easier when you stop trying to feed the squirrels.
And the folks I call my friends? Lots of them are noticing that their leaves this spring are different. It could be an age-group thing, although that’s an awfully facile explanation. Maybe it’s just the kind of people I like (could the universe have plopped me down into a peer group titled “People Shipped to the Wrong Address at Birth”?). And these shifts, these sproutings from seeds borne aloft, are not always related to birth families. Saplings are seeking the sun away from marriages, jobs, and geographies they were never meant to inhabit.
And I do believe that makes for a healthy eco-system for us all.
This one didn’t turn out quite like I’d planned - a bit short, a lot surface - but this is all about no pressure, right? RIGHT? She mutters to herself, “Be an elm, be an elm, be all the way elm…”
Sunday, April 8, 2007
So it begins...
Who am I? The world's biggest cowardly writer.
Too timid to use my name, I'm dipping a toe into the blogdom at the urging of a couple of friends. I promise nothing but a view into life on the verge of fifty, whatever blows out my snorkel when I surface from one of the pools in which I swim, and a forum for you to talk back and point out my blind spots...kindly.
And what's with the title? Not a lot. Blue is on my mind today. Blue states (I don't live in one, but I did once and loved it dearly). Blue skies (I'm thinking of the autumn sky in Taos, bright against the golden cottonwoods). Blue feelings (they come and go, just like everyone else's). And blue eyes (I do have two of them).
I ran across a Frank O'Hara quote today when I clicked on an unfamiliar blog. I'm not particularly familiar with O'Hara and the quote doesn't describe me, per se, but it just hasn't left my mind. Here it is:
It seems that many of my friends, men and women alike, particularly those with aging marriages or aging parents or children of any age are feeling a disquiet in their gut.
But I'm taking that blue and I'm making mine like the blue of the sky: impermanent. When it's here, it's here. Then it won't be. Then it will be. That much is certain.
I'm going to let it be the cerulean blue of peace.
Too timid to use my name, I'm dipping a toe into the blogdom at the urging of a couple of friends. I promise nothing but a view into life on the verge of fifty, whatever blows out my snorkel when I surface from one of the pools in which I swim, and a forum for you to talk back and point out my blind spots...kindly.
And what's with the title? Not a lot. Blue is on my mind today. Blue states (I don't live in one, but I did once and loved it dearly). Blue skies (I'm thinking of the autumn sky in Taos, bright against the golden cottonwoods). Blue feelings (they come and go, just like everyone else's). And blue eyes (I do have two of them).
I ran across a Frank O'Hara quote today when I clicked on an unfamiliar blog. I'm not particularly familiar with O'Hara and the quote doesn't describe me, per se, but it just hasn't left my mind. Here it is:
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time;
they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and
disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away.
Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me
restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I
would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm
curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the
earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can
spare myself little sleep.
- Frank O'Hara
they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and
disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away.
Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me
restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I
would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm
curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the
earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can
spare myself little sleep.
- Frank O'Hara
It seems that many of my friends, men and women alike, particularly those with aging marriages or aging parents or children of any age are feeling a disquiet in their gut.
But I'm taking that blue and I'm making mine like the blue of the sky: impermanent. When it's here, it's here. Then it won't be. Then it will be. That much is certain.
I'm going to let it be the cerulean blue of peace.
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