Courting a Best Life

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This was supposed to be my first post on Substack. Due to technical difficulties in the setup, it’s not happening. Yet. I decided to post here, rather than stress about it when my letter is already late. My own little bit of nonnamaxxing—in a weird way.

 

One evening at the dinner table, my mother recited to me and my sister information from her current book about Blue Zones: (allegedly) specific geographic regions where people live exceptionally long, healthy lives with high rates of centenarians.

Our mother, her eyes weak, listened to recorded books on a special player from the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library. She backed it up constantly  to catch every word her faded hearing missed.

“Why are you listening to it?” I asked.

“I want to know what I should be doing,” she said.

“You’re ninety-nine,” Rebecca said, “they should be studying you.”

Mama had some health issues, but none were caused by her lifestyle. 

 

Blue Zones

I looked up the nine traits studies believe to be factors in the so-called Blue Zones. They seem like good habits. Whether or not we aspire to live to one hundred.

 

Move Naturally: Staying active through gardening, walking, and physical chores rather than structured gym workouts.
Purpose: Maintaining a clear reason for waking up each morning.
Down Shift: Relieving daily stress through habits like prayer, naps, or social gatherings.
80% Rule: Stopping eating when 80% full to avoid overeating.
Plant Slant: Eating a diet rich in beans, lentils, and vegetables with limited meat consumption.
Wine at 5: Drinking alcohol moderately and socially, usually with friends or food.
Belong: Participating in a faith-based community or spiritual group.
Loved Ones First: Keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the same household.
Right Tribe: Surrounding oneself with social circles that support healthy behaviors.

 

Over the decades, my mother had been doing most of them. With the exception of number six, she was a lifelong teetotaler.

“Should I pour you a glass of wine?” Rebecca asked. No response.

And about number eight: Having her mother nearby threatened to shorten my mother’s life; as I thought at the time, caring for mine would surely kill me. It’s interesting that the list doesn’t include keeping the younger generations close. My mother, sadly, did not have that, but grandchildren kept me sane during mother-care years. On the other hand, my return to her house may have extended her life—perhaps out of spite.

My personal favorites are non-gym activities, naps, and wine. (Full disclosure: My nightly wine is now weekly, but it’s still fun to talk about. And where is dark chocolate in this list?)

Fun finding, if you come, as I do, from a lineage of nonagenarians—or if you don’t:

 

“The Danish Twin Study established that only about 20% of how long the average person lives is dictated by genes, while about 80% is influenced by lifestyle and environment.” —Dan Buettner, Blue Zones founder

 

Nonnamaxxing

I recently read a Huffington Post article about “Nonnamaxxing,” a trend among olders of taking on the rhythms of Italian grandmothers and “giving it a fun name.” The slow-cooking part is not going to track with me, but I would like to embrace slow walks, simple living, less screen time.

 

“Blue Zone research consistently links this kind of lifestyle – unhurried, communal, physically active by default – to lower rates of chronic illness, sharper cognitive function in later life, and measurably greater well-being. The nonna, it turns out, has been running the optimal program for decades.” —Noël Wolf, linguist and cultural expert

 

The Huffpost article does point out pitfalls! Nonnamaxxing is not about looking perfect on Instagram—it’s about being in the moment. (You would not believe the heavy make-up I see on young—and not-that-young—women in my volunteer role at Mount Rainier, and the contorted posing for IG selfies. Ay-yi. Is that judgey?)

Even before I read that, I’ve been contemplating lifestyle decisions about my relationship to social media and to my own public writing. I’m more determined than ever to learn a new song. More about that another time.

And it’s more about the nonna than the maxxing.

 

“A real nonna isn’t optimizing anything, she’s just living. The minute you turn slowing down into one more thing to ‘win,’ you’re recreating the exact pressure you were trying to escape.” —Chloë Bean, licensed marriage and family therapist.

 

In other words, no pressure. Including from Substack. And self-imposed publication deadlines.

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These last days of summer—or, in the Pacific Northwest, the summer-is-finally-here days—I’m ready for October. Ready for the garden to have been put to bed; for outdoor projects to be left undone; for the wood rack to be filled, ready for the wood stove insert (which reminds me, I need to get the chimney cleaned) . . .

As I finish up this letter, in the still-dark morning, a barred owl is calling from the woods through the open window. And there were coyotes howling in the night. It is enough.

🍁 🍁 🍁

I would love to hear from you! Do you think about making lifestyle changes? Or have you already? For health, for happiness, both? 

 

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply! 

Go to substack.com/@gretchenstaebler (Writing Down the Story, Act 3) to subscribe. 

I’m Moving! [and other third-act challenges]

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I’m moving! No, not physically, not yet. Though this move is just as angst filled and complex as that will be. I’m moving my monthly eLetter (of which posts here are a duplication) to [insert strangled gasping] Substack.

 

Now I hear your strangled gasps. “Please, not another Substack in my email feed!” Hear me out.

 

I’ll spare you the whys and why nots that have circled my brain for the past year, and get right to the why now. First, I have a new book coming out in the next months, and neither of my current bloggy platforms are discoverable. Substack—theoretically—is. Second, the platform that’s hosted my monthly letter for four-and-a-half years, is changing their terms (again), and this time it affects my use. I’m aware that all social media platforms suck us in with their awesomeness, then change to less awesome. It’s popularly called “Enshittification.” Like all the shiny things, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until Substack tarnishes, or maybe has already begun to. But for now, here I go, into the abyss.

 

The details: One monthly post on the topic of aging. No paywall. No extra-special content for subscribers who pay. In fact, no “upgrade to paid subscriber” buttons. It will still include the “Buy Me a Coffee” opportunity. Many thanks for those who use it, helping me pay for overhead on my various online writing sites. (As the sign at Panera Bread, where I’m writing this, states on their tip jar: “Always appreciated, never expected.”)

 

Here is what will be different: Posts will look better (arguably). I can include images (huge). It will be easier for readers to comment and engage in conversation (more huge). There will be a monthly digest, with links, of recent posts on my eclectic WordPress blog, making it more of a true newsletter.

 

At least all that’s my intention, third-act learning curve not withstanding.

 

Enough of that. I hope you will follow me, and tell a few friends if you feel like it. Find me at gretchenstaebler.substack.com. The name of my presence there is Writing Down the Story, Act 3. 

 

🌻 🌻 🌻

 

More Third Act Challenges

 

The Smart Watch. I got a semi-smart watch recently. Mostly I need two things of it: to tell time without unpocketing my phone—especially on the trail—and a more accurate pedometer than the phone is—also on the trail. Okay, and maybe sleep tracking. It can be linked to my smart phone, but it’s advertised as “senior friendly,” because linking it is too much for us? Maybe it’s assumed we all have a Cricket phones? The advertising feels diminishing. Or maybe the truth is hard. I couldn’t figure out the linking. Or how to use the pedometer, which I now suspect is less accurate than my iPhone, which I thought was under-reporting. Maybe I should read the instructions.

 

Digital Coupons. At Fred Meyer a few weeks  ago, I tried again to use a digital coupon. I swear it’s a different process at Fred’s than it is at Safeway. Maybe it’s different in produce than it is at the chicken cooler. Do I search and clip the coupon on the app? Or do I use the QR code? I tried both. There may be an answer, but I sure as heck don’t know what it is. In checkout, the avocados didn’t appear as one dollar each. Or the Honeycrisp apples, or whatever damn thing I needed the digital coupon for. I ranted to the trainee checker, and to her trainer when she came to help, that the whole stupid concept is discriminatory. If an item is on sale, it should just be on sale. You shouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist or a millennial to take advantage of on-sale Snoqualmie Blackberry ice cream.

 

I used to rant about the discrimination because my dead mother, who in her late nineties had still “enjoyed” going to the grocery story, could not have figured out how to use them. By then she had exchanged her Cricket phone for a medical alert device that hung from her neck. In truth, I can’t master the coupon. Bring back senior-friendly couponing. I was once queen of proofs-of-purchase, box-top collecting, and rebating (pulling the Sunday newspaper circulars out of a recycling drop-off because we couldn’t afford a subscription). I know my stuff. A grocery store I shop at twenty miles from home doesn’t use them, nor do they require a membership to get items on sale . . . except on senior day.* (P.S. the two Gen-X employees seemed to be in complete agreement.)

 

I need to move before I can’t tell time or drive to the grocery store. None of us knows when that day will come. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can make a virtual move, to Substack.

 

* Update: Two hours after I wrote this draft, I walked into said grocery store and was greeted with new signage: “Sign up today! Clip digital deals.” Sigh. Nothing stays the same. Oh, the irony, as I move to Substack.

 

I suppose the primary task of the third act is forced adaptation to change: gray hair, wrinkled skin, health woes, new technology. The list goes on. 

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I would love to hear from you! Do you have feelings about Substack? What are your challenges these days? Leave a comment and read what others are saying. 

 

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply! (This is the last time you’ll have to do this!)

 

Go to substack.com/@gretchenstaebler to subscribe, if you haven’t found your way here from Mailerlite. (I hope the subscribe is there, and that it works.)

 

Not Every Question Has an Answer

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“If you could stay put, would you?”

No. Also, yes.

A friend, on a four-person Zoom call, asked the question as I cried my way through telling of my overwhelm cleaning out the family home I’m living in. Part of the reason I’m still here is because the task is not done. And maybe I’m dragging my feet, because it will be hard—and scary—to leave.

Last summer, at my 55th high school reunion, a classmate (a neighbor, living on the property where she grew up) asked if I like living here on the hill.

Yes. Also, no.

Some questions just don’t have simple answers. And here I am again, asking “what’s next” and “when.” I don’t know the answer to that, either. But every time we ask the questions, we get a little closer to answers.

It breaks my heart to think of this property, my family home for sixty-six years, belonging to strangers. And, I want to create another home while I’m relatively strong of mind and body. I love living among the trees; the view of sky, valley, mountain; the coyotes howling in the night. And, I’ve never aspired to take care of acres as my father dreamed, recreating his childhood farm life. Two weeks ago, I scraped and stomped down 197 mole volcanoes in the meadow ahead of the mowing appointment, a twice-monthly task until the grass stops growing for the season.

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I drove by a sweet house for sale in Olympia the other day. I would have liked to live in Olympia, in a home of my own again. But, I’ll be 74 this week; there is precious little time left to get established closer to the younger generations of my family in Seattle (grateful that I have younger generations). There’s no longer time for intermediate moves. Sand is quickly passing through the narrow neck of the hour glass. I was a little wistful—Olympia is closer to my hiking life, and my sisters.

What if I’d left here right after my mother died, eight years ago? How would my life be different now? No answers.

A novel I enjoyed a few years ago, The Midnight Library (Matt Haig), explores lives the protagonist could have lived, but didn’t. It’s intriguing to consider life’s twists and turns, paths chosen, trails not taken. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . .” Or, perhaps, it wasn’t a choice, but circumstances that set the future, as in the 1998 movie, Sliding Doors.

Last month, I traveled with my daughter’s family to Sisters, Oregon, for my grandson’s baseball tournament. The Airbnb was in a development with houses and townhomes, manicured grounds with a greenway running through. Olders and grandkids, parents and strollers, dogs on leashes and kids on bikes went by the patio where I sat reading. I walked to the coffee shop in the mornings, bouncing with chatting olders when it opened at 6am. That’s what I want next on this aging journey: connection. No need for manicured lawns, but also not with an acre of mole tunnels.

Will I get to choose? No answer. I hope so. Tick tock.

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My sisters and I, trying to gather regularly to clean out the house, tackled the sewing and quilting supplies this month. Collecting needles from cabinets, drawers, shoeboxes, pincushions, sewing machine stools into a give-away box was like sifting stardust. My mother, my mother, my mother.

I sit on the deck and a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds hover around my head, on their way to and from the feeder, nearly empty again. I sense the presence of my parents. Are they here for me, or because this was their home? Will I leave them behind when I go? We’re here. We love you. Stardust.

We could hire someone to throw it all in a dumpster, but we would miss the stardust.

We put in the recycling box multiple sheets of paper on which our parents played Jotto—or Five-letter Word—on game sheets they created, and my mother’s lists of possibilities. Decades ago, they played it on trains and planes and at the dining room table. (Millennials did not invent Wordle, they merely wrote a computer program.) They kept the game sheets and lists, of course they did. Stardust. 

Last week, I gave 150 picture postcards from the desk drawer to a friend to send reunion reminders to her classmates. I’ve mailed two letters with decades-old, unused stamps from my mother’s obsessive saving. Slowly, surely. Repurpose, recycle, re-home. Get it out of here. So I can get out of here. When will that be? The third act comes with Social Security and Medicare (for now) and a lifetime national parks’ pass (mine has an image of wildflowers, thank goddess), but no crystal ball.

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If I could stay, would I? I do know the answer: No. That doesn’t mean it will be easy to leave. A friend says, what good is a life if we don’t miss the people and places that once inhabited it.

I would love to hear from you! What plans are you needing to get into place? What are your unanswerable questions? Leave a comment below.

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply!

Don’t Rock the Boat

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I’m tired. Can I just name that? The wonky sleep of advancing years. Trying to hang onto joy in these times that shatter my heart, over and over. (I wish I could say everything seems worse in the middle of the night, but in this case it’s bad and badder all the time.) Fretting about the need to clean out the house, but doing little about it, while the literal and metaphorical clocks tick.

Abigail Thomas, who is eighty-five, wrote in a recent post: “Sometimes you wake up at four-thirty in the morning with a surge of energy and no cows to milk.” Gawd, I wish my waking hour were four-thirty; but no, it’s one-thirty. What do you do with one-thirty? Slip another melatonin tablet under the tongue and hope for a couple more hours? I have “cows,” I’m editing a memoir—and cleaning out the house. But not at one-thirty.

My internet was down for a week and a half this month. Well, down during “peak time,” which seemed to be from seven a.m. until sometime after I went to bed. Which partnered well with sleeplessness, what with getting up at four o’clock—unless I had finally gone back to sleep about then—and trying to think of everything I needed that day from the information highway before it went out again.

On the one hand, I often blame the internet for, well, everything happening globally. At the same time, I am personally dependent on it for so much. I find it tedious, and sometimes impossible, to conduct life on my phone. I kept thinking it was temporary, though there was no report of a widespread outage. Surely it wasn’t a problem with my equipment or my line, since it worked sometimes. Reddit suggested my “node” was oversold.

All to say, I didn’t contact customer support.

I have a lifelong reticence to rocking boats. Big boats, such as relationship obstacles; small boats such as anything involving talking on the phone. Hoping all of it will magically resolve in silence. I would rather live with stuff than risk shame or embarrassment or a negative reaction. I would rather cheer for miraculous, or have a root canal, than stir things up. I’m a nine on the Enneagram: the peacemaker—or the peacekeeper.

I learned from the cradle.

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My sisters and I are trying to clean out our family home. (Reminder: my father died in 1995, my mother eight years ago. And here we still are.) One afternoon a month—well, not really, but that was the goal—we gather to go through a box or two. This month it was a legal-size banker’s box chock full of my mother’s calendars, greeting cards, journals, copies of letters, and unmailed letters. Oh, the unsent letters. Processing her angst about her adult children over and over for years.

Her journal entries were written in spiral notebooks, or on single sheets. (She didn’t use the journals we gave her because “they were too pretty to write sadness in.”) The unmailed letters poured out in stationery pads or on onionskin paper; in her beautiful penmanship and in shorthand. Paper was filled day-after-day, month-after-month for years, trying to work out her feelings over how my younger sister and I (first serially, then in tandem) had blown up our lives, wondering what she had done wrong.

She never risked breaching our already distant—physical and emotional—relationship to talk about it; bottling it up inside instead. Had she, I would not have wanted to engage. Given our dearth of experience, I have no doubt we would have ended up more estranged. Which is not to say I didn’t know how she felt.

It took us four hours, even skimming. Some would argue to just throw it out without looking at it. They would not be wrong, but we can’t do that. Our parents are gone, this is the last opportunity to touch them. On June 21, the day my father unexpectedly died—the day after my forty-third birthday—our mother wrote two lines in her 1995 Sierra Club calendar: “Oh, George. I will miss you—suddenly the world seems so empty.” Our father’s full calendar suddenly stopped. It broke our collective heart.

My sister and I believe that our presence with our mother during the last years of her life healed all wounds. Though it was hard to read her toxic writings, mostly we grieved that she let anguish control her living for so long. She blamed her “bad parenting” for our actions, rather than see that we were capable women making our unique way through the world, owning our mistakes and cheering our successes. We were not clones. She and I measured successful parenting on different scales.

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I finally called CenturyLink. They sent a technician three days later. He reprogrammed the box on the wall outside the house, behind the espaliered forsythia—which I didn’t know was there—and said it wasn’t running at the speed I was paying for. It’s great now, even working faster than it ever has. I called and asked for a credit on my bill during the time it was out (so brave), but only got it for the time since I placed the call. Company policy. I should have rocked that canoe sooner, not waited until I knew it wasn’t going to return to shore on its own.

We plan to burn the letters, releasing us all. Especially our mother.

Every day is Mother’s Day. Blessings on you and yours.

I would love to hear from you! Are you a rocker or a steady sailor? Do you have a story? Leave a comment below.

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply!

Over the Hill: Knocking on the Door of Seventy-four

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I’ll be seventy-four soon. Which means I turned forty . . . well, a long time ago. Forty is the over-the-hill birthday, right? Decorations are black, balloons have dire messages, life is pretty much over. As I approached that birthday, though, I felt like life was beginning. Maybe I would finally feel like an adult, an imposter up until then. I was about to complete a master’s degree, and (I thought) begin a career after being a stay-at-home mom—an occupation that was dying even then. There was hard stuff on the horizon—a big hill, unrelated to age—but I felt alive and ready for the world. “No over-the-hill napkins,” I told my family, who were planning a party. Nothing was going to hijack my thunder.

     Life goes on after forty, and no one mentions that phrase again. Until elderhood, the third act. Author Abigail Thomas—who is eighty-five, which makes me feel youthful—wrote on the topic a few months ago. I quote her brief Substack post in its entirety:

 

“Over the hill“ is a weirdly dismissive way to say one has grown old. Which hill, I want to know. All of us old people have climbed more than one, some of us negotiated the first in our teens, long before we made it to old age. Some hills we had to climb two or three times before we could get to the top and slide down the other side, only to be greeted with another even steeper hill. But we climbed that one too. Maybe luck was part of it, but there is always more to learn. Life is complicated and hard. Old at last, we may know how to keep still now, to look around, to listen, to lend a hand. As you will be too, one day, if your luck holds. A little respect, please. We deserve red ribbons and lots of flowers, and maybe a cake or two.”

 

I left home at twenty-four, and moved across the country. It felt like a small hill then, albeit adventurous. It wasn’t until decades later that I’ve realized how it changed the trajectory of my life. Seven years later, we moved to Mississippi—a friggin’ mountain I didn’t get over the top of for four years, when we  finally left. Forty was no hill on its own, but two years later, I became unmarried and I came out—huge elevation change, many obstacles. “Where is the evidence you won’t get through this?” a therapist asked, when I was sure it was a hill I would literally fall off of, long before reaching the top. Guess what? I survived. At sixty, with another cross-country move, I began the never-ending switchbacks of six years of mother care.

     At the turn of the decade, the whole world climbed, topped, and slid down the hill of the pandemic, in ways both solitary and communal. Now the world is climbing another hill. (Over the hill? Please, bring it.)

     As Thomas says, we olders have climbed, conquered, come off of many hills. We absolutely deserve ribbons, flowers, cake! And respect, thank you. There will be more, for sure, but we have much experience to draw on. I hate to burst your black balloon, youngers, but “over the hill,” as it relates to olders, is a sentiment that needs to be retired.

     Seminary Hill, my current and my childhood home, is not the hill I want to die on. And to leave will require navigation skills—which I have, thanks to experience. But for when I’m over my very last hill, I have signed a contract with Earth Funeral, to compost my meager earthly remains. I hope someone plants them on some hill. There’s no view if you stay on the plain.

 

I would love to hear from you! How do you feel about hills, literal and metaphorical? Leave a comment below.

A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it’s private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply!

Buried Treasure

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Here in the Pacific Northwest the forsythia is blooming, swollen buds are bursting open, raspberry canes are sprouting new leaves. It’s also cold and rainy (except when it’s not), and the mountains are getting much-needed snow. Perfect weather for indoor projects. I have a growing list.

 

I’ve been looking for a stack of Little Golden Books I squirreled away in 2020, when clearing a bookshelf in preparation for hosting Family Pandemic School—The Shy Little Kitten, Scuffy the Tugboat, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. (Remember those days? Who would have thought times would get more “interesting” than that?) What I found instead, in the antique trunk my mother and I bought for five dollars at a yard sale nearly fifty years ago, were letters.

 

Finding letters in old trunks seems to be a thing with me. First was the Army footlocker, full of letters my parents wrote to each other during WWII. These are letters written to me—mostly by family—in the final third of the last century. Unlike my parents’ letters, I will not be transcribing and compiling these. But what to do with them? I really didn’t need another project.

 

My sisters and I are striving to get our family home ready to sell, so we aren’t caught flat-footed when opportunity knocks. But this is my stuff, not that of my parents. It’s somehow easier to hold, reminisce, and discard what our parents saved, which was everything.

 

I pulled out the letters, and decided I will leave the rest of the contents of the trunk intact for my children to discover when I’m gone—my high school scrapbook, magazines, my red-metal grade school lunch box. Who am I to decide what I leave behind is burden and what is of emotional value? Besides, why should they escape the left-behinds? Where I will put it when I move from this big house is mystery. Not knowing what to do with it all is probably why my parents never left home, held hostage by trash and treasure.

 

But the letters . . .

 

Unlike my mother’s neatly stacked and tied bundles, my musty missives were thrown willy-nilly into plastic grocery bags. I’ve put them in a plastic box to contain the smell. I do have a plan, which involves returning to my sisters letters they wrote; they’re about them, after all. But I can’t help reading them first, which takes time. They say something about who we were. I had forgotten how five-years-younger sister, Rebecca, sounded off to me about the unfairness of it all via the U.S.P.S. when she was left at home, absent her sisters, and long-distance calls were expensive. I recall my awe of five-years-older sister, Jo Ann, being off into the world on her own while I was in college. I’m glad to be reminded of our relationships.

 

The letters from my mother are revealing of who she was—and I won’t say more about that, other than I don’t misremember. More letters from my father than I thought he’d written. Postcards of Mount St. Helens before she blew her top. Crayon-scribbled “congratulations” cards from the children in my preschool class when my son was born, almost forty-seven years ago. Stunningly, their names call up many of the small faces and personalities. I’m not saving them, or the many greeting cards.

 

There are letters from my husband-to-be and from the early years of our marriage when he was out of town for an extended period. I don’t know if I’ll read those. It feels somehow intrusive after being unmarried for more than thirty years. I will return them to the trunk for our children. Just as I am grateful for the treasure of meeting my parents before I knew them, perhaps they will appreciate seeing theirs in a different light, before the end of our marriage blocked the lens of what came before. At any rate, it’s their history, and not mine to erase.

 

When we resize our lives (and don’t you love that word better than downsize?), we don’t need to put all of our past in the landfill. There is treasure amidst the trash. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. There are the two shoeboxes of postage stamps my mother kept, for example, thinking they would be valuable someday. They are not. Some will be set aside for a creative venture, many duplicates and tattered ones will go to the trash or be passed on to other creators, some will be saved for next gens—because relics of a time gone by are interesting, though they won’t realize that for many more years. Maybe it is our task to store the treasure for now. Sorting is another project.

 

P.S. I haven’t found the books.

🌷 🌷 🌷

I would love to hear from you! What are your experiences of and philosophy about things left behind, yours and that of others? Leave a comment below.

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Unlocking the Future

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While snow, cold, and ice (also ICE) have had the eastern side of the country in a lock, here in the Pacific NW we’ve seen bitter cold, unseasonable warmth, and—always—rain. When it’s sixty degrees, I remind myself it’s not spring. When it’s twelve degrees, I remember it is winter. I wish it would snow, but it doesn’t do that here much anymore, though it did in mid-February last year. Hope springs a turtle.

 

The four seasons model has tricked us into unreasonable expectations. Kurt Vonnegut, in Palm Sunday, and Mary Jo Hoffman in her book, Still, proposed two additional seasons are in play. They call them “Locking” (November-December) when nature locks down, and “Unlocking” (March-April) with its gradual release from winter’s grip. Though here in the far west, where the natural world is already unlocking, the timing is different from their eastern U.S. homes. Make up your own: Mud? Monsoon? Lady-beetles-in-the-house? Define them any way you want! 

 

Inner seasons don’t fit expectations either. It’s early for my inner unlocking; I am usually resistant to letting go of winter before April. I did get out of the cozy chair in the corner for ninety minutes of yard work one recent warm day, and was grateful I no longer have to do it all. It messes with my desiccated disk. Ah, age. Good to have a concrete reason for hiring help. The next day I went for a hike before the rains returned. Then returned to the chair. Unlocking is slow.

 

I’m cautiously unlocking dreams too. A road trip to the canyons national parks in autumn—during locking season? If not now, when? Tick tock—a powerful motivator.

 

I read recently that “what if . . .” is a younger person’s question. What if I take a road trip? What if I move closer to my grandchildren? (Speaking of tick-tock—they are getting older faster than I am.) Simply asking “what if” doesn’t serve third act-ers, it’s overwhelming, and dreams can’t be too far distant. A better question, the author of the quote suggests, is “what would it take?”

 

That question unlocks my imagination, and measurable steps can override the voice that whispers, you can’t, you won’t, it’s too hard. What would a road trip take? I’ve ordered maps of Utah and Colorado from AAA. It’s a start. What would it take to move? I made a list, and a week ago my sisters and I gathered and emptied clothes bags and closets of what was left of my mother’s clothes; along with emptying a jewelry box and a linen cabinet. We’ll gather monthly to find things to hold and then let go of.

 

Also on my Be Ready list (see last month’s letter), is preparing for the end. Last month I researched, signed onto, prepaid for an Earth Funeral. Next up: get end-of-life paperwork in order by true summer. I purchased a planner. Next step: take it off the shelf. Once that’s done, it can be let go of to get back to the business of living large. Except during unlocking season, when I enjoy the quiet.

 

Small steps. It’s how we all learned to walk.

 

🌦 🌦 🌦

 

I would love to hear from you! What is your current inner season? What are your longings or goals? What is one step toward making it happen? What have you done in the past that seemed unachievable at first blush?Leave a comment below.

 

And some uplifting music to lighten you day! As my friend says of it, “It feels just-right for this moment — ‘we’re never one thing, not one thing at all’ — whether it’s winter-turning-to-spring or rage and hope living side-by-side inside of us.” (If  the ad comes up, wait a second, then you can skip it.)

 

I’m the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing, no, not one thing at all
I’m a street fighter, I’m a prayer for peace
I’m a holy roller, I’m a honey bee

 

 

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Be Ready

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Does anyone make New Year’s resolutions these days? Or is it just the olders who have gotten wiser, let those magnificent opportunities for failure go? (Maybe we are the only generation who ever did.) Some are really good—drink more water, stop scrolling social media, get more exercise—but who needs the pressure of “resolve”? Some of us have changed to softer “intentions,” providing an awareness of needs or wants, resolutions with no-guilt permission to blow it off. Others have a word for the year. I’ve had a few of those.

To be sure, if you do any of those (resolutions, intentions, word for the year), and it works to keep you motivated, yay you!

For the past several years, though, I have engaged in a more meditative practice: Tarot. My good friend Joanna Powell Colbert, created a deck that feeds my soul. Each year on the winter solstice, I draw five cards and see what they have to say to me about the year past. Or, more accurately, what I have to say for myself inspired by the cards. A question is offered for each card, but sometimes I just listen for them to speak to me. On New Year’s Day, I do a seven-card spread with questions to ponder about the new year. 



As is pretty much always the case, this season’s practices blew me away with the resonance with my life and the insight they inspired.

The solstice practice led me from acknowledging my contentment with relative solitude, to inviting me to ask what I need now and what is keeping me from it, and on to what might I have to let go of to reach a new thing? Because, of course, we can’t live all the lives. 



The new year spread led to this: Be ready. 

Call it a resolution. Call it an intention. Call it a word for the year. Call it inspiration. (Call it a kick in the butt.)



I’m not an astrology practitioner, but I do know Geminis are curious, and they love variety. They also struggle with indecisiveness. So me! I’m also a nine on the Enneagram: the Peacemaker. Sounds good, right? It’s a whole lot like Gemini: receptive, and also complacent. Everything sounds like a good plan. “You decide.” But when you are a solo, there is no “you.”



Like many of us in the third act of life, I’ve been thinking for a good time about where I want to be as I advance toward the inevitable years of changing health and function. Aging at home”—if that means the house I currently live in—is not an option. I’m not sorry. I’ve moved my home eleven times since I migrated across the country in 1976, returning in 2012. I’m good with change. But what? where? when? I’m ready to move to the next adventure. I want to stay near my hiking trails, and sunrises from my home. I’m restless. I’m stuck. Gemini /Peacemaker. 



The cards have offered me the task for this year: Be ready. 



I don’t have make a decision on what, where, or when. (Back off, Gemini/Peacemaker.) Be ready gives me the opportunity to make a list and check off items. (I like that.) Return to cleaning out the house of my parents’ belongings and my own. Complete end-of-life business. Get the house appraised and inspected, property lines confirmed. Get someone to look at the septic tank status, instead of just worrying about it. Pick up again pondering where I want to go and allow myself to dream without the “I can’ts” I tend to put on fantasies. I’ve got this.

Also, buy an orange toaster because color makes me happy. Goodness knows, we could all use some happy right now.


 

“We don’t have to have it all figured out or know exactly where we’re going. We just need to trust in the journey and stay open to the surprises along the way.” —Barbara Brown Taylor


✅  ✅  ✅

I  would love to hear from you! Do you set goals for the new year? What are your longings? What holds you back? What urges you forward? Leave a comment below.

✅  ✅  ✅

The Gaian Tarot Three of Earth card, the one I think of as the community card, and which inspired the name I gave my family home (and Airbnb) several years ago—Three of Earth Farm—was drawn on the Solstice as my “companion card for the year ahead.” And in the new year spread as “hidden concern.” Gemini. Peacemaker. The internal battle continues, but I recognize the need for connections in these times. I wonder, what longings call to you?

Meet the creator, Joanna Powell Colbert, at JoannaPowellColbert.com. 

 

 

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As the Balance Tilts

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As long as I’ve been practicing yoga, there has been the offered option of doing balance poses with wall support. The first years, I availed myself of it. Surely preferable, I figured, to the shame of falling out. I was failing at a lot in those years: motherhood, relationships, self-esteem. I could at least not make a fool of myself in yoga.

Since then, as I’ve become a hiker, I’ve learned something new about practicing equilibrium: regaining balance is more important than retaining balance.

I no longer use the wall in yoga. I lean this way and that, practicing tree pose: extend an arm, keep my third eye on the focal point, tap my raised foot down as needed and quickly return to the pose. Because I engage with the wobble, I can confidently cross a log on the trail without falling into the creek.

Balance is an illusion

Elizabeth says, in this month’s dharma talks, that balance is an illusion. We fall in and out of balance. On the mat and in life, equilibrium is a practice, not an achievement. Balance is about constantly adapting.

In this third act of life, literal balance becomes more illusive, falling more certain, injury more likely. I use trekking poles when I hike, the equivalent of a wall. My hand is ready to grab a stair railing at home and out in the world, if not engaged in a death grip. It’s not a contest of who can stand on one leg the longest. It’s a personal achievement every day we don’t break a hip or twist an ankle.

My daughter’s Achilles tendon ruptured five weeks ago; it’s been completely non-weight bearing, she relies on crutches (and a scooter). I’m thinking about that word, “crutch.” It has negative connotations: “something excessively relied on.” But a crutch can also be a necessity, not only for mobility, but emotional health. We reach for a railing, another person, a ritual—the support keeps us balanced. It’s an illusion to think we can stay upright alone at all times. But when we become afraid to let go, we deprive ourselves of a learning opportunity.

In those early years of yoga, it wasn’t so much that my balance was poor, as that my confidence was. Afraid to fail, I didn’t give myself a chance to succeed.

Give and take live on the same coin.
Without both, there is no balance.

In this season associated with giving, I’m also thinking about the need to balance giving with taking. The ability to give often comes from a place of privilege not accorded to all, it makes us feel good about ourselves to give. (I won’t get into that here.) But we tend to think of taking—like falling out of balance, or using the wall to stay upright—as shameful. The dharma word last month was “take.” Elizabeth posited that the word implies an action different from the more passive “accept” or “receive.” Ponder that.

When we need help, we tend to sit back and see what is offered rather than initiating a request. Then we try to deny the need—“No, no, I’m good; well, if you insist…”—clinging to the wall of self-reliance we’ve built.

Did you know that a caregiver attends to humans and a caretaker looks after property? (That’s just an aside.) I suggest that a caretaker is also the recipient of care, ideally involving asking for assistance, not just passively accepting. It was so hard for my mother to ask for help—or to receive it, for that matter. Taking requires a lifetime of practice she didn’t have. I tried to tell her she was depriving others of the gift of giving; it was a balance she never embraced. (And it was exhausting. Here’s a deleted scene from my memoir illustrating my point.)

Over the years, I have observed all the ways my daughter and her partner give to others. When she was injured, rather than wait to see what was offered once the word got out, they notified their community as soon as they left the ER. They asked for what they needed right then, and have taken what was offered in the weeks since. Unlike my mother (and probably me), they’ve found balance.

It’s been a gift to me to be asked by my family for help over the past decade. This is the time in my third act to be the caregiver. The day will come, when I will be the caretaker. Our lives are not made of equal parts give and take within any given time. It ebbs and flows. To think we can keep it always in balance is illusion.

Whatever your feelings about the holiday season—and I acknowledge the difficulty—I wish for you balance.

❄️ ❄️ ❄️

Where have you found balance in your life? When have you struggled? What are your feelings about giving and taking? I would love to hear. Leave a comment below.

P.S. If you would like to potentially improve your balance and flexibility through yoga, right from home, I invite you to check out Elizabeth’s on-demand classes by subscription on her Patreon site. There are many posts with different focuses and of differing lengths. Check it out here.

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Making Mama Soup

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The dharma talk in yoga in October explored the word “progress.” I confess, I couldn’t hear a lot of it. Yes, I had my hearing aids in, but the HVAC fan drowns out all other sound. So I hear a bit, the fan comes on, and I riff on the theme in my head. (And then spend the rest of class hoping I can remember my brilliant thoughts until I can write them down.)

Progress, I heard Elizabeth say, might mean letting go of outcome. Not progress toward a certain goal, but forward from wherever you are. The endpoint (if there is a completion), might not be what you thought it would be.

Or it might mean, I thought, realizing you could be successful if you do “less.” Or if you do something differently.

Progress might be the acceptance of backward movement.

I’ve been practicing yoga—and doing downward-facing dog pose—for nearly twenty years. While some practitioners can push their heels to the floor,  a small dog could wiggle under mine. Also, some yogis can step one foot between their hands in one smooth move, as the transition is “supposed” to be achieved. I have to pull mine forward with my hand. Every. Single. Time. (I know, I know, you’re supposed to keep your eyes on your own mat, not pay attention to the abilities of others.)

Shortcomings are not failure. In yoga, you do what you can do, and it is enough. But damn, I thought I would “get better” over the years of a regular practice. I have not.

Until a few months ago.

In an online session from home, with no one (not) watching, I did down dog with blocks under my hands. You couldn’t put a cat paw between my heel and the floor. I brought my foot forward in one gliding motion. Success!

One simple adaptation, one acknowledgement of what my body can’t do—will never be able to do—and I made progress. I have hated down dogs all these years, and suddenly I don’t! When offered the choice, I’m choosing it, now, over child’s pose!

I haven’t been hiking as long as I’ve been doing yoga, but I have learned a few things about progress on the trail. I once measured it in increasing strength and lung capacity. No longer. Now it’s in the willingness to adapt to changes in my body, to gauge my ability when choosing a trail, to thoughtfully navigate challenges, to know when to turn back.

. . .

What, you are surely asking, does progress have to do with “Mama Soup”? (And what even is Mama Soup?) Actually, they have nothing to with each other. Unless I figure it out as I write. But it’s National Family Caregivers Month, so I feel compelled to honor my mother, and those challenging years of our walk together.

My mama loved soup. And she saved unconsumed food from her plate. (Waste not, want not, a Depression-era holdover.) Two broccoli florets, a bite of chicken, a quarter serving of spinach. The refrigerator bloated with leftover containers (a.k.a. yogurt containers) and Ziploc bags. Eventually, she gathered all the dribs and drabs into a saucepan, added water (no seasoning), and voila: a half-cup of soup for lunch! (Insert major eye roll emoji.)

A couple weeks ago, I decided to try a version of Mama Soup. I had broth in the freezer made from last holiday season’s turkey dinner. I had a chicken thigh, beets, broccoli, mushrooms, half a sweet potato, a few garlic-roasted fingerling potatoes, and the last of the tomatoes from my garden. I had sriracha, and parsley I purchased for something and forgot to use.

It made a whole bowlful and was quite tasty!

So here’s my connection of Mama Soup to progress: Her good idea—arguably, poorly executed—moved to a higher plane. Also, my acknowledgement that it worked for her, and I should keep my eyes on my own mat. Rather than making fun of Mama Soup, I respect her commitment to feeding her body and not wasting food. I honor her for adapting to what her shifting ability still allowed.

Sometimes progress is measured, not in physical movement, but in attitude shift.

🍁 🍂 🍁

What adaptations have you made to shifting abilities? How have you reimagined progress? I would love to hear. Leave a comment below!

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