#lifebeginsat50

thank you, MEA (modern elder academy) for providing resources and tools for life's transitions as we are fortunate to age!

this is a way cool contest with an even cooler prize, so i encourage you or someone you know to enter if you/they are going to be celebrating half a century soon.  check out the link here:  MEA life begins at 50 essay contest

it doesn't have to be a mid-life crisis, it can be a milestone of curiosity.

even though i'm still 49, i've found myself naturally drawn to processing and sharing this stage of life and realized i had basically already written the essay in so many ways.  so i collected thoughts, pared it to the guidelines of 500 words and entered.  

i really hope i win because it would be amazing to take 7 friends to their ranch in Santa Fe as my birthday party!  sounds like just my style. but even if someone else is chosen, i find it to be a cool tool for second half of life wisdom, so the more the merrier.

why life begins at 50...

instead of a blank canvas, i’m standing in front of layer upon version of attempt.  i won’t even realize it as my self-portrait at age 49 until it is finished and hanging on my wall. 

the vase forms first out of ten cobalt and ultramarine shards.  have i been five ten times or ten five times?   paint mends it with gold fleck and metallics, broken open to hold something, both container and contained.

half-spent peonies on my hairdresser’s stand.  how potent they appear to me the tuesday we decide to stop coloring and let my hair turn silver.  i brush them in, four white flowers; one at each stage, pistils and stamen exposed, dropped petals collecting at the vase’s rounded base.

“lean into the curve, darling” as my wise sixty-year-old friend advises.  i switch brushes, wipe smudged fingers across my smock.

atop a contrasting ochre background, i add the words, “it is the bouquet that is unmaking us.  let oneself be guided by nature and find room for oneself here and now (parisian floral designer Christian Tortu), what we need is here (poet Mike Essig).”

as i sign it and clean up palettes, a montage of everyone leading up to this age timelapses through my mind, each easily its own painting.  my friend smiling into the camera and forgiving the bomber who killed her.  taking my mentor’s first British Literature course and, when she is diagnosed with cancer, her asking me to help teach what will be her last.  the five-year-old for whom i am asked to be an honorary aunt.

not just full circle but each a spiral staircase where to make an end, like ts eliot said, is to make a beginning. and when i take inventory of each area of my life, i feel indeed stronger at the broken places. curiosity, kindness, and humility forming a three-legged stool that can hold weight.

my soul is invited to meditation not only in the garden, but in hospital gowns and roadsides of life, chaplaincy of the everyday. 

i read everything i can, from Julian of Norwich and Mary Pipher to Gerard Manley Hopkins and poet laureate of Colorado Andrea Gibson whose poems slay me.

my body is more relaxed and nourished from long walks and longer feasts with friends around the table.

presiding over a thousand little funerals and equally sudden, startling joys becomes avocation of the heart.  the inward journey bends outward.  (did you know my cashier’s name means “Heaven and Sea” in Filipino?)

seven is my favorite number, and the exact number of tribe I’d like to bring to MEA for my 50^th birthday.  in fact, i can’t think of a better way to celebrate.  we are poets and psychologists, florists and adventurers who have howled in wholeness and heard the call and response.  our wounds have become stories and this light too, has left a mark upon us.

we are the flowers and the vase.  the contemplation in action toward healing of the world.

#lifebeginsat50

pass it on!