My mother said, “When I sit real still so that my arthritis doesn’t hurt, I don’t feel as if I’m over 80 years old. I feel like I’m — oh — 32 or so.” I understand that now. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between the being we are at the core of our minds and the reality of our bodies. I have avoided looking at the underside of my chin since a day when I leaned over to dust a mirrored table. Eek!
“Cusp” has various meanings. In astrology it’s a place between two signs or houses of the Zodiac. I had begun to think of myself as old at age 77. When I consider that my beloved friends, Vivian and Imy, are 103 and 108, respectively, and that I know people in their 90s, perhaps I need to adjust my thinking. Think of it: Imy’s thirty years older than I. Now that’s old. However, I don’t think that I’m middle-aged anymore. Perhaps I’m a “tweener,” caught between generational houses.
When I was an earnest college student my friends and I would muse about the eternal questions: “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?” Now those questions have arisen again during the fullness of my years. I’ve been blessed — cursed? — with an excellent memory that has stored vignettes and segments of my life in the trunks in my mind’s attic. I know who I was and where I have been. However, even the near future of tomorrow is terra incognita.
I think I’ve done pretty well at following Henry David Thoreau’s dictum of living consciously and extracting the juice from every moment. He also admonishes us to love our life even if we live in a poorhouse. I have loved being alive.
According to astrology, I am a Gemini, one of the heavenly twins, thus double-natured. So, too, is life. I recognize the inevitability of irrevocable change and loss. I shall never again take long strides up a path beside a rushing, boulder-strewn creek in my beloved Teton Mountains . . . During the past few years, ten of my nieces, nephews and great-nephews have passed away . . .
Examining my life shows me that friendships have dwindled or weren’t true friendships, and my priorities have changed. Time was when I hustled and bustled, busily giving my time to various causes. I felt that I had responsibilities that I must fulfill. Now in this cusp of time, much of what I devoted my time to doesn’t seem of such great import. I am not melancholy about this or regret it. However, I’ve come to realize that as the circle of my life has tightened, I’ve become liberated from one-way friendships and responsibilities.
I have become like a caterpillar that has stuffed itself on milkweed leaves and spun a cocoon around itself. One day the metamorphosis is complete, and the lowly, crawling caterpillar has been transformed into a lovely, ethereal Monarch butterfly. I have feasted on the rich pleasures and delights that life has to offer. I don’t know what I would find were I to move on into a new “house,” but I am content to rest here in the cozy cocoon of our home, liberated, and waiting for spring. I don’t really care that I don’t have answers to the big eternal questions. I feel a great kinship with the native American woman who composed these lines:
Here on this mountain
I am not alone
For all the lives I used
to be are with me.
All the lives tell me now
I have come home.
All is a circle within me . . .
I have gone to the
edge of the sky.
Now all is at peace within me.
Now all has a
place to come home.
I, too, see the circularity of life. Everything I ever was, everything I ever enjoyed, everyone I ever loved is still present within me.
wclarke@comcast.net