AUTHENTIC ADULT WOMAN

WHAT MATTERS MOST

I'm horified by the tornado devastation in Oklahoma!  People combing thru' mountains of trash for SOME SMALL MOMENTO of their personal lives.  ANYTHING meaningful. Not the furniture, the appliances, the pool, even the car.

They want a photograph, a letter, a journal, a toy, a special gift. Something that touches the heart - brings back a childhood memory, a happy time . . .

                         It puts everything in perspective.  

If your loved ones are safe but your THINGS are destroyed, what will you miss most?  

I would search through the debris to find those scraps of evidence that I was here on this earth - that I loved and was loved. 

 

 

 

 

I would be thrilled to find this old picture of my mother and me. We were not alike.

We never really bonded until she was very old. But we did. I miss her and I'm glad I have this proof!  

Here she is with me (at 90) in her aviator-style 'Glaucoma' goggles on a rare walk on the beach in White Rock, British Colombia.

 

 

And I'd love to find a bit of her familiar handwriting -

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a picture of Daddy and me when he was 80 and I was 30.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a scrap of his handwriting when he was 93!

                        

It is precious stuff like this that would matter most to me - if all else was lost.

AT WAR WITH MYSELF

I am at war with myself - over the multiple decisions of aging. They come on so suddenly, these choices.  Sometimes I go to extremes when faced with a choice.  For example, in my last post I felt I had to choose between staying in my 3 story home filled with books and art and or moving to a bare room near a hospital.  Black and white!

The trouble is, this old 3-story house is hard to navigate with brittle limbs, difficult to maintain, always needs repairing, garden tending  . . .  BUT It is filled with treasures - paintings, sculptures, books, journals, creative supplies, AND a panoramic view of the Pacific ocean.   

Until now these decisions were theoretical.  I knew I was aging, but I didn't believe it.

While I know that we all end up with NOTHING, I still protest that until the very end we should surround ourselves with things we love.  

Life Coach Suzanne reminds me that many 'shades of gray' could be considered. I don't have to give up ALL my books or ALL my precious art objects.  I could choose to keep just those I truly love. And, of course,  get rid of the rest :(   

                                       Here's the dialog of my inner wars:

My rebel says:  "I don't have to move if I don't want to!"  I don't have to stop buying beautiful things.  I'm still alive.  Why live like a monk?"

My warrior says:  "We can climb those stairs one step at a time, or we'll get one of those ugly stair-lifts. No prob!

My sensible self says:  "There isn't room here for new paintings, books or objects of art"

My tired self says:  "The garden is too much trouble. I don't use my wood-working shop. Maybe I would really like a simpler, smaller house".

My old body says:  "Everything aches. Nothing is getting younger. All I want to do is laugh and read and be with loved ones . . . hassle-free!  Impossible?  Improbable?"

These days I feel perplexed and distressed by the war between my optimistic spirit and the physical realities.                           

Carl Jung wrote about HOLDING THE TENSION OF THE OPPOSITES. He believed that we are often asked to endure the discomfort of holding the tension between opposing choices until a third possibility presents itself.

As Lao Tsu asked 2500 years ago:

“Do you have the patience to wait 
Till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?"

                I THINK I'LL CALL A TRUCE

         and let the 'right actions' arise by themselves!

    Lao Tzu also said: 

“Be content with what you have;  rejoice in the way things are. 

When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” 

LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OK - so it's a cliche to "love what you love".  But I just saw it in a new light.

Around here, with loved ones having knee replacements, friends advising stair lifts and one-story houses (instead of this dear old 3-story treasure overlooking the ocean) . . . I'm beginning to feel deprived, diminished, reduced to the barest minimum.

There is a sensible urgency about decluttering, so that "someone else isn't left to clean up your mess, when YOU'RE GONE". I get that.

But yesterday, amidst all this practical gloom, I found myself in an art gallery feasting on paintings by Dennis Curry, a fabulous landscape and animal artist.  

I fell in love with this painting: The Light and Dark of Things, depicting afternoon shadows on Old Creek Road near my home.

 

Immediately the terrible reality sets in - The cautions and injuctions are clear:  

     You can't take it with you!  Get rid of things. Don't buy more things. 

Pare down. Prepare for the worst. Sell this much-loved house. Move into Assisted Living.

                            Live in a simple room near doctors and hospitals.

 

     WAIT A MINUTE!  WHY?  

                 WHY NOT LOVE WHAT I LOVE WHILE I CAN?

                   WHY GET RID OF MY BEAUTIFUL STUFF NOW? 

 WHY NOT GLORY IN THE THINGS I LOVE AND THE MEMORIES THEY EVOKE?

So I bought a really fine reproduction of this painting.  And I love it.

    The BIG PARING DOWN will come soon enough.  I'm not ready. 

A GLIMPSE OF THE TRANSCENDENT

I'm inspired by my pal Jacki's post, "And the Answer is".  It reminds me that I've had at least two moments when ~

                

                IT ALL MADE SENSE

 

 

 

Ice skating alone on a CRISP COLD CANADIAN WINTER NIGHT.  

I'm 13 years old . . . not exactly Dorothy Hamill, but totally at home on the ice.

I glide silently and lean into long curves and lift my face to the wide dark prairie sky.

Suddenly the heavens are FILLED with Northern Lights, wild rose, cobalt, and amber fire!  

I am bewitched.  Enchanted.  In a trance.

I can feel my spirit rise up - swaying - moving - shifting with the galaxies.  

 

            

In those moments I KNEW something profound. It had to do with the ONENESS of all things. And the triviality of daily concerns.  It washed over me with A DEPTH OF UNDERSTANDING beyond my years or my comprehension.  The KNOWING seemed to be in my cells . . . an eternal reality above my human experience.

 I felt as though I would never be the same.  After those moments passed my mind and heart felt weightless - CONNECTED TO SOMETHING VAST, immutable, ineffable.

    The next day - the next decade - I would forget what I knew - or that I knew.

                     But I know it was a glimpse of the transcendent.

 

YEARS LATER, in my thirties, a friend and I are driving late at night along the High Sierra in Mexico. Hot and tired we find lodging in a mountain village. A mysterious pool surrounded by Greek columns gleams white in the moonlight. I am lured into the water, warm as the air - liquid on my body. I lie back in the still warm water. Floating. 

 

Time fades away. My spirit seems to travel through and beyond time and place - floating up into the humming velvet blackness of the universe. 

From far away and as near as my heartbeat, I hear a huge rich echoing VOICE. As big and deep as the world. In slow and measured tones it says something INFINITELY IMPORTANT!                                    

                                       A very personal, healing message ~

                       NOTHING CAN EVER REALLY HURT YOU

I am held and deeply comforted by these words.  I KNEW in that moment that the heartbreaks and sufferings of this life were somehow superficial and passing.

When my soul returned to the pool, 'ages' later, my body was slumped in the water.

        I was dazed with the NEW KNOWING.  I thought I would never forget it.

                                           But sometimes I do.

    Over the years those trancendent moments have passed in and out of my awareness.

         But I can return to them - like an anchor of wisdom when my seas are troubled.

 

MORE ABOUT 'MEANING'

I confessed last week that I have yearned for MEANING most of my life.  My old friend Sharon responded.

Now we're having a conversation about it.

Sharon:  

"What really used to puzzle me (not any more), was that I seemed to be among the few who were desperately searching for the meaning of life.  So many people just seemed contented - not even interested in knowing.  BUT I BELIEVED THE ANSWER WAS OUT THERE AND ONE ONLY NEEDED TO FIND THE TEACHER WHO DID KNOW.  I even got a little miffed that those who seemed so contented never seemed able to communicate what they seemed to know.  It almost felt like they were withholding and I resented that they wouldn't tell me. I felt so ready to know (and follow).  

Now I no longer feel the need to search externally for "THE ANSWER", and the great thing is . . . . I now KNOW that nobody has any more of an answer than I do myself.  

That can be unnerving, but also quite comforting and stabilizing".  S

 

Dorothy: 

I hear you, Share!  I thought THE ANSWER was 'out there', too.  Now I think finding meaning is like a series of gifts. Insights and understanding come to me in unexpected ways - through reading, conversation, meditation, suffering, synchronicity, aging, love, and FAITH.  

OK, do not ask about my personal faith!  It is SO personal, so ineffable, so genuine. I can't even describe it.  

 

My collage, here  >

could represent mysterious meaning coming down into the world and somehow touching us through Love -

(that little heart shape in the 'sun' is a real rose petal).

I let my collages speak to me in any language they please!

 

 

 

When asked if he believed in the existence of God, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung famously replied:  

                                "I don't need to believe, I KNOW".  I do, too.  

Jung's view was that whether or not one 'believes' in a higher power, IT has interest in US and guides us in what he calls the "experiment of our lives".

I realize that whatever gives your life MEANING may or may not include FAITH in a Higher Power.

Although often puzzling and seemingly purposeless, I have always had the sense that my life is being guided, sometimes kicking and screaming, along the path of my personal destiny. Otherwise how can I account for the perfect juxtapositions of people and places and ideas that have brought me through many spiral passages to this period of peace?

Now I'm starting to think about my mother's faith  . . . so outwardly different from mine, yet so full of MEANING for her.  As mine is, for me.  

Don't worry, I'm NOT trying to convert anybody or argue about religion, I'm just noticing that my personal faith is strong, and my life is meaningful . . .

                                                            MEANING-FULL!

 

                **** Stay tuned for my next post: GOD ANSWERS PRAYER or FAITH OF MY FATHERS ! 

YEARNING FOR MEANING . . .

For decades I searched for THE ANSWER . . .the concept, the insight - that would make sense of my life!  

I read the great philosophers, the theologians, the poets - SEARCHING, dreaming, longing. 

I thought - if I could just know I was LOVED my heart would be healed.  And if I could only know my life's purpose - I would give it 100%. 

In early years my inner scape was filled with despair - a moonscape of grey rocks and howling winds and a tiny starved figure stumbling toward a bleak horizon. 

After my last blog post my dear friend Sharon, who's known me for 50+ years, wrote:

"You had a lot of early experiences and reactions and responses and awarenesses that I think many people did not have - those of us who just marched on in step and took it as it came.  But I do remember, after high school, periods of such intense yearning to know and understand more.  

I always remember a particular piece from A DEATH IN THE FAMILY by James Agee:

  'On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts.  We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there . . .  By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying on quilts, in the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night . . .After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-loved in that home: but will not, oh will not, not now, nor ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.'

   Sharon continues, "I remember writing poetry and yearning yearning yearning for SOMETHING concrete to stand on. That time is gone now (Thank God, because it was very painful.) Now I just accept that the GREAT MYSTERY is just that, a mystery. . . . . that truly EVERYTHING is constantly changing . . . that we are all in the same boat more or less, even as we at the same time inhabit very different worlds from each other, and mostly forget that fact".

 ________________________

We try to find and pin down the truth.  We keep finding it through our necessary and personal pains, joys and heartaches.  But the fact is, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS CHANGING. You can't grab it, imprison it!

I think MEANING itself is always subtly evolving. And there's no end to it.

These days I am not longing for meaning, but anticipating new meanings.

LEARNING is what gives the drama of my life fresh and unexpected meaning.

    Last week, another friend asked, over martinis, "What does it all mean?"  

I replied, "I DON'T KNOW!"  And we LAUGHED, with total understanding!

    That's right. I don't know.  And I don't care that I don't know :)

                            I'm finally OK with not knowing.  

                       And I'm definitely OK with not yearning.  

 

 

 

 

 

Author Michael Meade said, "Look back and put your experiences in context - you'll see them as beautiful, essential.

Whatever path you took turns out to be the right path."

       That feels true

 

BACK TO THE SINFUL CITY

And now, by popular demand, is the next episode in the life and times of this prairie child.                                          Are you still with me?  

Remember, when I was 17 - expelled from my rural boarding school at Briercrest, I returned to the capital city of Regina, Saskatchewan for grade 12 at big Balfour Collegiate.  I was so unsophisticated. So unused to the unreligious kids with their fashionable clothes and clever modern slang.  

But I loved Mr. McVeety's Shakespeare class and adored Miss Meade's charcoal drawing - and I hated algebra.

I was cast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in the senior play but my stern and 'godly' parents refused to let me act - "too worldly" they warned.  Cruelly disappointed, I entered the provincial Bryant Oratorical Contest with a little essay called: Poetry and Music.  

I explored how dream and reality merge in Conrad Aiken's lyrical lines:

"There are houses hanging above the stars

And stars hung under a sea  -

And a sun far off in a shell of silence

Dapples my walls for me --

To explore poetry and music as ways of expressing the otherwise unexpressable depth and complexity of human thoughts and dreams - I used this excerpt from Aiken's -

 House of Dust:

"Once, on a sunbright morning, I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find a certain door;  I found one, tried it, opened, and there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted, a hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly, while one tall woman sent her voice above them in powerful sweetness . . .

Closing the door I heard it die behind me, fade to a whisper -- and walked in a quiet hallway as before.

Just such a glimpse, as thru' that opened door, is all we know of those we call our friends.  We hear sudden music, see a playing of ordered thought -- and all again is silence.  The music, we suppose, (as in ourselves), goes on forever there, behind shut doors.  As it continues after our departure, so, we divine, it played before we came.

What do you know about me -- or I of you?  Little enough -- We set the doors ajar only for chosen movements of the music." 

 

        I actually won that contest.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember myself as very shy then.  

I'm not sure how I emerged at all among those hundreds of students. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                Later that year I was toastmisstress for the Senior Banquet.  

I didn't think about it then, but I guess the public speaking thing was "in my blood".

My great uncle and several cousins were theatre people and my father and brother were ministers.  At boarding school, and even as a younger child, I told lots of stories, mostly made-up or silly ones.  

Looking back at grade 12 in the big sinful city, I see that I was willing to risk failure and parental disapproval to release my natural storyteller.

Once again my 'defiant creativity' found ways to express itself!

 

p.s. Notice, above, that my Senior Banquet was at the somewhat famous Hotel Saskatchewan.  The following year, to earn money while at Bible College (you heard me!) I had a part-time job as an elevator operator at that fine hotel - where I actually got to 'drive' Prince Phillip up to the penthouse in my elevator.  Alas, Queen Elizabeth was taken up by the head operator :(  

STAY TUNED!

FROM STONES TO STARS

Whenever I think I'm finished learning, that all the struggles are meaningless, that nothing really matters - and who cares anyway  . . . ?

                                     I get profound messages from cyberspace!

*Yesterday, a friend whose 34 year old daughter is suffering from terminal cancer, wrote:

               "I hope you keep a sense of humor around the aging process.  

        Aging is a luxury - to grow old slowly into a full life - is a gift to savor".

                                                 __________________________

 

*My wise friend Suzanne and I were pondering life and death - she said: "we don't get to stay".

What a concept.  How annoying.  I'm not done.  Do I have to keep exercising?  can't I just vegetate?

THEN I thought - maybe this IS really a new phase.  I truly haven't been here before.  Maybe nothing really does matter - EXCEPT that this short life is a GIFT that we're intended to use individually - to somehow fulfill our destiny.  

                                               As long as it takes!

                  

Maybe old age is a last chance to live in the present . . . to allow the meaningless stuff to drop out of focus.  

That means I must strip away the nonsense and just express my ESSENCE . . . which is probably HEART stuff - like openness, warmth and loving kindness. 

That thought fills me with ease and purpose.  I'm supposed to ALLOW these last days/years - whatever I'm granted, to be more full of love, and less distracted by worries and struggles that are beyond my control.

                                            And then, mercifully,

                    I'll recover my spontaneity, my eccentricity and my joy.

 

                                    "To you is left your life

                                 gigantic, confused, full of fears. 

                           Changing, by turns, from stones to stars"    

                                                         Archibald MacLeish

REVERENCE FOR WOOD

I LOVE BUILDING THINGS!  No project seems too daunting when the need arises.  If I require a desk or a coffee table or a bookshelf or a whole house remodel, I'm your gal.  Or I was - in my youth.

 

 

 

 

Its 1958 - in Seattle. I'm renting this darling gardener's cottage behind a mansion on lovely Queen Anne Hill.

My wide window overlooks the space needle, the city, and Mount Rainier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Along one wall I built a 9' walnut credenza with sliding doors and, (you can't see it in this pic) a knee hole for a desk in front of a window looking out to the Cascade mountains).   

In front of the sofa under the big window I built a 6' long coffee table using an arrangement of 2 x 2's . I stained it walnut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was so much fun to put those pieces together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1995, or so, I built a hutch up at our country place near Lake Isabella, CA.  

 

 

 

 

I started by cutting down an old oak table and then creating the top part with its shelves and trim out of pine.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I loved the way it looked in the kitchen of the big house!

Young Rafferty cat loved it too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I was FORCED, at my age, to build yet another bookshelf - this time for yet another batch of psychology books in the bedroom.

 

 

 

 

 

I love the feel of wood, the smell of wood and the beauty of wood.

 

 

HONESTLY - it never stops being bliss for me -

to design, saw, sand, stain and enjoy these personal pieces of wood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MY GUILT COMPLEX

I SUFFER from a serious sense of guilt.  I dream about past failures and 'sins'.   Mostly about stuff I can't do anything about now.  Some of the victims of my insensitivity are dead.  So there is no point in going back to 'make amends', as they say.  

 

 

 

 

For example, it still breaks my heart to think I abandoned Louis, the precious cat I raised from a tiny kitten. 

He was a wee stray covered with fleas and shivering in the rain. I loved him from the start.  He lived with me for 4 years in a charming loft overlooking Seattle and Mount Rainier. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We played together in the grassy backyard and he curled in my lap when sat down to read.  He had a special way of knowing when I needed the comfort of his presence - during those crazy late-adolescent years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One day I got an invitation to take a wonderful new position in Chicago.

The apartment there did not allow pets.

I made the terrible decision to give Louis away . . . to a couple who lived on a farm and promised to love him forever.

Two years later a friend visited that farm and asked about my dear cat.

Louis had 'gone feral' they said.  Last seen he was skinny, matted and wild-eyed.  He trusted no human.

 

 

 

 THAT WAS OVER 50 YEARS AGO!  And everytime I think of that decision I feel guilty and sad.

 

 

The other guilts: like causing pain and heartbreak, the little and big lies, the deceptions, are worse, I suppose.  

Maybe the huge heaviness of it comes from my upbringing in the archetypal field of heaven and hell. . .punishment and damnation.  Apparently, one must confess these things?

Right now, just talking about these persistent guilts lightens the load a bit.  

I am just human.  Surely other people don't bear the burdens of their mistakes so heavily?  Is it possible to let them go?  OR, is it the mark of a human being to have a conscience that registers the pain one gives other creatures ?

 

I'M STILL WORKING ON IT.