(What is more perfect illustration of traveling incognito than a mask?!)

Gal friend, Tina Tierson (whom I mentioned in yesterday’s post of Wise and Wylde people in my life), sent along this dazzling interview with Nikki Giovanni, the poet.  An excerpt:

Today, I am 64 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age. While I have always liked my career, I have way more fun with it now. I’ve got nothing to prove, and I don’t care what the critics say. When I finish writing a book, I don’t push myself to start the next one; I enjoy having just written one.

A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you’re in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you’re riding on another level. It’s completely liberating. Now, everything I do, I do because I want to. And I believe the best is yet to come.

Yes.  Hell YES!!!

I think after a certain age it is as if we are all traveling incognito – the picture of who we are in our head not quite matching the one we visit daily in the mirror.

Year of the Woman
by Tammy Vitale

 

I.

In front of the quicksilver mirror

            Mercury’s reflecting glass

she places a hand under each breast

            pushes up, arches her back,

stretches and watches the shadow

            of a 23 year old waist emerge

blurred as an old photograph.  She

            smiles.  Relaxes.  Chants, “Fifty. Fifty.

 

Fifty.”  Thinks of Manet’s picture,

            Olympia, and the roundness of Renoir’s

women; wonders what any one of them

            would think of Kate Moss.

 

II.

If she were a month, she would be

            August.  Hot.  Wetness everywhere.

As she brushes her hair, she sees blue

            lightening, watches her hair move

around her face

            like something alive.

III.

She has noticed that somehow she has become

             invisible.  She thinks, Crone.

And the snakes rustle in her skirt, wrap

            around her shoulders, whisper soft

as water wearing down stone, telling

            stories she has never before heard.

Loran Hills (also mentioned yesterday, Wylde Brazen Woman that she is) encourages taking and posting selfies on her Skin Deepest private Facebook page to get over the mirror shock

and get used to seeing ourselves as we are.  Interested in joining her page, friend her on Facebook and ask!  It’s a gathering place for soul chat!

I just finished getting certified to facilitate Conscious Aging workshops with The Noetic Science Institute (along with Loran).  As I worked through that course, it became clear to me that aging is nothing more than one more transition – but a transition that we can pull on a full lifetime of experience for.  We KNOW transitions (if we have done our introspective work), we know that some of them feel deadly yet here we still are, marching through life and sometimes (but only sometimes) taking time to note sunrises and sunsets and thinking about the magnificence of the ordinary.

And for this transition, almost no one is watching or paying attention.  We are free to try on new roles (freer than when we were teens and were trying on those roles in the context of what others think not what we wanted) with no embarrassment because no one is watching!  They never were.  We just thought they were.  NOW we know that.  Now we can participate in magnificent gatherings where we can be comrades and community instead of watching to see who is going to stab us in the back because our hair/skin/clothes/shoes/language is wrong.

That, my friends, is freedom.

As with all transitions, getting older brings with it work.

Now is the time to forgive ourselves and others for all trespasses (or come one step closer to that. It is, after all a journey and a practice, not an end).  Almost all of them, if we are truthful, were done when none of us knew any better.  We thought we were doing something that would lead us to happiness or truth or whatever.  And many may even have done that  – for a while.  But all things pass.  As we gather years on this earth, we can begin to embody that for *everything.*  And stop trying to hold on to the stuff we name good because it feels good since it is only for now.  Something else is coming.  Don’t get stuck!

In Conscious Aging, Kathleen Erickson-Freeman offers a guide for writing a life review.  I’m going to point out that 12 step programs do this in Step 4, take inventory, so it’s not a revolutionary idea.  But having had to do an autobiography for my master’s thesis, I can attest to its being hard to know where/how to start on something like this.  Here is her advice:

1. Write on cheap paper and write freely, allow for mistakes, cross things out or even throw away a page if you so choose.
2.  Avoid writing chronologically …memory is often associative and you’re more likely to recall similarly themed events that occurred over the course of your life than to remember those same events chronologically.  Your mind naturally groups experiences.  [Note:  as I have reviewed my creative work over the past 20 years for recent blog posts, this realization has come front and center for me!)

3.  Don’t allow anyone, especially family members, to “correct’ Your memoir…Our interpretation  has more to do with the context than the content.  And I would add – don’t even share what you are doing unless and until you are with someone who is safe and non-judgmental.  

4.  Go where the energy is.  What wants expression?  [draw it if the words won’t come, collage it if drawing is intimidating]

5.  Don’t pre-plan.  Allow one piece of writing to lead to the next.

6.  Start with the most important experience in your life:  events, people, memories.