vantage points

Today is my birthday, I am 58. And I am happy. At 58, my happiness comes from internal factors, not external things. By now, like Anne Morrow Lindberg writes in Gifts From the Sea, I have shed many shells, especially the heaviest most cumbersome of all, ego. I am feeling free from the external pressures of society and its distorted definition of how my life should be.

 I really just wanted to post and acknowledge how wonderful this vantage point is in life and encourage you to look forward to it or for those of you already "here" , look ahead with anticipation. I look back on the journey thus far and I see my evolution. I see the certainties I have always known, my core that was there in college as an art student and in my youth. I was in a place of “truth”, a place where I stayed in touch with myself and what I believed.I read books like Lust for Life and kept in touch with "me" through journals and of course, I painted.  But, then, I see the detours I took. I consider these detours weakness in my journey – places where I was successfully influenced by external forces and I deviated from my core values.My fault.My bad.

 I feel I am back where I belong now and it is  comfortable and right, for me.  I do, at 58, feel some anxiety, however. It usually manifests itself as apprehension about the future for my children, and your children. I watch them as they go down their paths and hope that, for the most part, their decisions are authentic and come from a place inside of them, a place where it is only their voice, their spirit that they hear; I hope they can keep the noise out. But, I also know that with living, there comes inevitable “lessons” and we all need them so that at 58, we can feel we have gathered enough knowledge to feel, in some small way, that we have “arrived”.

So, today is my birthday and I’m happy. Thank you so much for the wishes; those wishes, those acknowledgments, and you are the “things” in life that, for me, matter.



b u

p s

attitude

Today was one of those days that filled me up with some sort of peacefulness. Maybe it is because it is June and life will slow down for me for the next few weeks or maybe it is because I just shifted my attitude slightly and made a  choice to see ONLY the good in my life. It is a theme that I have been following lately, an effort to devalue many many things and in doing so I have found contentedness that I have not felt since childhood when my world was so small and narcisstic. That is where I try to stuff myself, in a small world , one where the outside does not really matter – I am not meaning apathy about “the world”, the planet, humankind, but matters of human weakness kind of stuff – like, it doesn’t matter if the kitchen is not clean when I go to bed or if I spilled bleach on my pants or if the backdoor is really old and needs repair and paint (it does) or if I don’t get the grass cut today or tomorrow  or if my neighbor’s kid just got elected president or if I have a new wrinkle  - doesn’t really matter does it? Who cares? I am sorting through things and deciding what I should give time, minutes and hours of my very finite life, to. The answer is easy really – people and for me, my art – people I love and people who come into my life because they need something from me – that’s it – nothing else matters –  I’m not just referring to “things” – it’s situations also that rob me of time, situations that are really superficial and should not hold value. I look back and I can embarrass myself over some of the things in my youth that upset me or caused me concern. Oh well, this is true rambling – it’s late at night and I told myself, and you, that I would make a big effort to write this summer and I am. This entry is so loose and hard to follow; random is the word to use here, but I am celebrating being “chill” – embracing summer and the essence of its spirit. There will be time enough later to rush and scurry –

“So quick bright things come to confusion” Shakespeare from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”

He reminds us how quick and fragile these happy moments can be. I will make it a point to find more of them; they are there if we don’t look to compare and if we push out the darkness by allowing the light to come in. It really is all about attitude…



b u

p s