
Photo taken of our friend Tanya and I by Jonathon Brown at Farewell To The Flesh.
This Wellness Wednesday post is more open processing then anything else as I am finding myself deep in the thick of things these days.
"I am proud of being fifty-eight, and still alive and kicking, in love, more creative, balanced, and potent than I have ever been. I mind certain physical deterioration, but not really. And not a all when I look at the marvelous photograph that Bill sent me of Isak Dinesen just before she died. For after all we make our faces as we go along, and who when young could ever look as she does? The ineffable sweetness of the smile, the total acceptance and joy on receives from it, life, death, everything taken in and as it were, savored - and let go. Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. Somewhere in the Poet and the Donkey, Andy speaks for me when he says, "Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it."
~ May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude
This word Gestalt - any of the integrated structures or patterns that make up all experience - is a powerful one. I've always felt it to represent the full present evidence of the culmination of experiences of something, whether that be emotions, dynamics, spiritual epiphanies, or the whole of life's day to day occurrences. And of course being a body worker, the reality that our physical bodies are a mapping or recorder for every experience we ever have, emotion ever felt and belief held, is one that resonates deeply with me.
May Sarton
goes on to say, "If a woman has artificial flowers in her house, flowers that need dusting twice a year but never die, she is closing herself off from any understanding of death. And if a woman has to remain thirty-nine for years on end, she is arresting her won growth as surely as if she were a Chinese lady a hundred years ago and had bound her feet."
Any of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I started to have some challenges with getting older just before my 35th birthday. And since then it has shifted, continued and evolved in a myriad of ways. It had never included my appearance, but as you all know, my latest decision to let my hair grow out has added this new facet to this struggle I have been having. The picture above? Thats me right now. Grey hair about 6 inches long now, and although most days I forget, or don't seem to notice it anymore, pictures like this bring it home in a big way.
So of course, in comes May Sarton into my life. I'm still pouring over this small book, going back to passages I have underlined and using them for spring boards to journal entries. There is so much in it that has help me dive deeper into this year of transmutation I have been on. And today's quotes have been on my mind for weeks now.
My deep soul really resonates with the truth she speaks of here. The reality that our bodies are the makings of all we experience throughout our lives, and this is something that is quite beautiful to me and also inspiring. How many stories of pain and self loathing have I read on the bodies of people I have massaged over the years? And the bodies that were vibrating with joy and life, and gusto, regardless of age. Each of their outlooks on life matching their body shape and texture and rhythm perfectly.
I think about this as I look at myself, my face, my body. Thinking of the parts of my life that cause me to cringe at my age, things not yet done, regrets that had somehow been such a foreign thing to me in my 20's that are now a part of my adult reality. I look at my hair now and its evidence of this advancing age, it is no longer a number that keeps reminding me that time is ticking, its on my body as well.
And as I have struggled with this, I have also had the opportunity to spend time with women in their 60s. Vibrant, young, beautifully natural and beaming 60 somethings that are still making love, still running, doing yoga, still learning and embracing life with a curiosity that seems like the most gorgeous revelation to me.
And I want this. This awareness that my story is my own, and my aging body a revelation of that story. Not aging as withering away, but aging as gathering, filling, adding complexity and beautiful details to this woven story that is my life. A story that holds beginnings and endings, and neither one of those are things to be feared or avoided. I continue to evolve as an art piece that reveals itself through my mind, my face, my body, my hair, and how I move in the world.
You know... I was asked a while back by someone who didn't really understand the concept of dread locking my hair, why I would choose to do this. Locking this very awareness, this time in my life where I am continuing to move deeper into myself, is an energy I want to bind myself to, commit to, and announce to the world as my Way. I'm still learning to dance with it, but I embrace the Gestalt of my life as it stands today and as I continue to consciously weave it. Letting my age gain me the layers of a woman fully living, beautiful through out all her stages, not because of what she looks like but because of what she embraces and savors fully.
