Getting old sucks…I am not even that old …and it sucks.  Today, I was cleaning my office to get ready for new carpeting.   I was totally dreading the whole thing – the thought of cleaning my office, the actual part about cleaning it and even the part where I’m supposed to feel good afterwards but don’t having realized I just spend the better part of my day throwing away a lifetime of memories.  Let’s just say, the whole thing ended up being as depressing as it sounds!    

For one, paper stuff takes up a LOT of room!  Secondly, I had to face the horrific task of doing in it one day (not a good idea).  Thirdly, in going through “my stuff” I had to come face-to-face with my “past stuff” - stuff that made me remember all the things I cared about (because let’s face it – an office holds only one’s most personal possessions). 

I realized that getting old sucks because of the following reason – we spend a lifetime accumulating stuff only to spend MORE time figuring out a way to get rid of it.  Is is any surprise why we are so stressed out – hello!!  WE HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF!!    Shredding  memories from Chicago was no easy task.  It made me want to be back there.  I don’t know what was worse – shredding all the evidence of memories or being reminded of good times I had forgotten.    

Maybe a paperless society will ease the pain of getting older — there will be no hard evidence of our existence at any particular point of time.  I can’t decide if that is a good thing or bad thing??  Either way, cleaning WILL feel good once I am PAST it.  For right now, it is down right painful on every front possible!

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy;  for what we have behind us is a part of ourselves;  we must die to one life before we can enter into another.” ~ Anatole France, Novelist and Noble Prize  winner

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I am not sure what to make our opinion culture.  The garden is overgrown and ripeth.   Everyone it seems now has an opinion about everything and no one is holding back!  

I am no longer sure what is relevant and what isn’t.  The information age has turned into a giant mis-information age.   It is hard to know what is fact, fiction or pure fantasy.  I am down right agitated these days.  I wonder if I will win the fight with my reptilian brain during this new evolutionary turn.  Honestly, sometimes (like right now) I truly feel as thought I have a handle on nothing.    And I can’t decide if writing about it is makes it better of worse (better I think…)

In my opinion, the Opinion Culture has created more chaos than order.  I feel like our world is gyrating around and around going nowhere in particular.  Maybe that’s what is making me feel unsettled.  Does anyone else feel like the whole world is one big blanket of white noise??      

Maybe it’s just me, but is there any way to turn back the clock… and bring back the innocence of a not-know-it-all society?   The 70’s and bad hair is actually starting to sound good….

“What started as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos…everything is amplified in the information age…until …information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.”  – Neil Postman, 1990 talk “Informing Ourselves to Death.”

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 ”The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables one to transcend art.”  (Lawrence Durrell – Balthazar)

Writing reveals.  Sometimes more than you want, sometimes less than you expect.      Writing is a lot like slicing open a sliver of  our own “voice” and putting it under a micrscope to see what’s lies inside the gaps of our thoughts.  Contemplation is not wasteful – quite the contrary.  It is in an invitation for intimacy with the nature of one’s self.    Without it, we fall prey to being absent in the trespassing moments of our life.   As we pass through life, life passes through us. 

Existential revelation broadens and deepens our monastic communications with our interior lives – the tools with which we build bridges to our outer lives.   In silence, we can remind ourselves we are a consortium with the whole of Life.   Transcending space to reach our art,  our revelations lead us to work outwards creating informed connections with our inner purpose.   We grow new personalities from the tree of our experiences, shaping and pruning along the continuum.  As we become one with our everyday moments, these moments become our art, pointing the way towards transcendence.    

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“We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.”  – T. Merton

I like to write because I like to think, see and know.  Each time I write I begin all over.   Reflection and patience become my companions as I begin the journey to see more clearly.   The point of all seeking is see clearly, always from new beginnings  again and again until all that ever remains is beginning anew.   

When seeing becomes clearing and clearing becomes seeing, this is beginning.

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Untold millions spent on caring for individuals daily - those unable to care for themselves, too old, too sick, too down-trodden, too poor, to indolent.                 

Living in a whatever-it-takes-to-save-a-life culture is costing our nation prized resources, financial and human.  Healthy women like me getting pulverized in the daily task of caregiving.  I am getting swallowed in the warfare of life as a caregiver expected to fill a role when no one else is willing.   By compensation tables, I am easily expendable but as a free servant, I am indispensable, expected to step in to fill innumerable roles required in the act of caring.    I am the blind cost of caring in an ageless society.         

Care-giving is mind-boggling exhausting!   From the four pillars of our world -  work, family, community, service - life is getting out of control.  Life expectancy is stretching families and futures like a rubber band ready to snap.  Caring is a single lane highway – an expressway for which there is no exit ramp.   The demands are great – the supply few.  Those remaining standing are losing fire, with no escape route in the works.    

Speaking as a professional caregiver (stay-at-home mother – a term I am coming to dread with each passing day), 
I can tell you the “sandwich generation” sound-byte is now a harsh vivid reality playing a joke on me.  Caring is endless work, with no-end-in-sight for giver.  I am ready to hope off the world for awhile and take a long break…   

The blind cost of caring is costly ride indeed….

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I admire people who voice gritty truths.    The older I get, the more I admire truth in general.   After decades of playing nice, bearing gritty truth is liberation.  Wrongs will never be made right in quiet silence.  But gritty truth in and of itself is a kind of self-liberation.  More harm can be the risk in speaking up - good for self-liberation;  not so good risking hurt subjects of your discontent!  

The family I grew up in continues to challenge me – I suppose all families are challenging, one way or another.  We move through life, pretending our messiness doesn’t exist.    Covering them up is even worse.   The problem with family is kids grow up and move on to become people in their own right - family breeds entanglements, with everyone contining to move along the storyline drafted decades ago.   

I am tired of making nice!  Making nice never forces anyone to own up to their s____!   Sometimes I wonder if family is some kind of  blind code of honor that prevents us from the simple truths of our experiences.  If families are any indication, I wonder how ”getting along” among nations is possible.  Opening up morality along universal lines means to put down the gauntlet of our struggles and stop fighting.   Is this the kind of gritty truth we are willing to bear for self-liberation?  

Intersecting with the gritty truth of our experience can open up something in us, so long as we are willing to go there in the first place.  Closure is the great illusion of the human race.   There is no closure, when raw human emotions are in play.   Thus, gritty truth is our legacy and the future from which we must play.

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We live in an interesting world these days because everyone has access to well, everything!    

Take blogging for instance.  An industry within an industry, blogging was founded by a guy named Dave Winer.   Winer is quite a trip - pretty fascinating guy in an uncensored way ahead of his time kind of way.    Here is what he wrote in 1995 in an essay titled Billions of Websites…”everyone gets their own personal website…everyone new website begets more websites.  If I have one, I want my friend to have one so they can point to my site…Someday I’ll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. The breadth of the web is limited only by the available space on hard disks and availability of human thoughts and feelings to fill that space…Every writer can participate in the web.  Someday, very soon, every writer will….(p. 51)

It is impossible to try and write a review of this book other to say it is both mind-boggling and deeply entertaining on many levels.   Blogging it seems is a mirror we hold up unto ourselves.  Science-fiction writer, Charlie Cross comments, ”This century we are going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything.  What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own because they will be able to see with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.”  (p.348).

“Trying to pin down what you actually think by writing it out sometimes has a salutary side effect:  you discover that your mind has changed!”   In the blogging era, we are become privy to the mind of not just a few writers but the changing minds, of many writers, both professional and lay, jumping into a virtual conversation pit to discover what others are thinking, saying and doing.  Why — maybe the curiosity of our human-ness is simply to know – and to know until there is nothing more to know.   Could this be the true communications revolution – to know oursevles beyond the edge of ourselves?

(italics denote contents from book)

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“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tightly closed in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.” – Anais Nin

As a new year unfolds, gifts of new openings appear on the horizon.    New beginnings - untold possibilities – reach out to touch you in everyday moments.   Widen your arms, breathe deeply and open yourself to what is ahead. 

The concourse can be rough yet it can also be rich and beautiful like the good earth beneath.   A flowering-bloom-in-progress is a thing of beauty.  The flower quietly toils away beneath,  pushing against its outer leaves, which stand guard to protect the delicate center until it is fully ready to emerge and stand on its own.     

Blooms appear and reappear in their own natural time.   The Invisible Hand works in quiet ways to release the bloom in each of us.  As you begin a new year, bloom boldly in the direction of your new horizon…your new flowering awaits you there….

Creativity need not make sense, to you or anyone else for that matter;  Creativity is searching to know Itself – to fold and unfold in new and told ways;  emerging and re-emerging;  blooming and re-blooming in a myriad of open ways to connect and re-connect to things you are exploring in your life.  The goal is to always to understand better and to better understand, to know and to not know – that is the seeking of all understanding.    ~ Meena

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“I have given up the “picture of my life” and let go of the story in my head.  It’s about being open to what can come into your life when you do that.”    – Sheryl Crow

The Basic Woman’s Life Formula  (plus or minus)

S   +-JC   +-M   +-HP   +-FY  +-K   +-P   +-F&G   +OA   +-HO   +-LG   +-SF  +-BO  {not necessarily in order listed)

S = School (kind of like life but not really) 

JC = Job/Career (yes there is a difference)

M = Marriage  (bad-so so -good-great)

HP = Husband/Partner (ditto)

FY = Finding Yourself (first chapter and volume 1 – ? of angst) 

K = Kids (second chapter of angst)  

P = Parents (first second third chapter of angst) 

F & G = Friends & Girlfriends (lifesaving raft)

OA = Old Age (coming soon)

HO = Hanging On (lifelong)

LG = Letting Go  (now’s a good time)

SF = Self-Fulfillment (must ask otherwise won’t get)

BO = Being Open (Forever)

Did I miss anything?

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We are in the midst of a remodeling project.   As one phase of the project finished, I took on the unpleasant task of cleaning up.  What a humbling experience it is to be on your hands and knees, holding a scrub brush in hand.        

I have forgotten what a good cleaning can do for your soul.  As I washed away dirt and grim, I felt as though I was rinsing parts of myself I no longer needed.   Maybe that is why the cleaning felt like a clearing!   Who knew therapy could be so cheap with a rag and bucket of water!  Cleaning was like stopping time.  As I disappeared into my thoughts, the washing felt more like a readying.   Amazing when we still life, how our dreams speak to us.  

Several months ago, I saw a truck on the highway with the logo ”Demolition is Progress.”  Demolition is about moving forward, letting go and readying for something new to come in.   Demolition can be painful and messy, but sometimes it is the only way to move out of the rut we inhabit.    Our physical space can foreshadow our own readiness to shift.   

Space is a uniting element binding past, present and future.  Speaking to us only in language we can understand, the physical process of shedding is not just about moving physical walls but more about shifting interior ones.     The remodeling project and the cleansing that came from the process of clearing has done much to put me in touch with myself and invites me to reflect on how powerful spaces are in our lives. 

Never underestimate the power of a good cleaning to restore and reorder a new order of things to come.  Forgiving old space and making room for the new is one of life’s great intersecting bridges.

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