Where I come from

It's hard to speak about the unspeakable, so I'll take a slightly different tack.

Putting aside all human-created physical boundaries, where do I come from?

I would like to think I come from Love. I would like to think I come from Truth. I would like to think I come from Harmony and Music. I would like to think I come from Beauty. I would like to think I come from Art. I would like to think I come from Good. I would like to think I come from Empathy and Generosity. I would like to think I come from Joy. I would like to think I come from Expansion and Spiritual Growth. I would like to think I come from Vision. I would like to think I come from Perfect Self-Expression. I would like to think I come from Wisdom. I would like to think I am as good a representative as I can be of the Divine Feminine.

And if there are days or even weeks when I am off-center, this is the general neighborhood of energetic expression that I hope to go back to.

Fragility

On this hot, exceedingly blustery summer day, I'll take a moment to muse about fragility. A few short years ago, I assumed that all my previous challenges would evaporate, and my sixties would be the apex of my own life and the lives of my female friends. I assumed that reaching the high points of careers, retirement, and power would put most of us in good places. Yet the reality is that many of us are either in extremely fragile places, or flirting with fragility in a way I don't remember in my mother's generation. My personal fragility is, as always, the transitional nature of my housing and a wavering sense of being able to fulfill my unique place and purpose. But my fall in England made me feel exceptionally fragile too, in a physical way. It cracked more than my wrist.

Friends in their sixties and early seventies are dealing with all manner of personal illnesses, challenges within their larger families, downsizing, disappointments. And of course so many of us are "freaking out" on some level about the direction our country seems to be taking. It is like there are storms blowing (more tsunamis?) and some of us, try as we might, are cracking, or breaking outright. Many of us are single, too, and as I've mentioned before, this brings up unique issues. If we aren't in close contact with birth family, who are our proverbial "loved ones"? And it's not like society at large loves its older single women. There's no, "Bravo, you! You've lived an unconventional life, you've contributed in unique ways (large and small) to our society, and we are proud that you are in our midst. Let's make the tallest and most elegant building in town its housing for wise older women"! (Hand to ear...still listening! No, I have never, ever heard words to that effect!)

My backbone right now, my counteraction to fragility, is writing my book. I am writing a blue streak, with index cards being filled up at an alarming rate. The "bringing cards to the library and typing" piece is going rather more slowly, but I'm not too worried. The book, in its early form at least, will be done by Labor Day, as I promised myself. Every word I write is empowering me, and I hope the ripple effect will subtly empower my personal friends and other women as well. I don't think it is possible to be empowered and fragile at the same time.

Atypical

As I move forward with my book, and with my life, I realize that there is nothing "typical" about me that I can discern. Nothing.

I guess this moment in Duluth is allowing me to fully appreciate this without totally freaking out. The circumstances of my life have been so wide-ranging and contradictory that I may never find a friend or community who I can hug and say, "You get this, you lived this too."

Friends who grew up in "typical middle-class American suburbs" at least may have been brought up with some shared values and experiences...type of housing, public high school, work ethic, etc. I have several friends who grew up on farms. On a very basic level, they lived a shared experience. They know what it is like to grow up in that unique environment. I have several friends who grew up in fundamentalist households. However different their circumstances might have been, there is a core spiritual experience that they could mirror to each other were they to meet. And of course, virtually all my friends married and had children, so no matter the dissimilarities in the other details of their adult lives, they know some of the "typical" trials and joys of partnership and childbirth and beyond (along with some atypical ones, surely).

It has always been hard for me to find a family of people who know what it is like to be American, but to have grown up with ultra-upper-crust "aristocratic" values but no money. To have family living in luxury one minute and dire poverty the next, and not even be allowed to talk about it. To be an American girl wanting to sing the English men and boys' choir tradition of music decades before that was possible. To have never settled down to husband or home because of those reasons and more. I have had so many friends over the years, and I love them and am so grateful for them. Right now, though, I am in such a different "place" than any of them that I feel somewhat panicky. Whether they are American or British, our actual day-to-day lives and struggles have had very little in common. I can rarely say, "You know what this is like." I wish I had more people with whom I had a specific shared mix of life experiences. From that standpoint, my life can feel outrageously lonely.

Yet this is all the more reason to increasingly tell the truth in my writing, the truth not only of what happened at specific moments, but also the truth of how things felt. I need to tell the truth of the evolution of my ability to emerge from numbness into human emotion. What I have experienced seems to set me apart from most other people, but how it affected me is the factor that may bring me back, closer to others. I may never be "typical" except on that deeper, feeling level. My heart has been broken over and over. That cannot possibly be atypical.