Me and metaphors. I should spare my readers, but this one is gnawing away, so here goes.
It occurred to me this morning that reaching 70 is like this: all your life you have been preparing for a big banquet. Early on, you look through cookbooks and recipes, trying to find delicious-looking appetizers, entrees, salads and desserts. You want to see what other chefs before you have done. Then you go around to the market, and buy all the ingredients you need (and possibly some of the food comes from your own garden). You get going with the initial prep work, chopping, dicing, deciding on herbs and spices. You find the appropriate baking dishes and sauce pans, and start putting each dish together. You boil the pasta and simmer the sauces. Some of the dishes may need to roast or bake in the oven for a number of hours. Meat or fish may go in the refrigerator to marinate, salads may be mixed then chilled as well, and depending on the dessert, you may be able to prepare ahead or throw together last minute.
70 feels like the moment when you know that people are about to walk in the door, and the results of all your hard work are going out on the table. It's the moment when you finally see all the fruits of your hard work as one big picture. You see the success (or not) of all your decisions. You even see that, wow, if I were to plan this banquet today, I might choose a whole different set of dishes! This meal doesn't really represent me! Forget about whether I cooked it well or poorly, it just isn't my taste in food anymore at all!
Now, this whole metaphor is probably skewed in the sense that I suspect that few successful men would use a cooking metaphor to begin with! It comes naturally to me after a lifetime of enjoying cooking and baking, and perhaps many lifetimes of stirring stews over open fires. And of course, many women's "ingredients" have been far different from mine. The menu they hoped to prepare might be a completely different meal. Yet as women, I think we have all effectively had to "cook" at times without a working stove, or adequate refrigeration, or even light. The system wasn't in place to help us get this huge banquet on the table. The fact that anything is on the table at all may feel like a miracle.
Today, it feels like too much of my meal is made up of bread, like many of my actions were, in effect, "kneading" in the hopes of my bread eventually rising. Preparatory work, scientific in nature, to create an eventual bloom...and yet, some of my bread rose, and a lot of it did not. All my loaves and other dishes -- successful and not -- are on the table. I mean, I embrace the whole array with love. I did the best I could, and I know there was very little encouragement along the way ("You go, girl, shake up that world of English church music!" "Yay, finally someone questioning our capitalist system and trying to live and work outside it!" "The world needs your Goddess perspective!") Somehow, I thought by now it would all add up to a brilliant banquet that hundreds would line up to eat, and instead, I watch as potential diners take a cursory glance at what I have to offer before wandering along to the next booth, the next dining table...or so it feels...
It is, I'm sure, part of our rapid spiritual evolution that the months leading to my turning 70 (and the two since then) have added to this energetic mis-match. We were preparing our banquet in one world, and are putting it out on the table in another world, almost literally. Hmm...I guess what I am trying to say to my fellow 70-something women friends is, we "cooked" as best we could, and now, with whatever energy we may have left, we are free to take new ingredients and prepare an entirely different meal -- heck, speaking for myself, I may only have the energy to create one or two decent dishes, not a banquet table full. I'll probably contribute my food to a community potluck, not even try to present a solo culinary show. The energy is no longer right for that.
