Finished Breakfast

One of the things I love most about this season of life is that there is time to enjoy a leisurely breakfast. It is a gift not to have to rush to be somewhere. To let go of productivity as a measure of my worth. We enjoyed Sunday breakfast on the screened-in porch, overlooking the woods, sun streaming in. Breakfast now is not defined as “healthy” or “balanced.” It is described as pleasurable. A flaky biscuit with butter and jam. Fresh cantaloupe from Snead’s Farm. A sausage patty. Steaming hot coffee with lots of cream and sugar. The way the light falls at this time of morning soothes me. The contrast of light and dark seems not only manageable but also necessary and even beautiful.

I snapped a few pictures. Happy to share this small thing I have noticed. When I think about a title for this post, I search the words, “finished breakfast,” and it turns out there is a whole category of such images. On Getty Images alone, there are over 5000 images tagged as “finished breakfast.” And this makes me happy, too. If there are over 5000 ways to notice the simple act of finishing breakfast, to notice nourishing ourselves and those we love, to begin each day with a fresh start, then surely there is hope. Where we increase curiosity and remove judgement. Where we embrace who we are and make peace within ourselves by focusing on being.

Self-awareness

 

I feel like now is the time to transform those old, unhelpful patterns. Opportunities for growth. They are all hard. But they are a chance to do healing work that will open the doors for a better future. I’m digging in, working things through step-by-step.

Pick any landscape

Once in a while I read a poem that sinks into my soul. One that I hold onto tenderly. There is so much to love in these words from poet Maya Stein. Not forcing ourselves to find beauty in ordinary landscapes, not looking at the world through some imaginary set of rose-colored glasses. No, this poem feels like permission to get close. To see and feel the roughness of life. If you can bear the stillness of not looking away . . . there is the chance for softness, breath, openness.

Thank you to Jan Falls and Heart Poems for introducing me to this poem. It changed my life.

what to love when you’re running out of things to love by Maya Stein

Pick any landscape—a kitchen counter, a waiting room, that part of your body
you shield from photographs—and narrow the distance between you. At first,
the stains will monopolize your eye. Each blight and crack and overgrowth,
a seismic disruption. If you can bear the stillness of not looking away, if you
step even closer, the contours will begin to lose their meaning. The noise
of an old story will fade. New shapes will emerge, like petals after a hard rain.
I’m not saying you will desire, suddenly, the pits and pores of the world,
or that your hands passing over every rough surface will feel fresh tenderness.
But you’ll notice your breathing has softened, your heart a door you can open
past the jambs. How there’s room for what you see, and everything you can’t.

The Joys of Elderhood

I am knee-deep in transformative work, primarily related to the intersection of ageism and ableism. And I have a new physical therapist who is helping me to address chronic pain with paradigm-shifting work called postural restoration. If this sounds like upheaval, that’s because it is. It’s hard work, and I am immensely hopeful.

Everywhere I turn, there is something new to learn and I LOVE it.

Just finished reading this really cool interview, This is 70: Chris J. Rice Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. Sharing an excerpt here:

What is surprising about being your age, or different from what you expected, based on what you were told?
It’s surprising how philosophical I have become in the last twenty years. Instead of thinking less, I think more, read more, write more. In a wider ranging and experimental way. I have not become more conservative as marketers and political pollsters would have us believe about seniors. No. In my particular old age, I have become more liberal, and equalitarian, broader minded, untraditional. Radical. At last, fully free to be the child I once was in the backseat of the car staring out the window trying to imagine the lives of all the people we passed.