the bigger connection

We’re coming to a time of year that more than any other time is about connecting, not only with family, friends, or community, but also on a bigger level to culture and Nature.  Thanksgiving is less about eating turkey and lots of pie, or watching football, or all the prep work and cleaning up after a crowd, although it’s an important cultural aspect and expression.  

Instead, it’s about being together and feeling connected to something bigger. Thanksgiving, as any harvest festival, is about our deep connection to the Earth because it provides us with everything we need to live.  Without good soil and a good harvest, we perish.  If we tend the soil sustainably, we thrive. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Hence, Thanksgiving is about thanking the Earth, our first and foremost nurturer, Mother of all Mothers.  It is about being grateful, not only for the people we celebrate with, but for our existence, for spirit, for that which made us and put us here.  Let’s keep this bigger picture in mind this coming week with the help from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World, which thanks all of Nature for making us possible.  

Thank you.

wiser, not older

Next year I will hit my 60th run-around-the sun, and I am reflecting on all the ways in which maturing is more fun, more grounding, or even perhaps more desirable than remaining young forever.

Traditional societies have revered elders for their wisdom and perspective.  In our younger societies we have come to worship youth as more desirable – my theory being that we’re deflecting our fear of death, or maybe we just don’t think wrinkles are fashionable (although not everyone becomes wrinkly as they age). Young people may be creative and exuberant, technologically with it (absolutely important in our day and age), but they lack experience, and potentially depth, because they haven’t been around the block. 

Nowadays “older” depends so much on your personal outlook.  Ernestine Shepherd is an 80-year old body builder who began training not so long ago. Tao Porchon-Lynch, the 101-year old ballroom dancer and yogini, still  teaches yoga several times a week.  Bless people who can afford to retire in their 50s, but not all wish to do so.   Many professors teach into their 70s and even 80s.   Authors can practice their craft until the day they die.  86-year old Ruth Bader Ginsburg still sits on the Supreme Court, and I know many people who travel into their high 80s.  And why not?

Our thinking about aging and “old age” is evolving.  When AARP sent me a card a few years ago I laughed it all the way into the trash can.  The French have broadened their senior citizen categorization from le troisième age, the 3rdage, the over 60s, to the quatrième age, the fourth age, the over 80s.  “Old” seems to relate more to how you look and feel and think instead of your actual age.  The Huffington Post published a chart that shows activity peaks according to age.  Peaks in life satisfaction, happiness with your body, and psychological wellbeing are all achieved starting in your late 60s.  And aren’t those the markers that count most?

Is it all in the mind? Are we our worst enemy?  To some extent yes.  How do you think about old age?  What are your plans?  

unpacking our children

Raising children is a magical experience of unfolding, full of surprises.  As parents we put so much energy and effort into providing our kids with fertile ground for their development.  Loving, encouraging and appreciating them, teaching them life skills, setting boundaries, modeling how to operate in this wild world, and inspiring them to come into their own, is  a complex dance of trying to read between the lines to anticipate who they are meant to become, all the while working from our own expectations and hopes (and trying not to let those take over). 

Our children come into this world with their own potentialities, their own natural knacks and tendencies, their own likes and dislikes, their own particular personalities.  But then they need our input, our guidance, our feedback, to navigate what they have been given within a complex world full of possibilities and pitfalls, steering them while loosening the reins gradually as they grow older.

It’s almost like a most precious present, packaged in many layers of giftwrap, that parents and children are unpacking together, or peeling an onion one layer at a time, to discover what’s concealed underneath it all.  Mind you, the unwrapping continuous until the day we die.  I am still peeling my own onion, still discovering more of who I want to be, still working towards my full potential.