The moon tapped lightly on my bedroom window a bit before 3 AM and beckoned me to come see it. It hung low in the east sky, a deep orange segment. It was either smiling a Cheshire cat smile or else frowning thoughtfully.
Too early to be up but also not sleeping, I joined the moon in the night watch. The little stars were actually twinkling in the charcoal sky. As the moon rose higher, it became brighter and lost its titian hue. Still I sat by and watched. Other than the odd stirring outside, the farm was quiet at that hour with the usual busyness shuttered for the night. Insomnia – friend and foe. Eventually, after waiting for my farmer husband to rouse so as not to disturb his sleep, I went back to bed. The sun was coming up, and unlike the moon, the sun pulled up the covers, tucking me in. I fell asleep and dreamed a dream.
In my mom’s last years, she would occasionally have broken nights which often appeared to be linked to the cycle of the moon. If she could go back to sleep in the dawn hours, she would often dream dreams. Weird dreams. Vivid dreams. Dreams that left her feeling discombobulated in the way that dreams can do. So, she never liked going back to sleep at that time of day. Her unsettledness after a dream like that was palpable. Though, occasionally, her mother and sister would be present in her dreams and “it was so real”. Those dreams seemed to take her to another place, a place where she visited the past and perhaps glimpsed the future. Those dreams left her with a sense of preoccupied peacefulness.
My dream had people from the past and the present. It had my husband and me on a bus. It had a book. It had an artist. It had me returning the book to our artist friend. The recently-borrowed book was shredded and tattered, much to my chagrin. The artist’s expression was calm but bothered. I apologized profusely, determined to replace it.
Odd. Curious. Maybe even insightful.
At of the beginning of May, I became a newborn into my seventh decade. If Mom had been still here to celebrate with me, she would have shook her head mildly in disbelief that her little Judy was at that milestone. Friends have queried regarding my feelings about a new decade. It’s good to think about these things. In one way, I have felt like an imposter. I’m still that sturdy girl with long braids but now I’m in an adult body going about in a grown-up world like I know which side is up. In another way, I have felt a settling into my accumulated years, and I have savoured the development of flavours of all my ages. In yet another, more ominous way, I have felt the shortening stretch before me as compared to the lengthened stretch behind me.
Madeleine L’Engle writes that “… Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and .. and … and …. ” (Walking On Water. Pg. 74).
It’s an invitational perspective to see that not only am I sixty, but I am also all my ages before this one. Maybe instead of echoing the voice of an imposter I can pay heed to the voice of an integrator. Search out and glean the wisdom from my lived experiences of all my ages thus far and lean into continued growth by integrating the happenings, the mishaps, even the missteps of the years. Move away from a socially constructed mindset that youth is the time to peak and it’s all downhill from here to a mindset of awareness and acceptance of the crests and valleys that form the topography of a lived life until the living is done. Stay curious about what compels me and be willing to do the work of introspection while cultivating a life-giving self-awareness. I can be sixty years old; I can be all my ages old without apology.
The alternative to not growing older is not living. Growing older and becoming old are still potentially growthy; I want to embrace it. While my desire to busily engage opportunities for growth has waned, I’m discovering quieter ways and practices to nurture it. My soul has antiquity leanings – now the rest of me is catching up.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling 22. And yes, Taylor Swift, it can be both miserable and magical, oh yeah. But I am sixty going on seventy (my fella doesn’t fall in line but does walk alongside), and I’m feeling less naive. One of the gifts that Mom gave me was her way of living that enjoyed all the stages of life. Nowadays, we might call it being present. She didn’t learn that from books; it was something innate. For me, it doesn’t feel quite so innate but it does feel learnable. Sometimes night watches can be a classroom and dreams at dawn can give pause and cause for reflection.
A friend penned these words and tucked them into a birthday card for me. I like both the sense of completion in them as well as the anticipation of new beginnings.
60 journeys around the sun
finished stories of Love, Loss, & Life
scrambled letters that have yet to be rearranged
