Well Past 50: The Weblog of Boomerful.com

Communities for the Spirit

I have never been a tribal person. Even in high school I preferred having just a few close friends whom I spent time with individually, rather than a group. When one of those special high school friends, Sandy, recently passed away, I dreaded the variety of funeral related activities where I would be forced to parade my grief past hundreds of well-meaning people whom I had not seen in many years.

I walked into the pre-visitation viewing prepared to politely greet, and quickly escape the well-meaning visitors. Before I had time to gasp at the sight of my precious friend, painted and coifed in her casket until she was totally unrecognizable, two of our closest friends from high school had their arms around me. We held each other, sobbing. The years of separation disappeared and we were once again loving friends sharing a common loss.

Throughout the events of the next few days I was awed by the support I felt from this “tribe” who could share the joy of having had Sandy in our lives and the grief of losing her –with total understanding of each other’s despair. Suddenly the importance of community became clear to me.

A few weeks later I had the honor of spending time with Father Ekuturi Raphael a Catholic priest who has devoted his life to working with the poorest of the poor in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India.  I asked Father Raphael how the goals of his ministry differed in an environment where life is so delicate and suffering so epidemic. 

“Nancy”, he told me.  “To bring them a faith in God is most important. That lifts them from their despair. But second is to give them a sense of community. In a place where people must fight for every scrap of food, they still come together and forget their differences and their fighting when they pray together.”

September 11 brought the entire country together as one community. Religion does it daily for the millions of faithful. And personal tragedy does it all too often in each of our lives. Whatever the causes, when we unite as one community, it is truly overwhelming and humbling to be filled with the oneness that God must have intended when he created all of us in his own image – the one image of humanity.

Retreat Destination: Michigan

The last retreat I went on was my trip to Colorado.  For possibly the first time ever, I had relaxed into the feeling that I deserved solitude. I reveled in the experience of having someone take care of me. I embraced my independence, and felt myself filled up with the energy and creativity that stress had robbed from me. So when my beloved friend Woody asked me, for the umpteenth time, to join him and our mutual buddy, Theresa, at his cottage in Michigan, I forced myself to give up my need to control my family’s every move and joined them. 

Woody’s cottage was built by his grandfather in 1922, on the banks of Lake Leelanau, and little has changed inside the cottage since then. Aside from the indoor plumbing, the family has been steadfast in their efforts to maintain the look and feel that Grandad was striving for when he found the remote beachfront property and built a getaway for his family nearly a century ago.

Leland, Michigan is no longer remote – it has become a popular summer tourist destination.  But the cottage rests on a secluded parcel of land, with nothing to disturb its expansive view of the lake.  Inside the cottage, memorabilia fills every bit of wall space – from pictures of Grandad at thirty-two, to Grandad at 103, to animals carved from driftwood that Woody and his brothers sculpted during their childhoods. It is a virtual museum of Perkins family history, and the unfamiliarity of such deep tradition touches and intrigues me. We spent the first night examining every photo and child’s painting and antique kitchen tool – questioning Woody about every memory attached to the physical remnants of his family.

Our curiosity satisfied, we sat by the fire, sipped wine and compared our childhoods to the childhoods of the privileged Perkins children. Privileged, not because they had money or influence, but because the family had a deep sense of tradition that every generation honored more than the last. I settled in and began, once again, to believe I deserved this holiday from the office, responsibility for my husband, and worries about my teenagers.

The three of us quickly released our attachment to control and began to act like teenagers ourselves. We wandered through the charming little tourist towns buying fudge at the fudge shop and bags of cherry jams to take home. We sampled quiches and white fish at every little restaurant we found along the way. We climbed Sleeping Bear Dunes until our legs ached. Then we sat in front of a raging fire in the old stone fireplace in the cottage. And we sat.  And we sat, filled with love for each other, and contentment with our lives. 

I don’t know if Leland, Michigan really does hold magic that other little waterfront towns don’t hold.  But I do know that contentment is often lost as we struggle to meet deadlines, manage responsibilities to others, and deal with the urgency of the mundane and the meaningless.  Colorado, Leland, Michigan, and a million other destinations hold the magic to restore our contentment and keep us forever young.

"Awakening" on the Osa Peninsula

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

    Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau preached endlessly about the need to de-stress, unwind, just “chill”. Whether you go “to the woods” or find an equally peaceful getaway on the beach, in the mountains, or in a room in your house that you have equipped with a lock on the door, your favorite music and scented candles, escape is an essential part of finding ourselves.

Travel allows me to gain new perspectives, renew my spirit and get back the creativity I give up in my pressured life. The more remote, the better. I wrote this when I returned from the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. I hope it helps you find your own perfect escape.

"Awakening" on the Osa Peninsula

The most persistent characteristics of this place are the heat and humidity. They drain every bit of life from your body until you feel that you must lie down. But lying down only makes the intensity greater. When you lie down it feels as if you are covered, head to toe, in suffocating blankets of moisture.

 

Your face is sweating so much your eyes sting. You try to wipe it from your face, but the sweat from your hand mingles with the sweat from your face and forms a river that runs down your cheek and pours like a waterfall from your chin.The sun is so bright it burns your eyes, but sunglasses are painful to wear. 

How is it this climate drains the life out of humans, yet creates and sustains the most incredible variety of life in plants and animals? Butterflies are everywhere - in every size and color imaginable.  Jungle runners scurry from under rocks and leaves - and large, horrible looking lizards peak around corners to see if you are a threat to them. Scarlet macaws fly overhead, screeching their greetings to each other.

Howler monkeys wake us up before dawn with a growl that sounds like a huge jungle cat - and dawn comes very early here. My children start their day chasing the coati mundi from the cocoa trees and end it searching for land crabs with their flashlights. They find eight or more each night. We came here to put our lives right - to put in perspective the need we think we have for window treatments and more horsepower and new CDs.

Just getting here should have been enough to put it in perspective for us. We flew, in a six-seater, twin engine aircraft over the mountains, bouncing and bobbing through each cloud we entered, landing on a dirt landing strip surrounded by jungle. We traveled by windowless van, with no air conditioning, over dirt paths and across a river with a crocodile waiting beneath the bridge for a lunch of some living thing. Finally we boarded a fishing boat which wound around the curves of the Sierpe River - named the Serpent River for its shape, and perhaps partially because of its inhabitants. When the Sierpe emptied into the vast and beautiful waves of the Pacific it seemed as though all the twists and turns of our lives had been washed clean by the glorious expanse of the ocean.

But we weren’t there yet. The tiny boat thrashed and struggled against the insurmountable crests, inching its way toward the peak of the cliff that hid our camp. And yet, seeing the shore beneath the camp was not the end of the journey. Still we had to jump into waste-high waves and struggle against the surf and rocks to reach the shore. Once ashore we climbed into a large wagon, hitched to an antiquated tractor that pulled us up a long, winding path, past the curious eyes of a band of capuchins, to a clearing in the jungle. There was our home away from home - one of five thatched roof huts with screened walls and a ceiling fan that offered the only relief from the incredible, oppressive heat. The only relief, that is, except for the rare afternoon when it would rain torrents of cooling rain just long enough to turn the hot, sticky air into slightly cooler, sticky air.

Settling in to this place, we were transported to an environment that is as it has been forever.  Almost completely inaccessible, this peninsula could not be anything except natural. The food we would eat was grown on the peninsula. The water we would drink and bathe with was pure rainwater. We would sleep when it was dark and wake when it was light, obeying natures signals for each of our daily rituals. It would feel like total freedom. We were no longer needed for even the most basic decisions. The only function we seemed to have was survival. We must watch the paths we walked for fire ants and poisonous snakes. We must be careful where we steadied ourselves long the paths - the innocuous looking tree could be hiding deadly barbs designed to impale us. We were one against, and one with nature.

Just as we were feeling quite against her, with her heat and thorns and ants that kill, we would stumble across a jungle waterfall emptying into a clear, cool pond, with a Jesus Christ lizard scurrying across its surface, and we would revel in our oneness with her glory.

Everything in this place survives in a symbiotic relationship with something else. Everything except humans and the tree-cutter ants that the natives describe as the closest creature to the white man.  “They move into the forest working constantly to cut down all the trees, and build huge roads and houses for no apparent reason, except to use whatever resources they can get their tiny hands on.”  We have been put in our places. 

The bats that live inside the towering hollow Agarlic trees stare at our wide eyes and gaping mouths, then fly away - not in fear, but in what looks from their sour faces, like disgust. The capuchins chatter about us endlessly as they swing above our heads, staring at our odd behavior. Even our kind, dedicated naturalist guides treat us with a certain condescendence. I feel embarrassingly pathetic in my lack of knowledge and understanding of the planet I inhabit. Yet I am totally enthralled with my awakening to its perfection. I learn to revel in the sensation of the unrelenting heat. I feel cleansed from the native food, and the lack of preservatives, chocolate bars, diet soda and Chardonnay. I struggle along the treacherous paths, watching for poisonous tree frogs as our guide advises. I welcome bedtime when the sun disappears - pleasantly exhausted from a day of invigorating discovery. And discovery is everywhere in this contrary paradise.

I have learned that there are three kinds of plant life: the vascular plant which draws in food from the earth, stretches upward to absorb energy from the sun, and grows tall and strong from its own efforts. There is the epiphyte, which attaches itself to a host plant and feeds from its food and energy supply without damage to the host. Then there is the parasite, which attaches itself to a host plant and sucks the very life from the host, as it feeds hungrily on the food and energy supply the host plant has worked so hard to collect. The correlations are endless. The lessons are not difficult or laborious. They simply spring up as we open our minds to our environment. 

For the first time in twenty years I have no feeling of need to be in touch with my office – to have control. I realize for the first time that I have no control. I am suddenly, finally, gratefully – stress free. Henry David Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.  Simplify, simplify.”  I always believed him. Now I understand. There can be no stress here. There is no stress in simply surviving.

Phantom Getaway

When I was ten years old I walked home from school alone, writing lyrics in my head and trying them out to different melodies. I probably wrote my best poem at 11, and volumes of poetry throughout high school. I tried my hand at writing stories for romance magazines at 21. I got two checks for $75 each and realized I couldn’t raise my son as a single mom on sporadic checks for less than a month’s rent.

I got a real job. I went into advertising and started writing copy for TV spots, newspaper ads and tri-fold brochures. It wasn’t my dream, but it allowed me to partially satisfy my creative needs.  Someday, I knew, I would go back to REAL writing.

I started my own advertising agency at 23 and soon became entrenched in the daily operation of running a business – employee problems, client relations and budgeting. My writing began to take a back seat. I promised myself someday I would leave the world of business behind and retire to a cabin in the woods to write.

By the mid-seventies I joined my peers experimenting with drugs and found renewed creativity. The only problem was that the deep and thought provoking novels I wrote between midnight and 3 A.M. looked surprisingly like gibberish when the stimulants left my body. Once again, I promised myself that this was a world I would soon leave behind to slip away to my cabin in the woods where I could be who I really was and write things that would change the world forever.

I’m 57 now and every decade has brought added responsibilities – more children, a growing business, volunteer Boards and a whole slew of animals to care for.  The cabin in the woods has remained always – a phantom, beckoning in the mist. 

When I met my friend Sue for a few days in Colorado I took a look at a few cabins that were for sale.  As always I told myself that I couldn’t take that much money away from my family for something that was my dream alone,  I would probably never get there anyway, and I should just go home, decorate the guest room with wood paneling and a wood stove, and do my writing in there.

I came home from Colorado and obsessed for a week over my absolute craving for one of the cabins I had seen – picture window overlooking the mountains, a wood stove crackling in the corner – and knew I had come to the moment of reckoning.  Did I really want the cabin I had dreamed about for 30 years?   

The answer was: yes, with modifications.  I dreamed of a cabin so isolated only the elk and mountain lions would find me. This one is a few miles outside a fairly upscale little town an hour from Denver. I dreamed of toughing out the cold as I waded through snowdrifts to get to the outhouse. This one has running water, and really pretty tile on the bathroom wall. I dreamed of nothing but the wind blowing through the trees to break the silence as I meditated on my next great American novel. This one has a cable connection.

The point is, our dreams we hold dear in our youth are sometimes just that – fantasies that only make sense to someone without the life experience to understand the ramifications of fantasies that become reality. But oftentimes those fantasies symbolize the very core of our beings. They’re the parts of us that never change, and stand to bring us the greatest satisfaction we can find in life. We may need to modify the dream to make it work better for the lifestyle we’ve created. But we should never, ever diminish its importance in our lives. 

I am like a little kid now, fidgeting, planning, longing for my next trip to Colorado. Back to my fantasy. Back to the part of me that has never changed – the part that truly defines the ten year old girl and the 57 year old woman.

Fresh from a Mini-Sabbatical

I told you about my friend, Sue, who took a six-week sabbatical from her family. Well, most of us don’t have the luxury of six weeks away from work and family, but I decided to take my own mini spiritual journey. Mine had to be sandwiched between client, children and husband needs, but I was determined to experience at least a few days of selfish time (Mind you, I did work in a client meeting toward the end of my trip so I felt slightly less self indulgent.)

I had always wanted to explore Colorado, so I located a health spa and inn in Ft.
Collins to begin my journey. The Atrium is a small, funky inn smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The actual atrium has a ‘70s feel to it – funky and a little old, with a goldfish pond, a large whirlpool and Enya music piped into the large open space. The feel of it was just right for a ‘70s chick like myself.

I settled in to my room – old and slightly worn, but very comfortable. Innkeeper Donna suggested we do an analysis of my health concerns in order to design a treatment program around my needs.  What she suspected my main problem to be was – you guessed it – stress. She scheduled a hot stone massage for me that night to de-stress me before bed. It was wonderful. I felt like Jello. But I wasn’t finished for the evening. She set me on a bench in the Infra-red sauna for 25 minutes and insisted I drink a cup of liquid minerals before bed. I slept for 10 hours.

The next morning Donna gave me an Ion Cleanse, submersing my feet in a tub of warm water, the Ion cleansing machine bubbling away as it rid my body of toxins. I don’t know where the toxins went, but my feet felt wonderful, and I was at the same time relaxed and energized, so something was working.

After Donna fed me a breakfast of Sicilian fruit bread and yogurt, Tom, the friendly local realtor drove me around the beautiful mountains northwest of Ft. Collins, looking at properties I might buy to build the little getaway I had always dreamed of. The area was beautiful and property affordable, though I stopped myself from writing a check in my euphoric state.

I went back to the Inn for yet another massage (deep tissue this time), another cup of liquid minerals, and another long night of sleep. Next morning, another Ion cleanse (my hands this time), 15 minutes on the Chi machine to oxygenize my body, and an application of the “Healthy Alternative to Liposuction” and I was good to go. I felt refreshed, positive and more in touch with myself than I had been in years.

I drove South toward Nederland – a little town in the mountains where Sue and I had decided to meet and catch up on the details of her spiritual journey. Nederland was, well…interesting. We had a wonderful lunch at the Sunset Lodge Restaurant, gazing out at an amazing view of the mountains as we ate our veggie sandwich and Huevos Rancheros. It was so pleasant that we decided to check in to the tiny roadside lodge for the night to prolong the experience. Word of caution:  Never try to prolong nice experiences. Experience them and move on.

While we were sitting in a bar in town, sipping a glass of wine and watching the colorful locals, the temperature outside was dropping to 16 degrees and the winds were beginning to gust at a brisk 40 miles an hour. We hurried back to our tiny motel room for warmth. Alas, the room was only a few degrees warmer than the outside temp. We cranked the heat up full blast and snuggled in for a comfortable night’s sleep. By midnight we realized there was actually NO heat coming from our room heater and no one to call for help, since the office and restaurant were closed. We snuggled together in the same bed, covered with all of the available blankets in the room and Sue’s sleeping bag.

We slept very little, and of course couldn’t shower in the sub-freezing temperature next morning.  We went to the restaurant to explain. After complaining that we had disturbed her day off, the lodge manager snarled that the pilot lights naturally go out in the gale-force winds we had experienced. I decided I was going to stand my ground (something I don’t always do) and insist on some sort of concession on our bill.  She grudgingly agreed to take $20 off our $79 hotel bill.

At that point I decided to avoid further contact with her negativity, took my $20 and moved onto a more positive phase of my spiritual adventure. Our next stop was Evergreen, a delightful town with warmer temperatures and friendlier people than those we had encountered in Nederland. A very nice realtor named Dana showed me four cabins in the woods. One was exactly what I had always wanted, except for the price.  But I guess you can’t expect to get your lifelong dream without paying a price for it.

Sue and I still had not had much opportunity to share stories of our spiritual quests, so we ate a light meal at an excellent deli that has its own winery, then checked into The Highland Haven to enjoy the comfortable room (with plenty of glorious heat) and the peaceful sounds of the rushing creek just outside our door. We liked Evergreen so much we both decided to seriously consider purchasing real estate in the area.

We sat and shared stories, giggled, and practiced the meditation exercises Sue had learned at one of her stops along the way. Once again, I slept like a baby and woke up excited to pack a lot in to my last day.

We ate one of the best breakfasts I have ever had at the Country Café in Kitteredge and went for a five mile hike in Falcon Park. Mind you, we intended to take a two mile hike, but, neither of us being good with directions, we managed to get off our chosen trail and hike for a good hour longer than planned. No matter, the weather was perfect, the views spectacular and the bonds of friendship feeling stronger than they ever had before.

Exhausted, yet invigorated, we parted company – Sue continuing on her remaining two weeks of travel – me heading to the airport and the return to reality.

My trip lasted only four days, but it offered enough of a change from the day to day to bring my life and my goals for the future into much clearer focus. As I bask in the afterglow of a my wonderful journey, I am planning an annual return to The Atrium for some soul cleansing, and the possible purchase of the perfect cabin in the woods for regular retreats to Evergreen.

When I left Evergreen, Sue she cautioned me not to get caught up in the “shoulds” of life I live by: I “should” save my money for retirement; I “should” plan my vacations with the kids, not alone; I “should” buy a place closer to my parents in case they need my help. I don’t know if I can do it – I’m pretty well programmed after 57 years. But my intention is to learn from this experience how to take more time for myself to work on my own spiritual growth. I really “should."

For the Love of Sue

Like so many perfectly descriptive phrases from the past, “change of life” somehow became archaic in our society that gives more credence to physiological terminology than the abstract, spiritual or emotional. I think this happened in our feminist quest to become more like men by denying our beautifully abstract, spiritual, emotional femininity.

Fact is, menopause – or the time of life when it usually occurs – is absolutely, without question, a “change of life”. Every woman I know who is at or beyond 50, has begun to examine, and in many cases, change her life.

Our children are grown, at least to a point of no longer needing our constant attention. Our marriages have had to change and be redefined with our decreased focus on the children. Our careers may well have left us longing for the fulfillment we incorrectly believed they would provide.

I may have a more liberal group of acquaintances than many, but most of the 50+ women I know, who are in 20+ year marriages, with children into or near adulthood, are either: a. Having an affair; b. Considering an affair; c. Seriously considering living away from their spouses for at least part of the year; or d. Carefully scrutinizing their marriages for signs of life that they can build a future on.

Part of it may be our generation. We began our adult lives blazing trails – fighting for equality, demanding the right to live any life we chose for ourselves. We then settled into our mothers’ lives, putting our husband and children first, setting aside our aspirations, and undermining our own hard-won freedom.

Now mortality follows us around like a desperate panhandler – begging for the bits of change we have left from the riches of our promising dreams.

January second my friend Sue packed her Hyundai hatchback with six pairs of orthotic hiking boots (for different terrains she may encounter), and her box of several dozen vitamin and hormone supplements, and set off on a five-week sabbatical to destinations West – those spiritual places she visited briefly in her youth and planned to move to permanently, before her husband’s career demanded a life on the East coast and her children developed special needs.

She loved her husband, loved her children more than life itself. But over the past 20 years she absolutely forgot what it meant to love Sue. Now her friends sit and debate whether Sue will realize how good she had it and come back after a week, or never come back at all.

None of her friends have raised the possibility that she will have a glorious five-week trip, come home renewed in spirit, and find a way to combine her love of Sue with her love of her husband and family, and live out a happy and rewarding dotage.

For the sake of every 50+ woman’s dream that it is possible to reconcile self-fulfillment with a loving relationship, I hope that is exactly what happens.

Adventure Guide to Wellness

As we put our Anti-aging directory together for the WellPast50.com Web site (to debut soon), I'll be sharing sites that I've found such as this Adventure Guide to Wellness. So many sources on this site - holistic health, spirituality, meditation, aromatherapy, yoga, travel, associations and directories, etc... it's too good to pass up.