Stretching out

It’s snowing…again. Letting Sam and Max out the back door, you’d think we haven’t been out in the yard all winter the way the snow has drifted and piled around the steps. There’s nothing sleek and smooth about this winter or it’s snow. It’s a sloppy mess.

I’ve turned to face it. There I was (in past days/past posts) writing, complaining, and generally belly-aching about my love seat perch – and now I’ve discover there’s a reason beyond my poor tolerance for scrunched knees and chasing mice – varicose veins. Yes, you heard it right. I am getting old. I have some inflamed something or other that has to do with these varicose veins, and so I have to put my feet up and apply a heating pad, and it is this that caused me to change my position. Where before I always sat closest to the window, now I am sitting away, my feet rather than my neck nearest the Fahrenheat. I’m all stretched out rather than scrunched up, and I’m facing the corner windows directly rather than at an angle.

It seems far too early to be light but it is. The sky is full of snow. It’s not the kind of snow that you see dancing down in large well-shaped crystals but the kind of snow you can’t see at all unless you look toward the light.

I’d like to turn this into a lovely metaphor but I’m kind of stuck on getting old. I don’t feel old but I will be fifty-five in a week. Prime of life I say to myself. You have to, you know, when your forties didn’t turn out quite like planned. I haven’t got a yen to live to 150 (read an article about how to get there in the doctor’s office), but I figure I’ve got ten, maybe twenty years tops, before I’m even less inclined than I am now to venture too far beyond my yard.

I am venturing. I will be giving talks in St. Paul, Boston, and Boulder in the coming months. This is good news on the book-writing front, and good news for my
55th year and the feeling that it’s time, and even good news in terms of progress of a certain sort – I am far better off this year than last when I was about to return to office work for the first time in eleven years. I’m doing work I love, the kind that has the feel of life and work being all of one piece, and I’ve got the opportunity to bring the vision that has arisen from all the various things I’ve given my attention to … well … to light.

Themes emerge with time and quiet and the one I see is focused on dying to the old and birthing to the new. Yes, I mean it in a spiritual way, and I’ve felt it in an inner way, but now it’s as though it’s time to take it out for a walk…to take it to St. Paul and Boston and Boulder.

It feels really great to stretch out.