In Memorium: Mary Oliver

I first discovered the poet Mary Oliver, in Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.  In Williams’ introduction to the book, she used the first five lines from Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese”:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

         love what it loves.”

For someone, especially female, raised a strict Catholic in the 1950s, those words struck a chord, affirming what I’d felt as I grew to adulthood: That I was body as well as soul, a “soft animal” alive in, and with, the natural world.

Eventually Oliver’s words—almost a command—would release me from the worst of the religious dogma I’d been forced to accept.

But what liberates also constrains.

The body, unlike the soul, which I translate as spirit, diminishes and dies. (And, if we’re lucky, over many decades of living and loving.)

But Oliver never shrank from this awareness either, and so her poetry invites us to “love what it loves” by paying attention to the world we live in. Just as she did with a grasshopper she  encountered out walking through nearby fields.

She describes and reflects on this small moment in her poem The Summer Day,” ending with these lines:

“Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?”

As for Oliver’s own precious life, it ended last month, at her home in Florida, at age 83. And having spent her life observing and describing her experiences in both the human and natural world, she was ever mindful of death, including her own.

Here are the final three stanzas of her poem, “When Death Comes,” written in 2006:

“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

“I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

The Move

To my loyal blog readers:

I am sorry to be so tardy with a new post, but I moved two weeks ago today, and 26.5 miles away.

The move went about as perfectly as it could, but the settling in has been complicated by two things: the crazy weather here in the Chicago area, and the back pain I sustained while packing, then carrying stuff down downstairs and upstairs.

Again, and again, and again.

Guess I ain't as young as I used to be, eh? Ah, well, if nothing else, pain does humble one, especially making us grateful for those moments, sometimes seconds, when it seems to moderate. Gratitude being another necessary ingredient of aging.

And so I am gratefully on the mend, and will be posting next week about the poet Mary Oliver, who died last week.

2019: The Purpose-Driven Year

Imagine the thrill of reading the following editorial in the Chicago Tribune’s New Year’s Day edition: 

“Boomers, remember your commitment. There's still time to save the world.”

Talk about a way to start 2019. It’s almost as if the editors follow my blog, especially given this particular sentence: “Find a purpose beyond yourself.”

On the other hand, maybe they read about the summer workshop I offered at The Newberry Library in Chicago: “The Purpose of Aging: Aging with Purpose.”

Here’s that description, slightly amended to reflect how that workshop and the response to it inspired my upcoming series of lectures and forthcoming book:

The news is no longer new: The Boomer Generation—those between the ages of 54 and 72—has changed the way we age. Not only are Boomers living longer than any previous generation, but are doing so in better health and more productively. 

This longevity bonus—or “Gift of Years,” as author Joan Chittister calls it—may even benefit those of us born before the Boomers, and certainly after.

In Carol’s lectures, workshops, and forthcoming book, she explores how we might use our gift of age with more intention, purpose, and meaning. In the process, she offers specific practices to help us create and manage this most challenging and rewarding life transition.

And part of what makes it both challenging and rewarding, in my humble opinion, is the choice to age with purpose. But how do find our purpose as we continue aging? And how does that particular purpose reward us?

Questions worth considering, eh?

Maybe the Trib piece could help answer them. Start here, with the opening paragraphs:

What’s next, baby boomers? You started turning 65 in 2011. Millions of you will continue to cross that threshold until 2030.

In your long-ago brash youth, you fashioned yourselves as wild-haired but deeply committed revolutionaries, America’s best hope to end poverty, prejudice and injustice. The times, they were a-changin’, for the better.

Sorry to say, you fell short in every category. You didn’t outperform the Greatest Generation (what’s greater than greatest?), which extinguished the Axis threat and created the modern world.

Now you’re signing up for Medicare and Social Security — rites of passage that make many of you cringe.

And to continue—which I highly recommend—click here:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-baby-boomers-65-20181129-story.html

Focus Group on Aging

In preparation for writing my second book, which will be on aging, I’m hoping to get feedback from people 50+ about their experiences of growing older. What are they thinking and feeling as they move through mid-life into their 60s, 70s, and beyond?

To that end, I’m offering a free program at the Center for Life & Learning at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, on Wednesday, January 30, 2019 from 1:00 - 3:00 pm.

Here’s the official description from the Center’s website:

In addition to writing, Carol LaChapelle has conducted writing and journal writing workshops for the past thirty years. Her newest offering, The Purpose of Aging: Aging with Purpose, encourages people to continue creating their lives as they age.

Inspired by the positive response to the workshop, Carol is focusing her second book on the topic of aging with purpose. She envisions it as both resource and guide to this most challenging and rewarding life transition.

In preparation for writing the book, Carol is offering this free program at the Center for Life and Learning. It is an invitation to people fifty and beyond to share their experiences, thoughts, and feelings about aging. The conversation will explore what elements of mind, body, spirit, and story might help us move beyond midlife with more intention and purpose.

Carol LaChapelle is a Chicago-based writer, teacher, and the author of Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories. Her essays have appeared in America magazine, The Writing Group Book, and on www.nextavenue.org. She blogs about this “new” old age at forboomersandbeyonders.blogspot.com.

If you—or anyone you know—might want to attend, please click on the link, then select Free Lectures from the list. Once there, you can register.

http://www.fourthchurch.org/cll/programs.html

Also, if you know of other venues that might want to offer this program, please do contact me at madmoon55@hotmail.com or 773.981.2282.

Finally, I wish all my readers a meaningful and stress-free holiday, and all the best for 2019.

Style Stories

I’ve never been accused of being stylish. And, if for some reason I got close, it didn’t last long.

I credit my rather utilitarian approach to dressing up—or down, as the case may be—to many things, including being a fat kid; wearing uniforms in high school; and growing up female and Catholic in the ‘50s. Translation: no drawing attention to one’s looks, one’s body, else you become an occasion of sin for a young man.

Despite all that, once I graduated and started to make my way in the world, I made reasonably successful attempts to look attractive, especially after losing a ton of weight in my early 20s. These included wearing skirts, nylons, and high heels, and using make-up, if sparingly.

Then came the ‘60s, when hippie wear ruled and the women’s movement urged us to minimize body and maximize brain. Sounded good to me. I could read and write way better than I could coordinate an outfit or tie a scarf.

Besides, except for books, I hated to shop. And the more choices available—the racks and racks of shoes and dresses and accessories—the dizzier I got.

As I’ve aged, it’s gotten worse (or better?). I clothes shop only when I absolutely must, and whatever I buy and end up wearing (not always the same thing) must be washable, durable and affordable.

And if also fashionable, well, great.

All of which is context for why I so much enjoyed a recent essay on aging and fashion in the Washington Post, “Why I gave up on ‘flattering’ clothing,” by Alison Gary, the editor of the style blog Wardrobe Oxygen. 

Now her style story is not the same as mine, but I think many of my readers will appreciate her journey. Here are some excerpts:

When I turned 40, I started to slowly question my choices, easing up on some of those hard-and-fast rules. I worked so hard and for so long to fit my shape into the ideal of my Barbies in their Scotch tape-cinched Kleenex dresses. I was exhausted.

Some rules I broke out of necessity. After I gave birth to my daughter, I developed plantar fasciitis and couldn’t wear heels. I tried. Lord, I tried. It went away, and I went back to heels — and then developed a fallen arch. I have now embraced my collection of Birkenstocks, brogues, flats and funky sneakers.

[W]e are square pegs and a lot of fashion is round holes. We try to shove ourselves into those round holes with compression garments, uncomfortable shoes, and over-shopping thinking there’s that perfect something that will make us suddenly chic. Style comes from within you, not within your closet. You are fabulous just the way you are. You deserve clothing that doesn’t require so much effort and so little payback.

And finally:

The older I get, the better a relationship I have with my body. I no longer want to punish it for not fitting an ideal, but pamper it for how well it’s supported me all these years. 

To read the entire piece:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/30/why-i-gave-up-flattering-clothing/?utm_term=.3e05ac6bc94b

With Gratitude to Poet Elizabeth Onusko

The World’s Oldest Person

BY ELIZABETH ONUSKO

has died. She attributed her longevity

to divorce and raw eggs,

which she ate daily.

A previous record holder

had no idea why she’d lived so long.

Another credited the Lord; still another

cited getting enough sleep. (They’re primarily

women.) Moisturizer, home cooking,

kindness. Hard work. Expensive lingerie.

A former world’s oldest man claimed

the secret was joy. Minding your own business.

Bowling, fishing, great-great-grandkids.

Many lived for decades alone.

One got her hair done on Tuesdays.

One took a job as a housekeeper at ninety.

Every night she set her table

before eating a plate of pasta.

She was buried with a photograph of her son,

who’d died in infancy. Some had the title

for hours, others for months

or years. They gave interviews, greeted fans.

One declared there was nothing left

to accomplish. Another lamented that

it had gone so fast. Their birth records

were hard to come by, if they even existed.

One wasn’t sure what day she was born,

but her marriage license confirmed the year.

They fought for women’s suffrage,

endured Jim Crow, lost count

of wars. Most passed quickly

and peacefully. The person who lived

to the greatest confirmed age thus far

was a chain-smoker

who quit when she could no longer see

well enough to light a cigarette.

She wanted to go to the moon.

She ate two pounds of chocolate each week.

(Published in The Sun, August 2018)