nina turns 60

solstice

Usually fall is my favorite season, but this was a hard one, and I'm happy for the psychological turning point offered by the solstice. My basic struggle right now is to simply make the shift from an outward focused sense of goodness, my own goodness and worthiness, to an inward one. To base how I feel about myself, and by extension everything else, on some interior quality rather than on someone telling me I am a good girl. Yes, it's can take over 50 years to get beyond that. And I've only just now realized in a deep way how all of my little addictions, from coffee to sugar to obsessive social media reading to getting attention from a man, are just ways of COPING with my own basic and fundamental unhappiness and keep me from really taking action that would help me find a more satisfying life that would then not need all those little surface pleasures because there would be deep pleasure, true satisfaction.

Who knew my inner resources were so weak? I can't believe in a god to pray to. Nor that I have spiritual guides or angels or any of that. I return to meditation, to Buddhist thinking, which appeals to both my mind and my heart. I think about making art, about my writing. Writing will save me, it always has, but even that ends up being a quest for approval, for love. If I write well enough, will you love me? 

And then, there's Al, and that relationship and the ways that it has been both healthy and not-healthy for me. I am still grieving the loss of my lover at the same time as continuing my friendship with him, the daily correspondence. I have so few friends these days, and he knows me pretty well, knows my daily rhythms, my joys and fears. 

One more day of work, and then a small break, the holiday, the family traditions, the family shrinking. Nothing to do know but to keep going. As Phil would say, left foot right foot.

transit

So many transitions all around me. Kimberly selling her house, her and Paul's house. Paul gone for almost three years now. Not just my own child, but all the high school seniors in town, these beautiful, vibrant young people, are getting ready to take flight, and this place will be emptier and quieter and a little bleak without them. I do not know if I can stay here. And then my small heart trying to figure out if it has a home inside me or anywhere else.

The wind howls, vents rattle, garbage cans blow over. Coffee is not enough. Every surface in the house covered in papers, books, napkins, electronica, pens, crumbs, lists of things to do, old water glasses. My mother is losing words, not just names, but objects, sometimes whole conversations. My sister, scared and sad, lashes out at me for not doing enough. Then she flies away to her home across the country. She won't be back for months. My dad unstable, falls down hard enough to need his scalp stapled back together, but has no concussion. His systems are all go. 

The thing that wasn't supposed to happen, that seemed ridiculous and impossible, has happened. Nobody knows where we are going to end up. But everybody agrees we are going somewhere new and dark. I realize how wholly unprepared I am and how little it matters. My small heart hasn't stopped beating.

still

 A shift in a friendship. A lover lost. A lover turning toward another, turning toward her with a different quality of interest that he never held for me, and that I had craved deeply. Wanting to rise above the ego hurt of it, the humiliation of being put aside for another, yet knowing all of that hurt is created by my jacked-up monkey mind and doesn't have to keep scraping me raw if I can learn how to dive deeper into the healthier parts of my mindself. After two years of daily communication, tens of thousands of emails, I am accustomed to his electronic presence in my life. It has sustained me, I have let myself grow dependent upon it. The monthly visits, across water and borders, added an exciting, tangible, and very physical layer to our connection, but it was the daily wishes of good morning and good night, the sharing of what we were cooking for dinner, what was going on at work, that became an essential part of my well being.

I have pulled back for several days, needing to cry and rage and live inside my hurt for awhile so that I could then take it off like a heavy coat you take off after you come inside. Because here, within the warmth of home, I know that the things that I think I need from him are already right here. I know that I am still his friend.