The Way of Things

Watercolor of the Cailleach by Sarah West

sII'm over fifty now -- fifty-one in fact.  Right on time, or so they tell me, I hear the insistent voice in my head. It feels like discordant gong ringing -- "Now is the time," it says. "Right now. You won't have more chances."

I've heard the clanging before, but it was a whisper then. When I turned thirty, it briefly paid a visit on the cusp of getting married. When I was six-months pregnant with my first child, feeling full and ripe, I knew then that I was quickly approaching a time where I would lose myself to motherhood. Others warned me. "Do everything now," they said. "You won't have another chance for twenty years!" And, as is the way with oxytocin and falling in love, the sounds of warning disappeared into a haze of sleepless nights and the light touch of new life.

But now, right now, it won't leave me. I ignore it, and the insistence grows louder. It spills out into my conversation with others my age, and I see in their eyes... yes, they too hear it. They don't hear my interior and noisy demands , but I can tell that they hear their own.

This cacophony seems to demand of me to define and accomplish goals and wants, dreams and sore-spots of longing. When I ponder these things and make a vow to set things right, the urgency mutes temporarily.

But what do I want? Isn't that an enormous question, loaded with possibility and expectation? Mid-century birthdays feel full, like a peach, sweet with the awareness of the short duration of the season of such fruit. I'm ripening again, just as I did while pregnant. What do I have to get done in the years I have left? 

So far, I can identify a few things: 

• I want a space of my own. A room would do; a small cabin would be better. I've lived -- as an introvert -- my entire adult life without a room that I could create as my private retreat. Decorating is entirely the domain of my husband, and each of my other family members has their place: a room or an office. But I never have had such a place, even in college. I work in the constant chaos of my living room, and I have shared a bedroom with my spouse for 25 years. I have no doors to lock, no privacy, no ability to create the colors and textures that feel like possibility and courage, there to inspire and uplift me. I am jealous -- and feel silly for feeling it -- of my daughter's ability to hang her paintings on her bedroom walls. It is trite to say it, but I want "a room of one's own." This is for starters.
• I want to write and finally bathe in sunlight the stories that dwell deep inside in my echo-chamber of a mind.
• I want to walk my ancestral lands and know the seasons. I want to breathe their smells, hear the birdsong. I want to find the ancient paths and explore them without concern for time. I want to taste the air and sea, hear the rocks speaking in their slow and cantankerous tongues. I want to drink water erupting to the surface from the holy places below. I want to feel the sun ask me why I roam, and then answer it with flowers. I want to heal myself with the plants that my body somehow knows is the cure for the incurable malaise of being adrift and rootless, of a longing that I cannot name and don't fully understand.
• I want a community of semi-feral spirits who know me better than I know myself, who ask of me to do the things I've not dreamed of yet; those things I want but do not yet know that I want it. May they be quirky and funny, passionate and kind, love my children, and be eager to both mother and be mothered as old-age comes knocking at the door.
• I want simplicity to surround me, in every way that simplicity can matter, and kindness to infuse my every interaction. Is it even possible to want such things?
• I want to acknowledge the crone, the witch, the hag in myself and develop her fully. I'm still learning to accept her presence, but she's been by my side my whole life, her arms on my shoulders. I always knew I would become like her, but now that the time is at hand, I have learned how to welcome her completely.

​The problem with all this mid-life wanting is that it changes your relationships, with everyone, almost in every way. These insistent demands that you change things up to get right with yourself also demands a lot of from the people who love you. They watch you wrestle with demons of your past neglected inner life, and sometimes it isn't a cheerful process and makes demands on them too. And they didn't sign up for that shit! Your messy needs and life-changes rattle cages and smash roles and illusions carefully constructed by time and habit and pattern. For the most part, this is not a fun process.

Tell me, friends, do you feel it? How do you bear it? How do you not spend your days crying with both gratitude for the knowing and the fear of it being left undone? How do you negotiate your life intertwined with others, their needs and wants, their own banging gong ringing in their ears? How does something this messy come clean? I am told it does, with time, but I see no clear path.

Perhaps having an unclear path that is the way of things, or so I'm told. But it sure would help right now to have some way to walk, a hint at a path under fallen leaves and decay, to steady my feet in the dimly-lit forest of this time of my life.