There is a popular illusion that as we age we become more peaceful. It is partially true but here I am, hustling to market myself. My first book, My Near Life Experience, birthed many inner and outer dynamics of my life, the life of a rebel or an adventuress. Slowly slowly I mine today’s marketing mysteries. I have to learn to set the story of my life in the high speed winds of social networking.
I muse: To market to market to buy a fat pig. (Is that why all the marketing? To buy the fat pig?) Home again home again riggity jig.
That familiar old verse matches the rhythm of my life’s dance. I leap forward, then hold back. Sometimes I am bold, but then I get all shy, or so inward I’m paralyzed. I take huge risks that alternate with extreme caution. Or I flow from feisty into numb. It gets hard to figure out when the dance gets mature. Fantasies about the fat pig fade. Greater demands move through me. Like creative expression, or the soothing voices of my soul and spirit, love and evolution amongst friends and family, and clients. That’s where the peace comes in. They make the product. Like my beloved courageous clients, they measure their lives against their higher purpose. Way beyond the markets’ fat pig. I get to help them empower their search for Who AM I?
And my own. Love provides the wind under my wings. The gifts of friendship and love relationships spiral through my life like smoke from a campfire. My eyes water. What have I learned?
I appreciate family of origin and lineage. Tide pools of karmic and emotional trysts weave us together into ourselves in this lifetime. Sometimes, writhing to be ourselves, sometimes wanting to express a deepening sense of our true nature, the family fabric tears. But other times the wine corks pop, we sing, share, and eat glad to be together. I love my family so much. For all the distances our personalities create there is no one as deeply connected for good or ill! As some are now on what is lovingly called “the other side” I get to see at times, their releasing themselves from karma or trysts or help myself and parents out of their clutches.
Then husband reviews. Through our adventures into one another, I see how morsels of myself refined and defined themselves through these men, as we lurched through our shared homes to the endings of our years together. As dreams burst and expectations lose their luster, and even as the people themselves die, we deepen in a rich stew with grief. My personal truth shakes off its torpor. At times I can drift into the dream-scapes that lead to my marriages. Such adventures! Like Mark and I. As the years traveled through us, we learned and grew, grappled with ideals as community development workers, or sixties radicals. We always wanted to change the world. The sixties fervor ended in a number of historical deaths, and in my world so did my marriage. What did it all mean, and where was the love embedded in the drama? An immature love I am sure. He sought a heart based truth during his dying months, as I seek it now many years later.
We are moving through a time as extreme as the 60’s were, observing the corruption and enslavement of populations to voracious greed. Nothing new but picking up fervor these days as the election primaries feature crazy antics and The Book of Revelation is ripe with the evidence of the deceit and egregious domination of people by those with money and power. People just don’t know how enslaved we are. Some of us are wanting to step forward again, in synch with the eyes and the hearts of young ones… with the drive to end war, enlighten masses, share our shrinking world? The drive and the energy comes from deep within, or deepening within.
What is the love? Where is it? How does it ripen? I ask myself some more questions. Am I learning enough? Am I contributing? And is the only possible contribution, I mean with any true value, the support we give to a world to refine and define our soul’s existence.
But in aging, I get to ask a lot more questions of myself. What has it all lead to? To help one another become more and more fulfilled?
I just want to go to God in great clothes….shining.
