When is enough?

What to do with my one wild and aging life?

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

~~ Henry David Thoreau

OK, Henry. Yes. Today. Only Today. I am enough. I have enough. I’ve done enough. The rest is gravy.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~~ Dylan Thomas

OK, yes, Dylan, as we approach oblivion, give it your most glorious self. There are no laurels. The past is nothing. The ever diminishing future is everything. Burn bright!

Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

~~ George Bernard Shaw

Oh, GB, this has been my rallying cry for years, you sexist old sot. What glory to burn with purpose, to be the sun.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise

~~ Maya Angelou

Oh Maya, while I was not a slave, I was chattel. May I cast off, finally, the slavery of being a woman born in 1945, and raised to be second, a rib, a help meat, a chair of the ladies auxiliary like my mother - but never powerful. Can I be the dreams of my grandmother, a Suffrigist in the 1930s, a Communist, born in Odessa and never really leaving the motherland. May I, in these years left to me, rise and rise and rise.

Breathing in, I stoke the embers of my life.

Breathing out, I rest in the eternal now

Breathing in, I create

Breathing out, I walk in green pastures and restore my soul.

So which is it, wise ones?

Every time I sit to write what still is alive in me, wanting to be born, my heart pounds and I wonder if this is it, I’m dying.

Every time I toss off a little post on Facebook, I rest in the easy likes.

Kaija Saariaho, right before she died of a brain tumor, wrote the opera, Innocence, about a school shooting, that premieres has its US premiere in San Francisco this month. God do I want to write exquisitely about my life and the times I’ve lived through - in poetry, comedy, memoir, a play even, something that pulls the whole tangle of me out into the light.

What do I think would happen if asked no one but myself if I should, could, might, maybe, please free myself from the nets I’m still caught in?

Oh, but, I am enough. I have enough. I’ve done enough. I know enough. I’ve said enough and wouldn’t it be lovely if I could get this monkey off my back?

Can I hear an amen from whoever of you has this in you? Rise? Rest?

E.B. White said: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Amen.

Bucket List?

Or is this just a bucket list, not so grand really, just a few things to do and places to go before I die?

My bucket list used to have just one item: make sure nothing beautiful in the world perishes.

That’s enough to ruin your day, but oh, I burned bright under that command.

I think of Granny D, peace marching across the country at 90

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I think of Peace Pilgrim, who walked the country for peace in her 80s

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I also think of the 1980 movie Resurrection, written by a friend, Lew Carlino, where Ellen Burstyn played a woman who developed healing powers after a car crash. She didn’t mean to but attracted multitudes seeking healing - and then disappeared. In the last scene we see her running a rundown gas station in the middle of nowhere. A couple in a motorhome pulls in for gas. She learns they are taking their son, who is deathly ill, to doctors. We see her kneel in front of him, embrace him and we know he is healed.

I somehow also want to disappear like that, to evaporate all the pretenses of the ego, shine with the essential self, no agenda yet present for what might come my way.

Alan Watts wrote a book titled: Cloud Hidden Whereabouts Unknown. Yes. That!

While less lofty and wise, I sometimes think about just boon-docking in my motorhome, meeting people along the way. Nothing fancy. Or stay settled like now - with a house, 3 roommates, a huge garden, a cat, 2 chickens, and a mouse who lives under my stove and eats greens i tuck under the bottom drawer.

What shall I do with the remains of my one wild and precious life?

Isn’t that the question now? Yes?

What is the promise of this time in life? Rest and reflection and inner peace? Letting the muse take the reins and run with the creative winds?

Of course, other’s wise, pithy quotes are just breadcrumbs from their lives. We never hear their morning complaints or the opinions of their children, so who knows how complete any 3-sentence wisdom is. Yet, these breadcrumbs help us orient - even thought they are self-contradictory. They are divining rods.

For now, I do a bit of many things each week, following some inner promptings that might lead to the garden, the journal, events, dancing, woods or beach walking, volunteering, exercise, sleeping with my cat, the stage, travel, and often just sitting in my lifeguard chair on my balcony, up in the treetops with the birds, evaporating into the sky. I’m privileged to approach the door of 80 with enough of everything, really.

I have enough. I am enough. I know enough. I do enough. I did enough. I’ve said enough. But in fact, I have decades (or years or weeks) more to fill with passion and peace and taking care of all the critters in my house and yard and village, me included.