Baby Crone

Sure I thought the release was happening as I turned 40.  I don't care what people think, said I, boldly striding into the decade.  So I unleashed my creativity upon the world.  And then, after making the autobiographical Martyred Moms, I proceeded to suck up praise and criticism like a baby starving for milk.   Don't care? my ass!   Narcissism roared its head and I, helplessly it seemed, inflated and deflated according to the circumstances.  It wore me out.  Like a stone on a beach being polished by smashing up against the rocks.   Smash!  ahhh…  Smash!  ahhh…  see?

50 is Smash.  40 was playing around.  At 50, my life shows on my face.  At the movies, they ask me:  Senior or regular?   I can laugh but I  tell you it feels like a punch.  I'm in another category. 

Not that I was ever beautiful, but I certainly knew how to be eye-catching. Now They don't look at me that way.   If They look at me or talk to me at all, it's often because They need something from Mother--or even Granny. geez!  

I remember noticing in my late forties that I was glimpsing a secret parallel universe.  I began to have eyes for elders,  to notice the variations among them, to notice the joy.   Yes, joy.   Do look closely.   In many of Them….in many of Us, you can see death in the eyes.    What is death but intimacy with all of life?  You can see it, fall into it if you dare.  "Freedom's true joy," as they say at OmYoga (by the way, this Institution upon whom I once depended is now gone).  

Free to wear my wrinkles.  Free to be uncool.  Free to be sexual from the inside--a subject not an object.   Free to dance, to play, to abandon legitimacy, to be what I am.  You might think it easy to be What I Am.   I wish it were.   But now, having been kicked out the nest of popular culture, the Baby Crone can find her wings.

Spring 2010 (after turning 50)