Bucket List with a Big Helping of Comfort and Stability

American popular culture has made it  fashionable to have a bucket list as a requiem for one's youth. And to then go out and do whatever crazy dang thing is on the list.

This presumably shows character.

I did as many of the dang crazy things I could afford when I was younger. Quite a few are X-rated and others I refuse to acknowledge because my answer may incriminate me. My adventures have been naughty enough so that I am not going to tell them, and on the other side, sufficiently intellectual and fantasist to bore you.

A bucket list, it seems, benefits from the inclusion of extreme sports — parachute jumping, rock climbing, deep sea diving — as proof one is going to live every moment.

Even packing off to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in India is acceptable, showing adventurousness and intercultural curiosity.

My bucket list does not have an extreme sports or jaw-dropping excursions. I will jump out of an airplane wearing a parachute the day a terrorist points a gun at me and says, “Jump or I’ll shoot.”

My bucket list is simple.

I want to live in a house in Florida where I can have dogs. I want to have two or three, and I want to rescue dogs, particularly poodles.

I would love to have purebreds; they are such a joy. But at this point in aging and maturity, I feel called to relieve some suffering.

I want the house to be energy efficient, secure, in a neighborhood with some businesses and nice vintage homes, perhaps a few mid-century modern buildings that are such a delightful part of Florida architecture.

I want to be part of a dog training and/or rescue group, attend Jung and Sufi events here and on the Eastern seaboard, perhaps other places. Find someone with whom to attend jazz concerts.

I’d like to visit a friend in England, visit Glastonbury and other places known for their ley lines, get into Ireland and Scotland, explore for a month at least. Visit France one last time. Not sure if I want to return to Spain. Would like to see Jung’s home in Switzerland and experience that country.

I’d like to make a good friend or two.

I’d like to spend more time on my health, make exercise a priority.

Get away from the TV. Spend more time with music, reading, writing.

The simple life.

Free Verse: Growing Older

One thinks for a moment

At the beginning

That life will be orchestras playing at weddings

Cake and bridesmaids’ bouquets

Nights a little tipsy

Or filled with hallucinations of a garden of stuffed animals

The roar of an expressway like a waterfall in the distance.

Driving in cars to airports

To pick up luggage filled with grass.

Boys who want to run their hands up your leg.

Sweet kisses, deep and filled with longing

And lust.

One thinks this will last forever.

Enjoy being young, we are told.

We can see the physical changes.

The bodies grown wrinkled,

A bit stooped,

Slower, a bit musty.

But it’s not the body changes that dim the orchestra

And the street lamps wetly off the pavement.

One stares with far-off eyes into an unknown distance

Wondering where the others went who came before

And wandering off darkling into the everylasting night.

We’ve heard the orchestra before

Danced our dances.

No more young men who want to run their hands up my legs.

No more sweet kisses that last until dawn.

Only night.

Only the fading strains of the orchestra that is getting ready to pack its gear.

Semi-Retirement, The Fork in the Road, and Choosing Truth over Comfort

Recently I have realized that I have saved enough to revert back to being an adjunct professor. I enjoy working on the Fashion After 50 website; I have additional online teaching possibilities that I don't fully use.

But I like comfort. I like the extras that working full-time allows, even when the restrictions -- no vacations except a week (five days) after every four-month term,  have to punch a time clock like a kid on her first job, responsibilities that crowd out my creative work and make it more challenging to exercise -- cramp the possibilities of growing fully into who I am.

As so often is the case, a serendipitous nudge seems to point in a certain direction.

Writes Alice Gardner, in her wonderful little book, Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice:

"If there was one factor most responsible for the continued awakening of those who seek the truth, it would have to be that of consistently choosing to seek truth over the comforts that appear to be available along the way.

"Each stage of development that we move through has its own kind of comforts inherent in it and we may be tempted to settle for those comforts instead of some far-away-sounding spiritual destination that mind isn't even sure exists. (p. 129)

 "By what means can we avoid these kinds of diversions?

"There is, of course, not a method, but only a cultivating of an awareness of our deepest intentions and a willingness to look inside ourselves to find our own most authentic responses to each moment.

"If there was anything that might be called a method to deal with how to make the little decisions in life without compromising truth for comfort, it would be to unearth this internal navigation system [that each person has] and be true to it and to ourselves in all of the little day-to-day decisions that come along, as well as the occasional major decisions." (p. 130)

That seems to be an answer of sorts, and I have a timeline for easing back into adjunct work in a way that will cause, hopefully, the least financial disruption to my goals. 

Recommended Blog: Casting Jewels for Readers

I have been preparing to launch a website (details when ready) and neglecting this blog. It does not get much traffic anyway.

Today, I scuttled on over to Velvet Sacks from Ronni Bennett's Times Goes By, the best blog about aging anywhere.

Velvet Sacks refers to the little pouches in which women often keep small items of precious jewelry. As it turns out, Velvet Sacks is often about two topics most precious to me -- dogs and Louisiana.

During a time of emotional confusion, I bought a Florida condo apartment that does not allow dogs. Dogs were my most valued companions for more than 30 years. Honestly, what was I thinking to make such a lame decision?

I was not able to take care of my beloved companions and had placed two in good homes, thanks to my connections with dog rescue and dog training people. How could I have believed that I would live a dogless future forevermore. Now the value of property has decreased so much, I appear to be stuck here much longer than I dreamed.

As for Louisiana, like so many artists and oddballs, I've been attracted to New Orleans since I was young. I believe I read Dinner at Antoine's when I was a teenager. I lived the summer of 2004 in the Lower Garden District. The flood of 2005 tore my heart out -- as does the prospect of a dogless old age.

Enough of my whining. For some jewels, stop by Velvet Sacks.

Godddesses for Our Times: Jean Shindo Bolen Tells Archetypal Stories to Inspire Aging Women

Bolen, Jean Shinoda. (2001). Goddesses in older women: archetypes in women over 50: becoming a juice crone. New York: HarperCollins.

Bolen casts a cross-cultural net to find goddess stories to inspire and provide templates for aging women in the United States and other Western cultures. She also provides a mature perspective on the stories of Greek goddesses covered in her earlier book, Goddesses in Every Woman.

The parts of the book are about goddesses or icons of wisdom; goddeses of anger, laughter and compassion; the update on familiar Greek goddesses Artemis, Athena, Hestia (who also appears in the wisdom section), Hera, Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite; and a final section of forming circles of wisewomen. Bolen argues for a cultural renovations of the word crone. The word has long been associated with the Halloween witch with a wart on her nose, a pointed chin, and yellowed baggy skin, like the hags in Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

As a communication scholar, I do not see this term rising like Lazarus from the grave to connote juiciness. Combatting ageism in our youth-worshipping culture is a challenging enough without saddling these efforts with a timeworn word of such negative connotations.

Bolen is an effective story-teller who relates the stories of each archetype through the lens of psychology. She creates mental pictures into which each woman can project images of herself in the broadly-defined roles and qualities of each goddess icon. I found it especially interesting to read her interpretations of the biblical Sophia as a goddess of mystical and spiritual women; of Hindu Kali as a goddess of angry destruction and regeneration (the cycle of life and creation); Baudo as a goddess of bawdy mirth; and Chinese Kuan Yin and the Roman Catholic Virgin Mary as goddesses of compassion. Today’s aging woman needs stories about admirable women whose qualities offer templates for maturity that do not depend on cosmetic surgery and desperate efforts to avoid aging.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to any woman who is looking for models for aging with grace and maturity. These iconic stories tap into timeless energy patterns that Carl Jung called archetypes. Through these mysterious psychological resonances, we may discover blueprints for our future.

Jung Love Review: Estes' Classic Starts My Journey

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves. New York: Ballentine.

For a long time -- since 2004 -- ideas had been burbling around in my head about women, creativity, and building a new identity in later life, in a society that doesn't value post-menopausal females. Reading Estes in February 2007 was part of my probing; I didn't know that it would start me off in a new direction, nor that, come autumn, I would barely have scratched the surface of my hero's journey.


Estes deconstructs old fairytales and folk stories for the wisdom they contain about how social forces dismember women's psyche, creativity, and central soul identity. The points that most impressed me in this book are:

• The wild female nature is creative and connected to spirit. Estes schema is that soul is a universal force that incarnates physically to know itself. Spirit inhabits the body and is the messenger between ego and soul. But ego is limited, afraid, and selfish. It sees the light of soul and entraps spirit, wanting to be close to it.
• Entrapment includes trying to be the good girl/woman, behaving to please others, giving up art for money and things, a marriage and children.
• Eventually, one must connect to the wildness within to be whole.

I recommend this book to any women who wants to know herself better.