The Pits and Pieces

  If you’ve been reading this blog then you likely know that I started a few new things during the pandemic (blogging being one of them). I’ve been nurturing and expanding my creative side while edging towards retirement. Aging and older women’s role in society has often been on my mind. Recently I watched a series of online talks on a summit about “Reframing Aging”, hosted by Maria Shriver.   The guests she interviewed ranged from Jaime Lee Curtis (With her short, sassy grey hair, she tells it like it is. She doesn’t look at her naked body when she steps out of the shower, finding it easier to accept her body if she doesn’t look at it critically) to Vanessa Williams (ex-beauty queen who won’t rule out cosmetic surgery) to the writer Anne Lamott who is so witty and forthright you can’t help but lean in, listen and nod your head in agreement. “It’s an inside job,” she says, among other things. And of course, women in my age group, have known for a while that it’s an inside job. We k

  Several years ago, I went to a weekend yoga retreat. I even consented to sharing a room with two other women which was completely out of my comfort zone. As was the yoga retreat, since I tend to view these things with some skepticism. Too much enforced positivity and bendy-twisty contortions and no wine! On the first night we were invited to sit on our mats and write down our intention for the weekend. Thinking my scribble would be for my eyes only, I wrote: ‘Let go of the fear of my radiation and what may still be in my body.’   I had completed a series of radiation sessions a couple of months earlier. We were then asked to fold our slips and place them in the centre of the circle. What? They were going to be read? My defences sprung on high alert. Shouldn’t they have mentioned this earlier? Never trust yogis and gurus! Those were the thoughts racing through my mind.   I felt deceived. If I’d known, I might have written something like: ‘Learn to relax and meditate daily.’  

  A zoom-friend who lives on the west coast writes poetry and promised to read a sonnet at our next online gathering. Do I really know what a sonnet is ? I asked myself (quietly, not aloud, reluctant to display my ignorance). I might have known at one time, when studying Shakespeare in school (‘ Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day ’). But what did I really know of the rules and composition of a sonnet? Google stepped in and informed me of sonnet rules: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Why not try writing one myself?   I tried painting during the pandemic, never mind that I didn’t know acrylics from watercolours, a flat brush from a fan brush. Why not a sonnet? I’d also recently heard on an online conference summit that poetry and laughter are two things guaranteed to engage the right brain. Not much laughing going on in the world right now. So, poetry then. In her blog Transactions With Beauty, Shawna LeMay has some links to beautiful poetry ( here ). So, on an evening this week, while

I’ve been in a pensive, brooding mood. News of bombs falling on civilians and nuclear plants will do that. How are we still doing this, going to war, in 2022? Have we learned nothing? How does a species who can travel into space and look at planet Earth from above, still have it in their hearts and minds to destroy each other, communities, cities, with weapons? No answers. I turn to philosophy to quiet my mind, to contemplate the questions about the horrors that are being inflicted. But I find no answers there, only more questions. Walking then, my great solace. The thing that has been my constant go-to.  Painting perhaps. It’s a way to lose myself in creating. Reading. But I flit from book to book, three on the go, none quite completed. I need light reading, something to transport me, take me to another place.  And yet, guilt, even as I am transported. How can my life be so easy, so smooth? What have I done to deserve this? But guilt about the comfort and ease of one’s own life, serve