Thoughts on Turning 60

Major milestone. The big 6-O. New beginnings.

I’m listening to my new iTunes purchase this morning, In the Bleak Midwinter, the Lorenna McKennitt version. Soothing music. I find I choose instrumentals more and more. No words, no voices, so I can listen to my own. How could I have gone these 60 years never having heard this song?

I don’t know who first created the melody. The words were originally written by Christina Rossetti as a Christmas poem for the American magazine, Scribner’s Monthly, in 1872. Do you know Rossetti, sister to the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti? He is one of my favorite Pre-Raphaelites. I’m sure you know his paintings.

 

Anyway, I digress. Turning 60. To most of the world, I’m officially OLD. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just hitting my stride. And what a nice feeling that is. SO much is different now. I am physically and mentally in a place that I have spent a lifetime searching for but never knew how to find. Hell, I didn’t even know what it was that I was looking for, which of course, made all the looking so much harder. And frustrating.

I think that this life I am living right now is truly a gift. A reward so to speak, for all the hard work I put in over the last 60 years: raising six children, taking care of my parents; struggling to make ends meet; living in a house that was in a constant state of disrepair. Oh of course I grumbled and complained and even felt sorry for myself sometimes. There were moments of deep despair. But through it all, I kept moving forward, doing the best I could in the circumstances of the time.

When I was little and under the influence of the Catholic nuns, we were taught to offer it up to God, that we will get our reward in heaven. Somewhere along the way between then and now, I formed my own thoughts and interpretations about God, heaven and earth. I began to believe that this is heaven and we are creators. That heaven’s rewards are not something we work towards, but something we create every day. So I tried each day, even the dark ones, to make my little heaven, here on earth.

Art had been a part of my life all along, but never a way of life.  For so many years I thought of that as being unobtainable. But the Universe/God has a funny way of dropping hints and clues and keys to unopened doors in our way. One of the first rubber stamps I bought was a large one that said, “Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.” (A quote by Alphonse DeLamartine.) At the time I was both elated and shocked that someone else thought the same thing I did. My good-Catholic-girl guilt kicked in (blasphemy!) but I had to have it anyway. It became a touchstone of sorts.

Art became my salvation. It was what got me out of bed in the morning and through my days…doing what was necessary all day with the hope that I would finish up in time for some art time. “This might be the day when I’ll have time to create…”

The rest of the story is pretty well-known by so many of you reading this that I won’t go into it here. And here I am today, at 60, living in a place, both physically and mentally, that I have been moving towards all of my life. I never knew where I was headed, but I just kept taking the next step and looking for those clues and unopened doors that the Universe/God kept putting along the path for me to find.

The key to getting to where you want to be, even when you don’t know where you want to be, is to always move forward as best you can, under the circumstances you’re in, believing that “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.” Luke 12:2

This I know to be true. Heaven is right here on earth, waiting for you.

I want to thank you for listening to me and for making it possible for me to create a life and a living doing what I love…and what I now know with certainty, what I am supposed to do.