Autumn reminds me of change and passing time. My acquaintance with this season is a pleasant, calm sort of familiarity. As the saying goes, “This is not my first rodeo.”
I am growing into a contentment in this time of life that matches this season perfectly. As a creative spirit trained in scientific method, I enjoy finding the perfect metaphor or frame for processes or events. Nothing exists without context, and finding the right context with which to present a bit of information helps expand the audience who can understand and use that bit of information.
When I look at women’s culture and attempt to describe aspects of it in my writing, I employ these framing methods. In my recent attempts to discuss the stage of life I am entering I felt the rightness of using autumn as a metaphor, but something was not clicking or fitting as I tried to plug women’s imagery into the metaphor.
I rejected the traditional, rather derogatory, depiction of someone at my stage of life as a crone quite some time ago, well before I entered this wonderfully faceted and sage time of life. I also rejected the term midlife that is currently enjoying significant use in online communities. I sincerely doubt that I will live to be over 115 years of age, and I would have to do this, if I was at a midpoint of my life.
How we visualize ourselves shapes attitude, influences energy, and touches many of the ways we project ourselves into the world. I am not a dried up hag or crone. Life energy courses through me in a different way than it did at other times of life, but it is a vibrant, kinetic aspect of my being. I am plump to overflowing with life energy.
“The sere and yellow leaf” per Shakespeare, connotes and evokes nothing off-putting or hideous, as neither should a time of life. In a conscious effort to draw no boundaries through the use of religious imagery, rather to bridge barriers, I do not propose using Goddess terminology to replace maiden, matron, crone terminology.
So, for lack of any term more apt, I am autumnal.
Launching Amid the Chaos of Creativity
We’re launching! Does that mean everything works well on the site. Nope. Please, please, please let me know if you encounter a sign-up that doesn’t work or a link that leads to no where. I am setting up this site myself, because, well, that is just how I do things. I fully plan to have this venture expand and Editor and Publisher will not always mean solopreneur for WLP, but for now it does. So if you like the concept, the site, or me, help me out and give me some feedback. You may use the contact form. I will be truly grateful. Thanks.
Launching entails…
Setting a launch date for a website is quite different from a bricks and mortar establishment opening. Putting out the open sign is a huge (as the Donald would say.)
1. What this really means for me is that I set a deadline for myself to have this site up and running and be in a position to start stocking the shelves, so to speak.
2. Somewhere deep inside me is a long ago suppressed perfectionist. I no longer try to achieve perfection, but I still am prone to procrastination. I find that I have to set deadlines for myself or nothing gets done.
3. Initially I set a deadline of the Summer Solstice for opening/launching, but it was just too soon after acquiring the software and developing the overall vision. So, having learned the difference between procrastination and adjusting project timelines, I said, “Well Summer Solstice was obviously too soon. I will not beat myself up for missing a deadline. I will just aim for a more realistic date, Autumnal Equinox.
Why seasonally anchored dates?
Well, this launch date is only partially linked to the change of the seasons. I also worked from a list of auspicious dates for the launch of a business per a Chinese astrological calendar. First it gave me a way to remember and bound the event. And women of the world are not just western. The information we are creating is creating global change. So why not throw in some eastern influence? As a creative I find that I need to create context in order to remember something or bring something to life. Because I grew up in touch with the land and agricultural seasons I find the turning of the seasons to be my elemental unit of time. Days weave into other days and weeks into other weeks, but seasons have a scent, a light, and even flavors associated with them that allows me to recall when something happened by the context of the memory. Today’s context is the fall season that officially begins tomorrow.
Over the next 10 days we are opening the doors to this project. I will Periscope and we will have Twitter and Facebook Chats. There will be a give-a-way or two. Mainly we will get the momentum going, and the context.
Welcome to the Women’s Legacy Project.
They Could Not Have Known
Today America remembers attacks on our eastern shores that transpired 9/11/2001. This anniversary in 2015, the 14th anniversary, has many people focusing on children who were born on that day.
On Sept. 11, 2001, 13,238 children were born in the United States, according to the Division of Vital Statistics. Today one of those children, Emily Berta, opened the New York Stock Exchange as an ambassador for the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.
These children will be impacted by the date of their birth for as long as they live. One never knows what legacy they will leave. Accidents of birth can influence legacy as much as any planned event or deed.
September 11th in Tucson is not quite like the date in other places. A Tucson girl, Christina-Taylor Green, was born that day. Her best known quote is recounted in this Arizona Daily Star piece:
When Christina-Taylor met a little girl her age living in a group home, she told her family: “We are so blessed. We have the best life.”
Christina-Taylor Green was featured in Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 on page 41 as Christina Taylor from Maryland. Her family then moved from Maryland to Arizona. The 10th Anniversary edition of the book, Faces of Hope 10 Years Later: Babies Born on 9/11, is dedicated to Christina-Taylor, who was murdered in an act of domestic terrorism in which a madman attempted to assassinate United States Congressperson Gabrielle Giffords.
The children of 9/11 will reinvent memorials into hope-filled days of action.
I personally cannot condone the ritual observance of days of tragedy, nor the militarization of remembrances. Legacy is what we make it. As a Tucsonan, as a matriot (feminine of patriot,) as an American, I choose to honor the lives lost, by working to decrease violence in all forms everywhere.
I pray, “Christina-Taylor, sweet Angel of Tucson, help us learn to live in love and peace.” Help us stop war, stop gun violence, stop religious violence. May the violence of the boundary markers of your life, a legacy you did not choose, never be repeated.
—-
As an aside – No I did not know C-TG. I have a friend who loved her dearly. I knew many of the people injured or killed that January day. No I did not know anyone killed in the Towers or the Pentagon or the flights; I know people who were in the Towers and lived. My step daughter worked in Lower Manhattan then in a building that was evacuated and walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When we lived in Arlington, my other daughter went to Junior High with kids who lost a parent when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
Behind the Scenes in Life and Dreams
I have been very busy working on my Women’s Legacy Project launch. While this is essential work to continue upon the writing path I have been following and then clearing and creating over the last couple of years, I have had to neglect some things to focus on others. Life can be cruel. It gives us energy to pursue mindless passions in our youth, and once our passions turn to mindful pursuits our energy usage also has to be mindful because it too is limited.
I have to share the bare bones of a dream I had. My dreams are sometimes summaries of very complex analyses I have apparently been performing for quite some time until my brain can spit out summary images as an icon, symbol, and index rich abstract of my thoughts on a subject. I doubt I am the only one who does this, although I may be the only one who writes about it.
THE DREAM
Walking through a library that symbolizes life. A young man in the persona of a well known news anchor found some loose floor boards that led to a hidden section of a library.
Several of us, a small group, made our way, climbed down on HVAC pipes and rigging, into an older stacks area where hidden resources were being accessed by a few dedicated researchers.
We wandered through these archives that were store houses of copies off essential documents and resources which the common library users did not access due to preservation practices. Some areas were dusty with disuse but other areas showed signs of eddies of activity. We went deeper and deeper through the dark, close archives until these archives were no longer composed of paper but took the form of ceramic ware.
A woman who worked in the upper levels of library but had access to and awareness of the lower archival areas turned out to be a poacher, married to a survivalist even though she maintained documents about and access to information about the delicate ecosystems from which her family poached.
As the dream developed it became evident that whole families lived in, or had taken refuge in, the lower, difficult to access, archives. I then found a different way back up to the main levels but it still required climbing pipes and infrastructure to exit.
On the ground level, where windows were still obscured it became evident that there was an angry crowd of men, camo-clad fundamentalist men, hurling insults and rocks at women within the building.
Then a scene change, for time, showed the archives were in a war zone and damage was evident.
The horrific end of the dream found me hurling hand grenades to defend the archives. We turned the poacher over to the authorities and then we also sent chemical-agent contaminated individuals outside to infiltrate another group, similar to the rock throwers in their fundamentalist fanaticism, but who were on the opposite side. Both of these groups wanted to destroy us and our archives.
Then I woke up.
Next post: interpretation of this dream.
A Legacy of One – Loss of Siblings
You were close. Maybe you could not stand each other. Or perhaps you were indifferent. Sibling relationships are as complex as any relationship in life, or death.
As I write this I am 58 years old. At one time this might have been considered old. I do not feel old. I am not old. Old is always 20 years beyond where you are. Old for me would be when I am older than 75 and also in ill health. 75 need not be old. Old presents as an attitude.
My mother lived to be 92 years of age. I turned 50 a month before she passed. Her younger sister also lived to be 92. I work under the assumption that my body can probably last that long too. Good genes. Probably.
But when my father died at age 71 I was in my late twenties, it was 1986. When I rode back to my mother’s house with the youngest of my four brothers from the hospital shortly after our Dad died, I remember saying to him, “I can’t believe I am going to have to go through this five more times.” My brother looked at me and said, “Oh, I’ve never thought of that. You are right.”
Those five times have happened. April 1998. March 2005. June 2007. November 2014. July 2015.
I am not alone, my husband and daughter are my family now. But I miss my family, the one with which I grew up.
There is no good help source for dealing with the loss of multiple siblings. The only person I ever met who talked about this was my neighbor who lived to be 105. Her baby sister lived to be almost 100. They had each other for almost a century.
I will live the rest of my life without parents or brothers. It could be another 30+ years when I will be the only one of my generation left living. Yes, there are cousins, but I did not know them well, and most of them, too, just like my brothers, were much older than me.
From time to time I will post about sibling loss. Someone should.