Sometimes things seem to align. Right now the writings of several people I read, the comments on my posts, and just knowing and having met many of these women writers in the last year or so convinces me that there is a wisdom brewing.
Many of us write from monikers real, imagined, or somewhere in between out in cyberspace, that suggest midpoints in midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brings the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.
I am OFFICIALLY Years Behind: An Inverse Bucket List
I am officially years behind in “stuff” I have to do. My biggest fear is that I will die before I get the really important stuff done. That is right, I do not fear death.
Digression: I’ve seen the tunnel, felt the love, and have no worries on that front.
But there is so much I want to pour from my bucket. I have to finish the book on being a survivor of medical child abuse and get it published. I have to write a scholarly, flowing, definitive biography of Gene Stratton-Porter. I have to figure out how to make some real money. I have to share the story of rising from the ashes of lifelong depression. I want to write speculative fiction. Those are the biggies, but when I start enumerating the steps that it will take to get these things done along with catching up with ancillary tasks from my D years, that lasted from 1997 to 2007, I have thousands of items on my list. Some of these are putting into the bucket but, most pour from the bucket. There are things I feel I am “supposed” to do before I die. There is no oppressive “should” looming over me , or guilt for that matter.
Digression #2: I boxed up all my guilt, and store that box on a closet shelf.
It is just that I cannot stop thinking up new things to do. My imagination has always gotten me into trouble, but I love the way I think. A creative mind essentially allows us to practice unlikely or impossible things in our heads. If some bizarre situation comes up on us in life, well, out of the box thinkers (who put guilt in boxes) may have gone over some similar, or dissimilar, scenario that spurs a useful thought in the most unusual of situations.
Digression #3 : In fact, I confronted Death in my home’s hallway one night, right outside my daughter’s room, when she was a toddler. No joke. I demanded that the tall dark, cloaked figure, “Get the hell out of my house!” and, for good measure, I repeated the phrase my mother had mentioned that her foremothers had used to confront evil, “Greater is he who is within me, than he who rules the world.” He complied. It worked. But that is another story for another time; telling that story is on my Pitcher List list too.
I do not really like the phrase, “Kick the bucket.” What is wrong with the word “die?” We all do it. It is a natural part of life. I will never understand why a people who so vociferously want to impose their Christian beliefs on others are so afraid of the word “death.” So, in my indubitably obstreperous manner I am creating a Pitcher List of all the things I hope to have pour forth from me before I die, rather than to create a Bucket List things I would like to do before I kick the bucket.
So here it is, the official definition of Pitcher List, according to moi!
Pitcher List |ˈpiCHər| list|
a list created by a person that she or he would like to accomplish and be able to offer to the world as a life experience before the end of his or her life
Just this week I added several items to my list that would be good to cover through web posts or actual websites, so I can share some info that I think people who stumble upon my blog might find useful. The first was to create a website My Body, My Vote that encourages those persons of the Fallopian persuasion to link being a woman who has a body with the act of voting to maintain her self-determination over her own body. (This previous phrase is linked to the as yet nonexistent website, but it will exist soon! I promise.
Digression #4: Notice if you will that I did not use the word “control,” nor the word “power,” because there are no unidirectional processes in life, and most things people view as control are false masks and the bravado of buffoons.
But I digress…. I just love that word… it makes me think of meandering down a lilac-bounded, curvy country lane that leads into the past, or to as yet unthought thoughts, but I digress… so I did a domain search, and found that mybodymyvote.com was not available, nor were the .net. or .org domains available. I registered mybodymyvote.info and doing something with it soon now resides near the top of my Pitcher List. I also created a graphic that you can see in my sidebar to the right and an earlier post, that gives you several options for using the image to promote women’s self-determination per health issues.
The other thing I’ve added to my “to do in the next 6 months” list is to blog more on the News and Politics section of BlogHer.com. The attorney equating Liberalism and Hustler just about blew my gaskets! We need more progressive political posts on BlogHer IMO, and of course I have no sway with them, I’ve just been posting there for a few years.
And whenever I think of BlogHer I think of all the things on my “to do before BlogHer list.” Leave a comment if you are going to the August 2-4, 2012 conference. Because so many things on that list involve technology at some level I then start thinking about all the security practices I have to finishing implementing in my blogs and websites. And when I think about websites… I think about formalizing and blending some minor business sides into my primary business main course offerings.
So much to do… but I know others are in the same situation… well maybe not. How many people have an entire huge shed of possessions that have been packed up for almost 10 (yikes!) years?