The Slow Blogger's End of Summer Reflections

At Goddard College in Vermont for my daughter Sophia"s graduation

 This summer I have transformed into The Slow Blogger. No apologies, just some end of summer reflections on life, family, aging, and development of Sage's Play's programs.

In early August I traveled with my beautiful daughter Sophia to attend her commencement exercises at Goddard College in Vermont, where she graduated with a Master's from the sustainable business and community program.  I thoroughly enjoyed attending the presentations of learning that each graduate did. Fascinating and informative stuff on positive solutions in areas of agriculture, housing, new sustainable business trends, art and more. I find it astounding at times to realize that my younger daughter is now 30. Most of her education has been focused on independent and holistic learning-- from her years at Waldorf from kindergarten through Grade 8, into Wilderness Charter School and Eagle Rock School in Estes Park, CO in high school, then a stint at the Southern Oregon University, where she experienced conventional education formats and on to Goddard, a longtime bastion of independent thinking and learning. Now I hope I live long enough to see more of her marvelous evolution--how she moves out more into the world. I am proud of her.

Wildflowers by the railroad tracks, Montpelier, VT

 In Burlington, Vermont, I  had one of the best meals I've enjoyed in a long time at a restaurant called The Farmhouse Tap and Grill. It was simple, made with locally grown ingredients, and completely satisfying. A bowl of tomato soup, rich and rounded flavor, two slices of freshly baked bread, a delicious salad. Plus a rather wonderful beer from a local brewer Sophia loves. I've forgotten his name. If you get to Farmhouse they can tell you about him, though. He is well-known in those parts.

We stayed in Montpelier at an old, overpriced, stodgy hotel right by the capitol. Montpelier has a thriving food co-op and I visited that a few times to soak up the good colors and interactions, and to look for the delicious maple kefir you can sometimes find there, though it disappears quickly because it is so good. I took walks, including along the river and railroad tracks. Northern Vermont reminds me a lot of southern Oregon culturally. Both have a strong focus on organic agriculture and a farm to table focus. Both are largely rural, with towns and cities that are warm and full of cultural innovation.

A graffiti in the Music Room at Goddard

After the graduation festivities were over, I took an Amtrak train from Montpelier to Newark, NJ. That ride, moving from the bucolic green cornfields, meadows and woods of Vermont through Massachusetts and  the desolate industrial towns of Connecicut with their abandoned factories, past affluent towns in  Connecticut and New York state, led me to disembark in Newark, where I met my dear brother and Kimmy, one of my four nieces. Her beautiful little son Maximo was there, too, bawling his head off.  Usually he is a sunny, happy little fellow, but at that moment, he wanted to be somewhere else.

I usually feel like bawling my head off and being somewhere else when I am in environments like northern New Jersey, where I was born and raised. It seems like Mordor to me, just a couple of steps above Hell. Traffic, pollution, unhappy people, with a deep condensation of ugliness and despair coating it all. Nature is eclipsed, eradicated. For me, it takes effort to continue to bless it all. And that effort is a useful one.

May these horrid, toxic environments be transformed into clean and liveable places that are safe and comfortable.  May these people be uplifted and happy. This is a prayer, one among many that I put forth for the congested, miserable confines of that geography. Prayers make no sense on the rational level. They don't have to, thank goodness. How can we change this world? The world manifests from our collective thought, belief and intention. What a time to be alive. It's tremendously challenging and full of opportunities. It takes courage to meet those sometimes.

I asked my brother Phil to take me back to Lambert's Castle on Garrett Mountain in Paterson, NJ (what passes for a mountain is actually a hill), where my father used to take me when I was a child.

How magical those woods were to me on those childhood excursions.

 It wasn't the same, of course.  There were open fields where folks were playing ball. The woods seemed small and tired,  and the castle-- which was empty and full of the resonance of memory when I was a child-- had become a museum. Unfortunately, it was closed the day we visited, so I never had the chance to see how they dolled that big stone structure up.

I am glad I saw it again. Those times with my father looking at leaves, rocks, bugs, stones and sky were very special.

My brother Phil and my niece Kimmy

It's emotional to visit family and the place where you were raised, especially if you visit seldom. Here my brother is looking at an album that his daughter Kimmy put together. It contains photos of both my brother and his wife when they were young.

What waves of feelings washed through as I perused that collection of images. Long in the past, still evocative.

I love my brother and we are living very different lives in very different places. He is a loving, hilariously funny, intelligent guy. It was beautiful, touching and deeply informative to spend time with him, his sweet lady friend and my nieces and their kids.

Yet overall, I have to say that I would be quite happy never to return to northern NJ again. I hope my brother and my nieces make their way to Oregon instead.

I was glad to return to Oregon. I am grateful for so much in my life here. I enjoyed the respite, but was looking forward to returning to the work of Sage's Play and its conscious, creative aging programs.

I've been working on revising the script for A New Wrinkle, in preparation for an upcoming meeting with composer Laura Rich, business advisor Gary Einhorn, and Larry and Joy Marshall, who have a wealth of theater and fundraising experience.

I had a meeting with photographer Mary Landberg, who is going to start taking photos of elders for a book project we are collaborating on. I'm developing an outline for an afternoon workshop in September, "Playfulness, Pleasure and the Art of Aging." A lot of development is going on, in other words.

My main project is networking and preparing for the launch of our fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo on August 25th. I hope that you will help us raise the $15,000 we need to produce a staged run of our musical revue A New Wrinkle, and film it.

We need the help of many people to increase our visibility, community and audience. I will be sending out a blog with the IndieGoGo campaign link on it soon.

Thank you for any help that you are able to provide. Your donation of $5 will be a big help!

If many people donate $5 we will reach our goal. Of course, you are welcome to donate more, too. In fact, the sky's the limit on that.

Sharing news and information about A New Wrinkle's IndieGoGo campaign is another way you can help us move forward with this important effort. Thank you for whatever support you contribute. It's all about building a broad community that supports positive, conscious aging.

I hope that you have had a marvelous summer. It has gone by all too quickly for me. I went swimming and soaking at Jackson WellSprings yesterday and took a walk in Lithia Park.  Friday I am going to Betsy Lewis's Walkabout Woman launch, which is combined with her radical downsizing and going away party. She's off on a walkabout adventure, she is. What are you up to?

Moving Pro-Aging Messages out into the Culture

No photos this time. Sorry. Feeling very basic and unadorned at the moment.

This week was a busy one. Medifecta Healthcare Training, the company where I have worked for the past 12 years (now part-time) developing educational materials to train caregivers of elders was sold last week. We've been getting oriented to the excellent, upbeat new management and its dynamic programs. That feels really good -- and this kind of transition is also something that really gets your attention. There's a lot of new information, people and goals to learn about. Stirs things up.

Sage's Play was busy, too. Moving the pro-aging messages of A New Wrinkle out into the culture for me means not only being an artist, but also engaging in social change, fundraising, public relations and program development. Right now it's all about our upcoming fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo, which is an Internet-based crowdfunding platform. Our goal is to raise $15,000 in order to produce and film A New Wrinkle.

On Tuesday we got together with a videographer. He filmed us for a video that will introduce our IndieGoGo campaign. Before we met with him, I spent hours writing the script for the video, locating still shots and identifying music files to include in it. I am certainly curious to see the finished product. Will it be everything I hoped it would be? Even 80% satisfaction is good. Suspense. Curiosity.

Now I have to write the text that viewers will see when they visit our campaign site on IndieGoGo. I mulled that matter over while I pulled weeds and planted some snapdragons in the garden. But it will take more than mulling. I will have to sit down and write it. Very soon.

This week I also met with Gary Einhorn, my business advisor, and he helped me develop an action plan for the IndieGoGo campaign. It has a lot of items on it. Of course. It's an action plan. I've already done a few of the items on it, just to get a feel for all that action.

Gary and I met at the university library. When our meeting was done, we passed an old woman who was dragging her coat along. She seemed terribly tired. Her walk was slow and a bit erratic. I wondered if she was about to faint. I spoke to her and mentioned that her coat was dragging.  I asked if she was okay. She said she was though I had my doubts. What a lovely old face she had.

Later I realized that she had been a neighbor of mine when I lived briefly on Morton Street. I would see her ripping down the hill on her bicycle. Wow, I thought to myself then watching her fly down the hill, her helmet firmly on her head and a look of rapt enjoyment on her face. What a wild old woman. Now here she was all bedraggled, having gone on the bus to nearby Medford and then come back on the bus to Ashland. "I live five blocks away on Morton Street," she told me. "I'll just sit down here for a minute then go the rest of the way."

I offered to drive her home.  I thought she needed to drink some water and sit down and rest. She still rides her bike everywhere. She's 81. Ten years older than I am. I've been thinking of her since then, and thinking about how much change occurs in each decade of human life.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. Two women I enjoy are coming to visit. They are volunteering to help with the IndieGoGo campaign. There are actually three volunteers, but the third is at a conference presenting a paper on women in the global community. I decided to call the volunteers the Sagesse Squadron. They are all marvelous individuals and I am looking forward to our collaboration.

The roses, peonies and love-in-a-mist are about to bloom in my garden. I hie myself to sleep, hoping that some bright dreams illumine the hours. Tomorrow is another day, as my Mother was fond of saying. Bless mothers and mothering.