The value of late life journeys into memoir and life review

I no longer remember the exact day I began an archeological expedition whose purpose was to delve into my life history in order to understand it better. I was in my mid 50s and I was living in a rustic house at the foot of Tashi Choling, a wonderful Tibetan Buddhist temple I had helped to found years before.

I am a person who relishes an occasional riotous discard of papers due to the misplaced hope that their destruction will bring freedom from onerous details of self and mundane life. Because of that habit, I have no notebooks from that time.

Fortunately, that habit has not reached my computer records so I do have a chronological set of files that describe the scope of my themes and how I approached them over time. Writing this particular book Songs of the Inner Life has occupied my imagination for the past 15 years. I've worked on it intensely for months at a time, then set it aside and taken it up again, over and over. I've written three quite different drafts. When one has spent that much time on a project, it assumes a dreamlike quality. Will it ever emerge as a finished book? That's certainly my firm intention. And now at 70, I finally feel mature enough to do it.

There is a marvelous exhilarating energy about setting off on a voyage, though that excitement may be mixed with certain misgivings and fears. That was my mood as I began exploring my psyche and personal history, intending to dig as deeply as needed to unearth new insights and healing artifacts. I had no idea when I started that I had plunged into the process of life review, which is considered an important developmental task of later life.


I began the first draft of the first chapter by contemplating the mysteries of how a singular human being precipitates from light into matter.

"A baby is still close to the angels. Its newness melts us. Its skin soft as a flower petal, its sweet breath, tiny hands and feet move us to wonder. Babies sometimes seem as if they are not quite in their bodies yet. We suspect that they may be lingering in luminous realms which have become invisible to us. Perhaps that's why being with a baby brings us back to the state of beginners’ mind, beginners’ eyes, beginners’ smile. And when we look into a baby's eyes, we feel that we are gazing out into the spacious reaches of the universe, or deep inside the secret wisdom of the uncreated.. A baby brings us into the ecstasy of the present moment."

I was working up to exploring some difficult terrain, and it helped to start by remembering original grace. After that, I spent months exploring and writing about my deepest childhood wounds, the beliefs and experiences that led me to feel worthless, isolated and deformed. It was hard going, but I kept on slogging through it, infusing the process with breaks for meditation and walks in Nature.

I agreed to engage in a continued encounter the Shadow because I wanted to heal. As they used to say in that old radio show about The Shadow, "The Shadow knows!" It's true. Digging into those layers was not an easy job, but I am very glad I did it.

"Writing memoir is not for the meek," a fellow writer wrote recently on Facebook, that beautiful mandala of offerings from other humans (whose management manipulations are sometimes terribly annoying.)

Of course, there were times on the journey when I felt as if I had become lost in a labyrinth. Not a labyrinth as beautifully green as this one but a forlorn rocky confusion of dead ends, isolation and being walled off from the rest of life.

I endured the hopeless confinement of one who felt she would never find the way out.

Is the way out, or in--or just relaxing and sitting still in the moment?

I am looking forward to returning to this book during the reflective months of winter. I am about to publish an excerpt preview of the Introduction and first three chapters of Songs of the Inner Life soon. I will let you know when it is available on amazon.com.



My recent article on memoir and life review (mentioned in my previous post) was mentioned in the September News Briefs of the National Center for Creative Aging!I am pretty pleased about that.

Because I believe so much in the powerful integrative and healing qualities of memoir and life review, I will be offering workshops devoted to that exploration through poetry, movement, deep relaxation, storytelling, voice and prose. A one-day workshop is coming up in Ashland, Oregon on October 16th. Please email me at gaea.yudron@yahoo.com or call me at 541-535-3084 if you would like to register. Fee is $50.

I plan to develop an online version as well so that friends in far places can participate.

Interested in walking through fire, discovering forgotten talismans in long forgotten sites, finding understanding and resolution that provides release from old issues, coming face to face with original grace, recognizing and engaging your deepest gifts? Memoir and life review is a way to do all of that and more.

Happiness is The Old Magic

One has to start somewhere after a blog absence of over a month (or even of a day), so I will start with happiness and with these lines by Jane Kenyon, who is one of my favorite poets.

"There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away."

Kenyon suffered from bouts of serious depression and that certainly colored her view of happiness as a prodigal returning home at last. I can relate to the prodigal returning image. The appearance of happiness sometimes feel like that.

This morning I'm musing about what makes me happy. I find pleasure and happiness in creating beauty. This vista at my kitchen window gives me an inner smile. I feel happy looking at this beautiful image taken one day in late summer at the Umpqua River on a beautiful summer day with dear Frannie and her family. Nature makes me very happy. It's rejuvenating and endlessly fascinating. Meditating makes me very happy. Dancing, gardening, cooking, singing and writing make me happy. Being with good friends makes me happy. Helping others with healing work makes me happy. I generally feel happier now that I did earlier in life. People say that happens as we age. It's paradoxical. Is it the keen edge of mortality? Is it letting go of many things that troubled us when young? Is it slowing down and enjoying the moments more fully? Seems to me it's all of those elements. Humans have an innate capacity for happiness and contentment no matter what the circumstances. Pursuing happiness sounds terribly tiring but I like relaxing into it. It's always there in the awareness of the present moment. Drinking the coffee. A hummingbird zooms past the window. The leaves on the birch tree twinkle in the breeze. Oh my, summer is nearly over already.

We are headed into the season of harvest. Today I head over to Dave Scoggin's studio again to lie on the couch as a very interested but musically unschooled observer while my composer colleague Laura Rich and Dave continue their fascinating work to mix the song tracks for the promo CD for A New Wrinkle, our musical revue about aging.


This beautiful photo of Jonnie Z is one of a series that photographer Helga Motley took. One of those images will grace the CD jacket very soon. Yes, that CD project will come to completion.




















Tomorrow I will host the first Sage's Play salon of 2011. I did not do very marvelous publicity for it, and so I have no idea who will show up for it. The topic is "Is Aging a Terrible Disease or a Valuable Stage of Life? The salons are a way for elders to talk about how they think and feel about aging and will naturally support a more vigorous community of elders. This is a flyer that Christer Rowan designed for Sage's Play's fall programs.


It's rewarding to move forward with these projects and to see them come to a successful conclusion. Even if not many people show up tomorrow for the salon, I have the opportunity to do a better job next time.

And today my essay on The Healing Power of Memoir and Life Review appears in Inner Peace column of the Daily Tidings, Ashland's paper. I am going to be offering a on-day workshop on that topic on October 16th.

It is satisfying to harvest--whether it's creative projects or garden bounty. After seeding, cultivating and nurturing for months, there's a lot of pleasure from reaping the bounty. Hope that your harvest, whether inner or outer, is a beautiful one.

A Cottage Embraced by Roses--and Ivy

For years I imagined living in a place surrounded by flowers-- and now here I am--this is my second week in my new home, which I call Casa de las Flores. Perhaps it sounds a bit magical to womanifest a home from the imagination and there was certainly magic in it-- but it was also three months of uncertainty dealing with brokers, banks and paperwork-- adding up to the most stress I've experienced since my second marriage broke up 14 years ago. I personally like to keep a low stress profile.

Real estate is crazy these days, as my agent said several times. Since the fiscal meltdown in 2008 things have gotten wacky. Real estate being just one small example of the wackiness at present. But finally everything worked through to a successful finale and with the help of Guatemalan Carlos and his friend my precious treasures, Important Papers, unfinished manuscripts, kitchenware, books and memorabilia were schlepped here to Phoenix, two towns away from Ashland.

The garden in front of the house is filled with roses, herbs, daylilies, crysanthemum, beebalm, daisies--in fact I haven't completely surveyed all the myriad plants that ornament this piece of ground, attracting butterflies and bees. There's an old-fashioned swing that seats two people in the front yard, too.





I want to paint those black shutters blue! They are not actually working shutters but decorative reminders of real shutters. No matter, I want to paint them blue.

The front of the house was built in the 30s, and then an addition of another bedroom and bath was added 15 or more years ago. I am a fan of cottages from the 30s and 40s. They have a cozy, welcoming quality. That feeling of welcome-- in addition to the marvelous garden-- was what magnetized me to this place. It was the only place I looked at and the only one I was interested in living in. So I suppose it was already arranged in the realm of the imagination. But one still has to go through all the hoo-haa because we are on the Earth Plane.

I've been told that there are 25 rose bushes here. I haven't counted them yet, but I have begun to get acquainted with each of them. Even in August, some of them are blooming splendidly.



The woman who put together the front garden 30 years ago did a beautiful job. I don't know if she was the same person who planted the many varieties of ivy in the back yard. I am going to try to find that out from the next door neighbor, who has lived here for a long time.

Now there are many things that you can say about ivy. It's a beautiful plant and one sacred to Dionysus and no doubt other Greek gods. It's famous for being invasive. Yesterday I felt that there was about an acre of ivy I was dealing with. It has not been pruned for many years. I divested a cedar tree and a pine tree from great circles of ivy that wound far up their trunks, not a healthy thing for those trees--or for any of the other plants that wild Dionysian ivy is smothering. I am amassing great piles of cut ivy. Big as haystacks. Satisfying.



This morning I had an insight while drinking my coffee and thinking about the ivy.

All that ivy!

Not only in the yard but also festooning the wallpaper of the kitchen!

There are even little decorative tendrils of ivy twining on the overhead light fixtures. Hmmm....someone really did have quite a passion for the stuff.

One thing is certain. That wallpaper has got to go.



Dark outside now, the sound of crickets. Time to rest. Tomorrow in the morning there may be the sound of a dove.

Two Pictures on a Monday in July

For the past months, I have been busy with a project that I have kept to myself until now. It's still not a fait-accompli, but hopefully it will be very soon. I am purchasing a sweet house in the nearby town of Phoenix and very much looking forward to moving there. For now, I am calling my new place Casa de las Flores. It has marvelous old gardens. The whole enterprise has taken much longer than I wished, but I have to keep the goal in mind and relax about the delays--which can be rather challenging some days. The transaction should be finished by July 22nd. Oh, patience is a virtue. Mother always told me that. This is certainly giving me some practice.

Rather than regale you with photographs of the boxes that are accumulating chez moi, I thought I would share these two images instead. I find this one rather idyllic. An elder gentleman sitting under the tree reading, surrounded by ripe fruit that has fallen around him. It has a wonderful fairy-tale like quality, rather timeless, as if he has been sitting there for ages. And perhaps he has.The second picture captivates me, too. I love the easy intimacy it portrays-- two unique older people simply enjoying a moment with each other.


I am always on the lookout for great images of elders for Sage's Play. I also search for photos for Medifecta Healthcare Training, to use on the covers of DVDs the company produces. It is much easier to find interesting photographs of elders taken in other countries than it is to find interesting images of older adults in America. The photos of older adults widely available in America tend to be terribly stagey and stereotypical. You have the blissed out older couples walking on the beach or bicycling or dancing. Or the other extreme, an older person in a wheelchair being tended to by a solicitous caregiver. Should I mention those abysmal images we have to endure on the internet or print of older adults looking completely foolish and laughable? Those pictures are totally ageist! Take my word for it, it's slim pickings in terms of artistic images that show the range of experience of older adults, depicting real people in the midst of their real lives.

I searched and searched but I never could find a suitable image for the cover of our A New Wrinkle promo CD. So the other day I hired photographer Helga Motley to take some great photos of an about to be 85-year old elder woman named Jonnie Zheutlin. I'll share a couple of those images in my next blog post. I know, promises promises... I will. Promise. We should be finishing up with the recording for A New Wrinkle's promo CD soon, too. Dave and Laura both took off-- for Hawaii and Europe respectively-- but they are headed back home soon. It will be wonderful to complete that project. Why does everything take so darned long? For a variety of reasons, it seems.

There's actually a lot going on here in the midst of the packing because I am working on developing a fall-winter program for Sage's Play that will include a series of salons and workshops. That is going to be a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, the trees shine green in the sun and the pool at the hot springs beckons me. It is utterly beautiful here.

Some News from Here and Now

My friend Elizabeth has fallen in love at 83 with a man she has known for many years. She's on her way to spend a month with her beloved. In other words, who knows what will happen next in this life? When I visited Elizabeth before she left on her journey, I had to take a picture of her rug, which she found in Greece. I think it's very beautiful.





Here's a view of the cloud of love-in-a-mist and California poppies in bloom in Elizabeth's garden, so blue and golden next to the red shed.









I love this pink iris. One of many many fabulous irises to be seen yesterday at Indigo Ray's annual iris viewing party in the Colestine Valley. As usual, it was a gathering of old friends from the valley and folks from town, great food, music, swimming, catching up, iris gazing and marveling at what Indigo has created on her land. She told me two years ago, "This place is too much for one old lady," and on a strictly realistic level that would seem to be true.






But Indigo doesn't really operate in the world of strict realism, as her art and gardens and homemade raspberry wine show. She occupies herself creating another kind of reality, communing with nature spirits and the muses of creative life. Time always slows down in Indigo's garden.





Her house has bright colored walls and is full of her paintings and embroideries.

She has created wonderful tableaus in the garden.





Look at this beauty. What a healing place. I am going back there to visit again very soon.

The Benefits of Aging Naturally

The other day Dominique Browning's article The Case for Laugh Lines appeared in the New York Times, eliciting a variety of responses from readers. Browning's article, which is a real delight to read, focuses on the cosmetic surgery fetish, the fight people put up about aging, the surgery they choose as a weapon and the frozen and sometimes tragic faces that result.

In her article, Browning suggests we have gone to far in our attempts to deny the imprint of time on our faces and bodies. As the model Daphne Self noted in my last blog here, cosmetic surgery does not stop us from aging. I tried to post a comment to Browning's article and included some lines from Passing for Young, one of the songs in my musical revue, but the comment never was posted. I must have transgressed some New York Times posting rule, but I do not know what it was. This is part of what I was trying to share from the song.

Once upon a time not so very long ago
Blacks they passed for white and
Gays they passed for straight
And speaking in the latest tongue
Ringing all bells that can be rung
I’m going to pass for young.
What, is it wrong? No way!

70’s the new 50
60’s the new 40
50’s the new 30
Turn back the clocks!
Botox! Restylane!
Body shaping liposuction
A little nip, a little tuck, a little surgery
And you’ll evade time’s tyranny.

Look at my face
Does it sag or does it flap?
If wrinkles give me character
I say, erase, erase!
I don’t want to look like Rumplestiltskin
Even if it rhymes with Paris Hilton!
I’m going to pass for young because
70’s the new 50
60’s the new 40
50’s the new 30
Botox Restylane
Body shaping fat reduction
You can have a little liposuction
Turn back the clocks!

The two happy people in the photo above haven't had any work done. They are just aging naturally. When I get too myopic about the peculiar views of our culture, I like to remind myself that most people on the planet are aging naturally. They are not getting cosmetic surgery. Their issues about aging are quite different from those of the frozen face persuasion. Organizations like HelpAge which focuses on age discrimination and poverty and Global Aging which focuses on human rights for older people are two of the organizations that address some of the issues that affect many older adults on the planet.

Here we are, fortunate beings who are growing old in places that are relatively affluent and peaceful, compared to many places on earth. We have the opportunity and freedom to use these later years for personal and spiritual growth, community engagement, social change and creative expression. It's a shame to waste that freedom by constricting the potential for these years to an obsession with passing for young.

Accepting aging as a natural part of life is life-affirming. Aging naturally has the potential to increase our contentment and positive self image. I'm not trying to talk you out of a face lift or coloring your hair. Those are not my choices but I'm not intent on limiting your choices. I'm just suggesting that outer appearances are only one aspect of human life. I'm suggesting that the wrinkles are just fine and that we appreciate the real richness that presents itself in later life and make good use of it with a fair amount of joy and gusto.

I decided a couple of months ago to drop some weight. One of my old friends emailed me awhile back and told me that he had decided that he'd rather be a skinny old guy than a fat one. I kept thinking about that comment and decided I agreed. I don't want to be skinny but thinner. I have lost about 10 pounds so far by eating less and eating fewer carbohydrates. I am enjoying the process and it feels good to be getting lighter. I've noticed when I look in the mirror that my face is finally acquiring more wrinkles, especially when I laugh or smile, which I like to do often. All I've done is live 70 years, which is saying plenty.

What are your attitudes toward aging naturally? Would love to hear about them.

Artist's Life update: just sent in my application to Oregon Literary Fellowship. It would of course be wonderful to receive a grant from them. I'm enjoying working on three projects--my musical revue A New Wrinkle, for which we are creating a promo CD, my book Songs of the Inner Life, and a new book project on inspiring elders. These will keep me busy for at least 2 years. What are you working on?

And the sun is finally out today!

The Ravages of Time: Taking Things at Face Value

When my daughter Sophia and I got together for brunch to celebrate my 70th birthday, she gave me a birthday card which bore this image of an old native American woman.
"Isn't she beautiful?" Sophia asked as I gazed at the photo. "Yes, she is," I replied. I certainly am very glad I have a daughter who has a capacity not only to see beauty in a diverse way but also to appreciate the beauty of the aged. The beauty of the woman in the photo has much to do with her innate dignity, her character and the life she lived, which from the looks of her eyes, had its share of sorrow. Her face is not what most people would call beautiful, affected as many of us are by commercialized, homogenized ideas of beauty. Her beauty points up the ravages of time, how life imprints itself on us, on our faces and bodies. It invites an exploration of what's more than skin deep. The photo was taken by Milton Rogovin,well-known as a social documentary photographer.
Rogovin passed away in January 2011 at 101 years of age. He took wonderful photos of minorities and poor, overlooked people--including native Americans, Mexicans, Chileans, working class people in Buffalo, NY, miners in Appalachia, Scotland and France--and more. His work over decades illuminates social issues and the common struggle of the working poor. Beautiful work. Well worth contemplating.

I posted this photo of the beautiful 82-year old British model Daphne Selfe on Facebook the other day. Selfe is in high demand these days. Her career was so-so until she hit her 70s. Then she appeared in Red or Dead, a show put on by London Fashion Week, and it's been uphill for her career ever since. She claims her long grey hair is the secret behind it, but I think her cheekbones and eyes and lithe body are doing their share, too. Selfe does yoga to keep fit, eats large amounts of fruits, vegetables and fish, drinks plenty of water and says she doesn’t feel a day over 60. She has never had cosmetic surgery.

"Your face is your history," she commented. "If you have a few lines, it's your life that you've lived, and people should embrace that. Some [models] want to alter themselves and I hear talk about getting all this wretched cosmetic surgery done, but I don't want to do that myself as it costs too much, it might go wrong and what's the point? It won't stop you from getting old."

I celebrate her beauty, health and her late-life success. Of course, though each of us has unique, innate beauty, few of us were ever as "classically" beautiful as the lovely Daphne Selfe. The rest of us, women and men both, are challenged to come to terms with the ravages of time on our less than super-model faces and bodies. Older women are especially ridiculed, and older men have to bear the brunt of a great deal of scorn, too. Let's do what we can to expect and create a more generous definition of beauty, including the beauty of the aged. Please don't internalize these toxic prejudices about age being ugly. It's not good for the health of the body or soul.

Our culture applauds "active aging." Sometimes this lifestyle seems so hyped up I call it hyper-active aging. It's trendy to spotlight elders who are doing extraordinary work in their later lives, ignoring everyone else who don't fit these high-visibility standards. The overall presumption is--how amazing that these older people are still able to do this or that.

In this Sage's Play blog, I also spotlight exceptional elders, in the spirit of sharing wonderful models of aging. Do I sometimes seem like a cheerleader who focuses only on the positive aspects of aging and the creative, artistic, social and scientific accomplishments of elders, without ever stopping to mention the obvious?

The obvious is that our bodies are aging. We are mortal; we will die at some point. As Rain pointed out in a recent exchange of comments on this blog, we have to do the best with what we have. That's true at any time of life, and it is more obvious as we age. We have to pay more attention to diet, exercise and rest. We have to shepherd our energies each day. We may have to deal with illness or pain or loss. Age involves a fair amount of loss. On that level, growing old is not for sissies. There is a lot of demanding emotional and spiritual work that is part of the aging process. And it is all practice for "laying down one's mantle" as they say in gospel songs.

I've been a Buddhist for over 30 years, and my spiritual practice has included contemplating old age, sickness and death. Not popular subjects for many in our culture. To me, they seem like essential topics, especially as one ages.

Age is a time of life for going deeper, for stripping away, for letting go, for loving even more than ever, for sharing the bounty of what we've learned, for leaving a legacy. It's a profound territory, and it demands courage, creativity and trust. Solitude. Slowness. In the midst of my creative work, I make time for meditation, exercise, prayer rest and just doing-nothing. Here's to the blessing of living long. As Rain points out it is a mixed blessing. It's not all a bed of roses. Parts of aging are full of tribulation. And it's up to us to meet life open-hearted, to work our soul alchemy with whatever arises.