where is that light coming from?

I dozed until midnight, then adrenalin and heat fired up my body for the race, the chase, the battle in the jungle. Only I’m not in the jungle; I’m in bed trying to sleep. I’m having a major argument with my body: What is wrong with you?! Can’t you feel the fatigue? Why are you flooding me with all this energy? Body: Hey, it’s not my problem; you’re the one with all the worries and ISSUES that keep me up. Mind: You have a lot of nerve calling me out on ISSUES when these things wouldn’t even bother me if I weren’t flooded with adrenalin and cortisol and whatever else you’re doing to me.

Most functional people would have grabbed a cab straight to a psychiatrist for Ambien. Or to a doctor, or to the park–whatever. This is not a feel good experience day after night after day after night. The relentless irritated exhaustion is wearing me down to the bone. My coordination is compromised; I feel nauseous, dizzy. My face is shot, aging daily from going through the nightly wringer.

I do want to put an end to it, but I admit there is something interesting that happens when your brain loses much of its ability, especially when you have the kind of brain that gets in the way of things. Such a brain shatters under the weight of fatigue. Inhibitions fall away–who cares?! Indecision is rendered meaningless–who cares?! And in this agonizing yet carefree condition, I rediscover play.

In a household where my daughter dominates all waking hours, the night gives me permission to sense the rest of the universe. Even my partner, waking at 3am to keep me company for a while, has a far more interesting approach to things when we’re off the schedule, off the grid.

Off the grid. An athlete without any recognition, applause, or even acknowledgment. A warrier without a witness. A woman in transition to an uncharted place–one that will be uniquely mine though I share the process with half the universe. Something worth staying up for. or is it?

50 is Smash.  40 was playing around.  At 50, my life shows on my face.  At the movies, they ask me:  Senior or regular? I can laugh but I  tell you it feels like a punch.  I’m in another category.

Not that I was ever beautiful, but I certainly knew how to be eye-catching.  (my ass my ass..)  Now They don’t look at me that way.   If They look at me or talk to me at all, it’s often because They need something from Mother–or even Granny, geez!

I remember noticing in my late forties that I was glimpsing a secret parallel universe.  I began to have eyes for elders,  to notice the variations among them, to notice the joy.   Yes, joy.   Do look closely.   In many of Them….in many of Us, you can see death in the eyes.    What is death but intimacy with all of life?  You can see it, fall into it if you dare.  “Freedom’s true joy,” as they say at OmYoga.

Free to wear my wrinkles.  Free to be uncool.  Free to be sexual from the inside–a subject not an object.   Free to dance, to play, to abandon legitimacy, to be what I am.  You might think it easy to be What I Am.   I wish it were.   But now, having been kicked out the nest of popular culture, the Baby Crone can find her wings.

by Miller Williams

He doesn’t see as well as he thinks he remembers.
His fingers sometimes find it hard to bend.
He often can’t find the name to go with a face.
Sometimes he doesn’t hear but decides to pretend.

Weekends, week by week, are closer together.
Sometimes he has to sit down to put on his pants.
No lady seems to mind if he calls her Honey,
never grins nor even throws a glance.

Sometimes he’s told himself what all this means.
“Every year some more of me is dead,
but there’s a lot of stuff still left to collapse.”
He started to laugh but talked to himself instead.

“Think of yourself as a plumbing system, a clock.
As soon as you’re done, you start to come undone.
It’s almost interesting when you pay attention,
how working parts stop working, one by one.

So now you’ve asked me the oldest question of all.
You want to know how I’m doing. I told you before,
I’m dying. Been at it for years. Still, I think
I could hang a few more calendars on the door.”

“He Gets Around to Answering the Old Question” by Miller Williams, from Time and the Tilting Earth. © Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

An amalgam of documentary and performance art, Mommy Doll Gets Old skewers our ideas about aging. Using play, conversation, and dance, psychologist video-maker Elena TaJo wrestles with brain death and wrinkles, and emerges with less knowledge and more freedom.