Only This and Nothing More

It is mid-afternoon on Loon Lake in Rangeley, Maine, on a hot summer day.  

I lift my head ever so gently from the float’s pillow and see the sunlight shimmering on the slow moving waves coming across the lake in front of me.  I close my eyes dreamily and reopen.  

The green of the pine trees lining the lake is vivid; the bright blue of the sky, brilliant with white/gray cumulous clouds ever so slowly moving east.  Eight loons – yes, eight, something unheard of – glide together in a pack not far from where I float.  They’ve been near our dock and our end of the lake all day.  I wonder why.  What about today has drawn them so peacefully to this area and made them linger here so long?  

It’s the day.  It’s the time, the place.  

I am relaxed with a depth I almost never experience.  The beauty, the sun’s shimmer and warmth, the calm, nature, quiet – I am immensely grateful for right here, right now, needing only this and nothing more. 

Photo:  Loon Lake, Rangeley, Maine

Life and Midlife

Last week, a wonderful woman in my life, Susanna Liller, sent me a You Tube link of  Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of Ms. Magazine speaking about our “Fertile Void and Second Adulthood” from a TED talk.  She told me this was speaking precisely to me which prompted her to head it my way.  It was.   

Susanna would get that; Susanna “gets” everything.  She is someone who tunes in very deeply to others and can sometimes see fragments of them, they’ve not quite discovered yet.  She was one of my inspiring hosts on my retreat to France in May.

This week, I came across this little pendant for sale on Patti Digh’s blog page.  It is saying the same thing.

Will I need to hear the message every week to get it?  And more importantly to act on it?

Midlife for me is my belly filled with jelly, squishing around, foreign, uncomfortable, unstable, wishy-washy.  But I know it’s all good.  I know I need to stretch my limbs and my mind and create some new neuro-pathways to shake off old ways of being to embrace the new ways that, like the alien, are trying to burst out.  I’m changing.  If I stay stagnant, the jelly will remain forever; it will weigh me down and cause me to age and grow old.  It will bend my back and cause me to lose the spring in my step.  

I am standing at the cross roads.  Which path will I (or you) choose?    

 Photo:   www.37days.com Patti Digh’s blog