A beautiful room layered with colorful rugs and pillows and soft music. Carefully chosen pieces brought back from a traveling life and made part of a rich current life.

Nothing under glass, untouchable. All within reach of human eyes, human bodies, and furry paws.

A safe space to be this morning, to create.

My friend’s weekly life drawing group.

She had been patient with my non-commital “Can I please decide to show up at the last minute?” request and there I was, crisscross-applesauce on one of her sofas, pencil and eraser at the ready.

Three of us, plus our lovely model, who is also a special friend of mine. Two dogs and two hours ahead of us.

Pose after pose, sips of mint and honey tea from a large Mexican mug, I am tracing my friend’s curves. She is very still, and then she stretches and changes her body around. My pencil follows her.

After a few minutes the “Is this looking right?” questions from my mind start to get quieter and further apart. Eventually, they almost disappear. It feels so good, so restful.
My eyes on her body, my hand moves on the paper. A hip, a foot, a long neckline, a nipple.
Then I notice something.

It’s subtle and very easy to miss.

I call them.

I am calling her body parts in my mind as I draw them. “This is a toe.” “Here is an ear.” “Now her belly.”

So weird, so tiresome. So … small.

As soon as I notice what I am doing, from long-ago art classes in college, I hear my teacher’s voice: “No, no, no. We don’t do that.” This teacher had a huge influence on me twenty years ago and I love that she showed up again today in this beautiful space across the world.

So I stop. I try to hold back the words, the labels. I hold back everything I have learned about how an eye looks and how a back bends. I do some inside blurring, I call on some detachment from “What I know.” I just look and I just move my pencil. A straight line. A dark angle. A curve, a rectangle. I step away from my story and my words, my past experiences, and my skills or lack of skills. I step away from my questions and I step away from my answers.

I just draw. For many minutes.

And right there, in this peace-infused space of not knowing, not asking, not responding, and not labeling, I receive a reminder of how sweet it would be to live - and to love - this way. No story, no pre-conceived anything. Just a journey from one curve to the next, from one breath to the next. Responding to one invitation at a time, restfully. So very restfully. Trusting, following creating.

Then of course, when I look down at my paper, I love the way the drawing looks. My left brain asleep or at least dozing a little, beauty has shown up.

What a Gift.

As I walked out into the sunshine and sounds of the cobblestoned street an hour later, I felt slightly altered, sweetly re-oriented.

Today I invite you to consider stepping away from the knowing, for just tiny bits of time. To trace the contours of your day, the lines of your minutes, the sounds of the words from someone you love. Just as they are, without naming them. I think you may love it.

This life…

There’s no other way to say it, no cute euphemism that will do the trick, so here goes: I just turned sixty.

“Turned” feels like just the right word, actually. A light psychological departure from the regular path. A jaunt around a corner without being quite sure what’s on the other side, or what I should pack for the trip.

So yes, it happened. Quietly, uneventfully, and in a very loving way. It happened.

And then, because the Universe loves to get its point across to me with the utmost clarity, within the next few weeks, I will be holding a new Baby Girl. Which again, there is no other way to say it (I tried) will make me a grandmother.

Then, as if almost on cue, my right knee started hurting.

Is this the end? Is this the end of my mobility, my lightness, my ease, and - gulp - my freedom? Will I soon have to sell my quad, stop wearing shorts, or dance naked around my house?

The Fear.

The Fear loves to talk s*** and especially loves a vulnerable audience.

For a short time, I let her have at it. While I take late afternoon walks in the countryside, while I paint in my pink studio, she murmurs. She does her work, she tries. But I don’t love her company, I never have, and so I pick up her kryptonite: my pen. And there, to the paper, I give it all: her whispers and my prayers. My excitement for what’s to come, my vision, my surrender, too. My gratitude for having been granted sixty years. My joy at the possibility of having more.

Slowly, line after line on the small white notebook a realization that really nothing has changed other than whatever story I am choosing to tell myself and will keep telling myself.

On my birthday, I went sledding and ice skating. A few days ago, I was jumping up and down on a hotel bed in a Mexican city. I am planning my second art exhibit. I am in love. Whatever the number says, I am me and I feel me and I live like me.

Yes, time is passing and while I don’t feel very different today than I did after my 50th birthday, I know that my body is slowly changing. I also know that I am loving myself more and that this shows up in all kinds of ways.

Also, this weird little thought crept in the other day as I was trimming my banana trees of their huge leaves and carrying a heavy jug of drinking water into the house: there is an expiration date to this lifestyle I love. THAT thought had never shown up in my brain before no matter how / where I lived - and it was a strange one to commune with. It was not a dramatic thought, it was not a mean scary thought, but I think it was a reasonable thought. A thought that has its place right next to “I may want to start an art community someday.” Both are true, both are real, and both can be friends.

Today I invite you to find the sweet spot between what’s real and “reasonable” and what’s “YOU” and maybe less standard. I invite you to give them both a voice and a place at the table and then to concoct your own blend. The one that has you jumping up and down and loving deeply and creating freely - while not being afraid to acknowledge changes. Changes that come with the privilege of blowing many candles on our birthday cake.

I love new notebooks, fresh coats of paint and I love bridges. I let myself indulgently roll around the nostalgia of the last page of a good book, too.
The last day of a year and the first day of the next one offer all of these to me.
A long time ago, I liked crossing the bridge loudly. Jumping up and down, hugging, dancing, and giving a raucous welcome to this new friend I had yet to meet. Receiving it as though it was about to become my very best companion, still full of mystery, sure to be hiding many extravagant and delightful gifts in its shiny overcoat.
As a teenager, I would have an eye on the clock, from whichever party I was celebrating, to call my parents at exactly midnight.
Uncharacteristically for them, they would be staying up until midnight (but not many more minutes past midnight), in bed watching the NY Big Apple fall from a tall building. There would be fancy plates on their beds, filled with smoked salmon, perfectly toasted bread, and some rich French paté. Just the two of them. They loved receiving my call and I loved making it. We wished each other all kinds of good things and then they would go to sleep while I would dance several more hours.
The years passed, they moved themselves and their family to the same side of the Atlantic as the Big Apple, I grew up, and my loud New Year’s Eves started to feel less and less joyful.
I felt weird about that.
Eventually, I decided that feeling weird was less uncomfortable than feeling inauthentic and in 2000, as we were about to cross a big bridge, I allowed myself to sit comfortably in the middle of it while I meditated through its crossing.
From then on, that’s how I have celebrated the turning of the page, eventually extending the experience to include pretty much the full last day of the year and the full first day of the new one.
Quietly, often by myself and in deep celebration.
Being the Capricorn that I am, on the 31st, I am compelled to tidy up all kinds of loose ends, including my closets and my finances. Getting ready to welcome a special guest, I make sure there are no dust bunnies lurking in the corners of my mind or home.
Getting ready to say goodbye to an intimate companion, I make sure to acknowledge our time together, give my thanks, and harvest the lessons it brought. I often write it a Letter.
Then, as the one hour in between, the magical isthmus, arrives, I settle my body somewhere beautiful, light some candles, and close my eyes, ready to slide across the bridge with light in my heart.
This year, this is how it went:
On the 31st, as I was getting re-acquainted with my life here having just returned from a deeply sweet week in the comfort of the United States and the love of my family, while cleaning my closets and closing my accounting books, I was very aware that the contents of my Letter were organizing themselves, creating a draft of sorts, knowing that I would get to them soon once my mind was ready. As a writer, this is a process I am familiar with and which I cherish.
That time came, with a pile of giveaway clothes on the patio, a cup of steaming hot tea near me, I was prepared to sit down and commune with the harvest.
What a sweet year 2023 has been. With of course, enough bitter to make the sweetness pop.
As I scanned the Container of the past 12 months, I saw that they delivered me three distinct and so very beautifully intertwined Gifts:
The Gift of Love
The Gift of Healing
The Gift of Creating
These are enormous and while each one both started and completed its cycle within the year, I knew that they were also going to walk across the bridge with me, and that we would continue to dance together in a new, yet unknown, way.
The three Gifts are magnificent, separately and together.
Life-changing and everlasting.
I know that I will carry the Essence of each one until the end of my life.
In the stillness of my body, having done all the doing I wanted to do, I let the bigness in all the way. The thankfulness swam through my bloodstream and flooded my heart. Some of it overflowed out of my eyes. I think this is the first year this has happened to me at this level, this clarity, this giant wave.
The more I could see The Bridge, the deeper in love I fell with this side of it.
And the more I fell in love with it and its sweetness, the more I dared to let myself get close to its bitterness, too. The fear it invited, the ache, the helplessness. As someone I treasure says: the sugar and the salt. The salt stings.
By the time night arrived, I was ready to cross.
Because Life likes to surprise us and show us new, often better ways to do things, a friend was camping on my land, each one of us seeped in our own celebration together and separate. The last Gift of the year, this reminder that yes, privacy can dance with togetherness. Safely. A Gift I now know I needed to take with me.
Candles were lit, “keep-your-dog-calm-through-the-fireworks” YouTube playlist music was wafting through the speaker, and I settled my body and mind, ready for the big little trip. I flinched each time my neighbors turned the jungle into a loud celebratory explosion, remembering that we all like to cross the bridge in our own way.
Soon we were on the other side. The unknown other side. The blank page.
The expanse and deep breathing.
Here in the jungle, my friend and I shared tea and butter cookies, and friendship ease. Throughout the day, she napped in her tent and I wrote on the patio, both of our pups going back and forth. Nature all around whispering its own welcome.
Love. Healing. Creating.
The salt, too.