What's Left Behind. If you pulled this image from the deck of Crone Cards, you may find yourself overwhelmed. What's left behind? Well, everything, actually. Depending on your particular circumstances you may have jettisoned the belongings of a lifetime in order to shoehorn yourself into a space so small it fits you like a glove.
You may have done this willingly. Or it may have happened to you as part of an inexorable push toward your next phase.
In either case you need to decide how you feel about what was left behind. The emotions of your life are as vivid as the physical items, as vivid also as the people who have played large or small roles in your life. And all of these have been left behind.
But in another way they are still with you. Not in actual memory, perhaps, but in your body's memory of what it has lived through. Let the physical things of your past go without a thought, but treasure what remains in your body and soul.
Patience. If there was ever a time for patience, this is it, for these are your years of expectation and waiting. These are the slow years. Perhaps you can welcome the slowness instead of railing against it. Your daily walk is not as brisk as it used to be? You find yourself overtaken and passed by every other walker in the park? Do you really care? The former you—the one you once were--cared. But competitiveness will get you exactly nowhere now, so you might as well take in the sights as you amble along your path.
What are you waiting for? Once that was a rallying cry: get on with it! Get moving! But we can also see it as an actual question and try to answer it: what are you waiting for? What do you think will happen while you are waiting? Are you an active waiter or a passive one? Your new times welcome both these conditions.
Loneliness. Oh, my dear. Loneliness. We can be so lonely in the midst of a living space of 200 other people. We can be lonely sitting at the dining table with three other people we know only superficially.
We are lonely when there is no one around who knows us. If you are a California hippie who traveled across the continent on your motorcycle and who was into woo-woo before the term even existed, then it is hard for your new neighbours to see you. You are a mystery to them, which is to say they simply see you as being the same as them—which is to say they don't see you at all—which is to say you are lonely.
Any remedy for this must come from within. Will it help to drop all expectation of being known in your present circumstances?
Bursting. Bursting with energy! Bursting with joy! Bursting with anticipation.
A literal bursting is not what we want here. But the fizz and sizzle within us that feels as if we're ready to burst? That's something to reassure. When you were five years old this was probably a familiar feeling. Why is it we lose that fizz as we grow older? But now, free from the daily obligations that beset us before we were crone-aged, we can return to fizzing. I fizz quietly when in the embrace of a new, good book. I fizz more energetically when I see each day a new blue flower, three inches in diameter and unfurled like an umbrella from its bud, on my single miraculous morning glory plant. I planted three seeds at the beginning of the summer, but then the pot fell from a height during a wind-storm and I salvaged only one of the little plants. It twined and vined healthily to a pretty length, but without flowers. Then the lower leaves dried up and fell off. And then, on Labour Day, the first blossom appeared, a blossom of surpassing beauty, as blue as the sky. Since that time there has been a blossom a day, ephemeral but even more welcome for that.
If I count the buds there are still a dozen potential flowers, a dozen days of dazzle, to come from that fragile vine, leafless for a third of its length. Nature's ways are mysterious.
Audible.Ca: go to https://www.audible.ca and search for Ann Tudor
Audible.Com: go to https://www.audible.com and search for Ann Tudor
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