An overdue hello, and the indescribables
on turning sixty, spring and things that have me at a loss for words
Hello friends,
I hope you are all doing okay. The world continues to throw things at us, there are still tragic and unjust wars, many places of unrest, political insanity, and yet it is still such a beautiful life. We are always only a moment away from immense beauty…just look up at the sky. Beauty is a human necessity, and I think I am safe to say that anyone reading this has access to it every single day. Let us not just consume it, but always strive to create it and share it. We all need it, more than ever. If you are someone who paints or draws, I invite you to consider welcoming a daily creative practice into your life, and then to share it in some way that feels right. If you need some guidance on how to get started, I’m here to help.
I have worked on an essay about indescribable things to share with you today. Beauty. I am so grateful for the opportunity you give me to wax poetic and muse about things. I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I am also sharing an essay I wrote when I was turning fifty, as I just turned sixty a few days ago. I found it really wonderful to read, and still all so true; I would not change a word of it except to emphasise even more how very grateful I am to be here. Maybe you will relate to it, no matter what birthday is next for you. So, lots of reading this week, but you don’t have to read it all at once, right? Sixty has been incredible so far. The most special thing that I can talk about is that my daughter whisked me away for a weekend in Toronto and spoiled me to the moon and stars. I will treasure the memories forever.
Spring is in full force here we we dwell. So many gorgeous shades of green are everywhere I look. Have you ever noticed just how many greens there are in spring? It’s more colourful than autumn, and such a delicate and energising delight, before the monotonous green of summer sets in.
For me, I continue to spend as much time as I can with my sweetheart, my granddaughter and my family. We have had a lot of family time lately, and that is always a blessing. Time with my family is simply the best thing in my life. And I have been writing. And reading. A lot. I am deep into work on a novel, have put down about 60,000 words so far (It has taken YEARS) and I wish I had so much more time to dedicate to it. It is the most satisfying work that I do. I will be so very excited to share it with you one day.
Until then…
The Big L
Written near my 50th Birthday, 10 years ago this week
I was wearing a fuchsia-coloured sundress and was six-months pregnant with my first child. We were living in Phoenix and it was summer, 114 degrees. Instead of walking for exercise outdoors, I would drive to the shopping mall and walk around the inside perimeter three or four times. On this particular day I was on my final loop when I was suddenly hit head on by this epiphany that I would never be an old woman. It really shook me and I recall sitting down on a bench and trying to rationalise the foreboding sense that I was going to die a young woman.
When my then-husband arrived home that evening I told him about my premonition while walking at the mall and he laughed at me, shrugged it off. He said it was normal, that no one could envision themselves growing old. Is it really normal? It didn’t feel normal. I obsessed about it for quite a while and the idea has followed me around like an invisible shadow ever since. I suppose I could justify it as the first whisper of mortality, being very pregnant and about to be responsible for a new life, but regardless it was a disquietude that I carried around for a while. Mortality punched its fist in my gut again several months later when my son was born very ill and died within three days. I became all too familiar with the whole idea of death when still in my early twenties.
The next slam came when I was in my early forties and discovered I had a rare form of breast cancer that affects only two percent of women who get breast cancer, and of those almost all are over the age of sixty-five. Another wake up call that my days might be numbered. Thank the good heavens that I did just fine and after five years I was given another clean bill of health that meant I have only a five percent greater risk of dying from breast cancer than the average person. In my late forties I had a hysterectomy which hit me even harder than the mastectomy. My surgery went fine, but I had complications and spent a good deal of time in the hospital and convalescing at home because of a hospital-acquired staph infection that would have done me in if it weren’t for the miracle of several heavy-hitter IV antibiotics and two blood transfusions. Sometimes I think I still have not fully recovered from this experience; I get tired much easier, small illnesses take longer to go away. And there is something to be said about losing all of your reproductive organs overnight. So long to youthful reproductive me, hello to early and sudden menopause, rapid fire hot flashes and all the rest of the delightful things that come along with it. But you know, almost two years later and I barely notice those things anymore. The greatest gift of all of this stuff? I have learned about the value of life today, right now. And I certainly don’t mind having birthdays. Ever year we get is a very good thing and a miracle in itself.
One of the cooler things about turning fifty is that you graduate to a new Roman numeral: L. It seems sleeker than the XL of being forty, and certainly easier to remember than the XLIX of forty-nine, and that’s a good thing because my memory isn’t so snappy these days. Today at work I was writing out acknowledgement cards for memorial donations and I realised I was writing the numeral five when the address clearly showed a number four. I started over on a new envelope and then I made the same mistake twice. I checked over my previous envelopes and found three more mistakes. Is this normal? Please say it’s normal. Several of my fellow menopausal friends say problems with short term memory is quite customary during this transformative time of our lives. I’m just going to pretend that is the gospel truth. I’ve also noticed a big difference in my skin’s elasticity, and the sudden appearance of brown spots and other marks on my body’s road map that I don’t remember seeing before. But I’m not letting these little gifts get me down. Not too much anyway. If Diane Keaton can rock the wrinkles, age spots and the crinkly neck (even if she does wear turtlenecks in summer), I can, too.
Hey, I’ve graduated from self-conscious youth into c’est la vie adulthood. I’ve got a half-century behind me now. If I want to contemplate my milestones and perturbances (and if I desire to make nouns out of verbs) I have earned the entitlement. Six decades. L years. I still have MCMLXIV books I want to read, places I want to visit, experiences I want to have, so many things I want to write and create. Fifty is a big deal because suddenly it’s crystal clear that time is short and the list so very very long. I’ve got one thing in my pocket though; I know how I want to spend my time during however many years I have ahead of me and I’m already doing it. I know whom I want to spend those years with, and he is already by my side. At age fifty I am doing the work I love and living my life with the man I love. As a mother, I am content and beyond grateful that my children are both well on their way to making good lives for themselves. My health is fine—with room for improvement—and perhaps by turning fifty I will hasten to take better care of myself, as I have in the past. I have the basics covered; how fortunate could I be?
I feel so damn lucky.
Sure, there are plenty of regrets, and yet everything (glorious, good, bad and awful) has led me to where I am now. But the only regret worth contemplating is not having given more. That is something so valuable to hone in on as we age—giving more. The man I love is an inspiration to me on the giving end of things. It’s pretty cool to be with someone who allows me to be myself, appreciates who I am, but also inspires me to be a better version of myself. Isn’t that all we can hope for as we grow older? To give more and be a better person than we were before?
We arrive at certain milestones in our lives on the backs of many people who have carried us countless times along the way. My parents, my brother, my grandparents and my children. My many friends, some close friends and some only acquaintances. If I lit fifty candles and made a wish, it would be a wish for all of them. Another thing to practice more in my years to come—giving thanks.
I’ve arrived at this milestone a very content woman. There isn’t much I would change. Can you tell I’m no longer worried about not growing old? I have way too much to accomplish before I leave this wonderful world one day. It’s been a remarkable half-century, but the best is yet to come. Chin up, boots on, carry on.
Indescribable
“From its initial gesture, a single clarion note that falls into a shimmering trill, the music captivates with its supple melodic lines, the eloquent asides of its inner voices and its subtle, expressive dissonances. It is dreamy, haunting, and highly romantic.”
Can you hear it? Would you guess that was a description of Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 55, No. 2? Probably not. Even if you listened to that piece of music every day. There are many difficulties along this writing road; earning a living from it is one that glares like a neon yellow flag, but it isn’t nearly as flashy as the problem of translation. I don’t mean the task of translating one language into another, but instead the act of harnessing the visceral experiences of life, like music, funnelling them through the synapses and whizzing them around in the brain until they begin to form words that can be distilled down through our fingertips.
Music might be the most difficult thing to translate. Go listen to one of Chopin’s Nocturnes and then sit down and try to describe it words. I think you’ll find it tricky, like accurately describing a person’s voice in words. I’m thinking of bird song, too. Have you ever read about a bird in a field guide and tried to hear the sound of its call as described in phonetic English? Here is what my field guide says about the song of the cardinal: “The songs typically last two to three seconds. Syllables can sound like the bird is singing cheer, cheer, cheer or birdie, birdie, birdie.” I imagine any cardinal worth his scarlet feathers would be offended by such a prosaic description of his song. Sounds of any kind are nearly impossible to transcribe with language.
Food is another thing that meets the flimsy film of words like an impenetrable wall of bricks. The delight that food awakens in our mouths is at its best simply savoured and appreciated. Come to think of it, sex is the same. There are very few authors who can write about food or sex in a way that gives either subject the transcendence it brings while we are in the midst of enjoying it. Plenty of us try, though, and all of us have suffered through reading a less than earth-shattering sex scene or feast in a novel. It is forgivable—a peccadillo, not a deal-breaker. A novel can still be transcendent even when its sensual pleasures of the flesh and palate are forgettable. There is only one novel I have read with clearly memorable sex scenes (I’m certain I recall all of them) and that is “Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon. Two books come to mind when feasts are considered: “Like Water for Chocolate” and “Chocolat.” Honestly, no other stories stand out when it comes to food or sex. If you know of any, I would love to hear about them.
Let me try to describe a particularly awesome cheeseburger I ate the other day. The bun was average, slightly hard on the crust but tender on the inside. It soaked up the juices from the meat without becoming too soggy. The meat was succulent, a cool medium-rare, even though I ordered it medium-well. It had the copper tang of blood that I would have objected to if it had not been smothered in condiments. It was the embellishments that made it next to holy: briny banana peppers and jalapeños, spicy pepper jack cheese all melty and warm, and a lush and heaty mayonnaise spiked with cayenne, a sprinkle of sugar and the bright tang of lemon. The crown of this rose was four crisp slices of bacon. It was the kind of burger you had to press a bit in order to fit it in your mouth, and the sauce and juices continuously dripped from the sandwich onto my fingers, which I licked enthusiastically.
Did you taste it? Did my words give you my experience? Maybe a little, but I doubt you were tasting what I had tasted and you certainly didn’t feel the hedonistic pleasures I revelled in while devouring it. There are some things best left to real life. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think a mind-blowing cheeseburger is, too.
Our language is an often insufficient medium to translate some of our human experiences. All human experience that we attempt to describe becomes a facsimile of the experience itself. Philosophers call this phenomena “simulacra,” or something that replaces reality with its representation. It is similar to the French phrase "je ne sais quoi," that refers to an elusively indescribable phenomenon of something. Think about trying to describe the colour red without using any words that mean red, or any representation of red, like a rose or a ruby and the like. We use these methods to represent the intangibles, and they pale in comparison to the real thing.
So what is a writer, or anyone, to do when he or she has a flaming desire to describe something indescribable? That’s why we have metaphor, and also poetry, but metaphor and poetry lack the real, detailed experience, too. They can only transpose an image or sensation, an experience or memory that the reader already has within them. These media can evoke powerful emotions, sensory reactions, but they can’t minutely transpose the actual thing being written about. We can accurately describe a face; think of police artists creating a real likeness just by a witness describing the suspect. Right now I could give you a mark by mark description of the blue pottery bowl on my countertop, so detailed that you could draw an exact representation of it. We can portray the details and story of an event that happened to us, the weather, the landscape that surrounds us…the tangible things. But what about the intangible things, like the way it feels when your lover kisses your neck, or the unforgettable smell of your newborn baby's head, the taste of pomegranates or avocados, or even the darker things like the deepest heartaches and severe physical pain? It is here that words fail us. Perhaps the things we have the hardest time putting into words are the most mysterious experiences we have as human beings. Perhaps the indescribables are the most important things in our lives. Describe God. Describe happiness. Describe love.
Wow! A powerful essay - thank you for sharing! As Agnes says there are no words to express... You are a super resilient and inspiring woman.💕
Emojis come in handy since I have no words… 🫂🤍