Loose Leaf Notes

-Golden Years: the years of retirement, normally after age 65, or a song by David Bowie.

Getting older is bittersweet. It’s an acquired taste. It’s also a time of harvest when the fruit is ripe for picking, and the work done over time to get to this stage of age pays off.

Katherine Chantal and I will be reading our call-and-response poetry at Yoga Jam’s TeaShanti on Saturday September 3, 1 – 2:30. The readings are a different collection than the one we did at the Jessie Peterman Library in February and will mark the second installation of the Grief and Relief Soulful Aging Tour, our local poetry reading tour that features new work and draws from our poetry  memoir books: Katherine’s Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Musings from My Sixties and my Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife and Objects Are Closer Than They Appear (all available on Amazon and at the reading).

Devoted to attachment parenting (and now grandparenting), and homegrown lifestyles, Katherine’s and my paths first crossed before we met, when we both had articles published in Mothering Magazine in the late 70s, a prophetic foreshadowing.

We met when I moved to Floyd in 1985, and we spent years raising our sons in the same rural neighborhood, as members of a women’s talking stick circle that Katherine guided and, more recently, in a woman’s dialogue circle, which I have described as “an inner life workshop.” Dialogue founder Judith O’Brien has said, “The reflection that the dialogue circle provides can be utilized as a fast-moving current to move participants to the doorway to a transcendent awareness. Dialogue is talk that moves you forward!”

Recently, I wrote a poem for Katherine about our friendship and our similarly themed poetry, titled Depth Psychologists: We dig / and hit pay dirt / A vein that shines when polished/ that runs through the gray of granite / A soul’s inheritance / Awakened subconscious.

Katherine, an herbalist and ceremonialist who guides life passages, including weddings and deaths, writes: Ever has the elder / been in the child / Hidden gem of being / in plain sight…

I, who has spent the last 15 years covering events and writing features for our local newspaper, might respond: When the soul takes the lead / there’s a deep delving / There’s a widening horizon / with the narrowing of life.

That’s how the conversation goes.  We hope to have time for questions and maybe Katherine will offer a few haikus from her latest book A Year in Haiku, and I might share some of my short humorous poems.