Family Times

Dells Events

Feb. 16, 2002

There are many pleasures watching the winter Olympics and one of them is pure appreciation for the physically beautiful young athletes. In the prime of their lives, at top physical condition, their health and beauty shine forth. The lovely figure skaters, graceful and stunning, the speed skater who after the race, strips off his tight hood to reveal a shock of sandy colored hair, all are breathtakingly gorgeous. And they are gorgeous in a way that is not an icon, a decoration or an airbrushed photo shoot.

It got me thinking if there was any time in my life I was anywhere near like that. I think it was right before my first child, in my late teens, early 20s. I took my health and grace for granted, blessed with a slim and smoothly working body.

Our journey in life has several paths. The physical one peaks rather early. Brett Favre, our Wisconsin favorite, is now pushing the envelope of prime football age at 32. Most human beings are at their best physically in their late teens and 20s and literally it is all down hill from there. As Bette Midler said, “After thirty my body decided it wanted a life of its own.”

Heroic measures are attempted to stem this tide since sexual attractiveness is based, biologically, in “fecundity” – signs of ability to reproduce. The newest form of stemming the aging tide is something called Botox, a botulism neurotoxin that paralyses muscles and erases wrinkles leaving the face with the inability to scowl. Too bad, I say.

I prefer to consider other paths on this journey of life that peak at different times later in life.

The psychological journey, for example, I believe peaks somewhere about where I am right now. Finally, I have resolved those pesky childhood issues and learned to accept others and myself as we are imperfections as well as strengths. I am past expecting myself or others to be perfect. It is also the beginning of the time of life I notice married people seem to be happiest. One psychologist said that marriage is for finishing your childhood and if you finish your childhood you can live “happily ever after.”

The intellectual journey peaked for me somewhere earlier than now. I think it was maybe in my 40s when I learned new things rapidly, finding myself in situations where I needed a swift learning curve and I was up to it. Nowadays I don’t retain as much as I used to when reading things. More often now I forget where I¹ve placed something and find myself standing in a room not remembering why I’m there.

But I believe the peak of the spiritual journey is still ahead. One could see it as a preparation for death, but I prefer to see it as the time of life other things diminish in importance and we are faced with the primary issue of conscious humankind that more and more in the years ahead when my work-a-day world diminishes and I have more time to ponder and connect spiritually.

This is what it is to be human. Those beautiful young people, although we nearly worship them, are only one stage in this earthly life.

This Christmas, all across the country, people are trying to figure out how to have a merry one even though their families are split by divorce or they are suffering some other loss.

My children were about seven and ten when their father and I divorced and after a year of difficulty and bitterness, we made our peace and carefully planned ways to minimize the effect on the children.  I think we did a pretty good job but there is no getting around the grief and emptiness.

These plans meant that we, like many other families, traded off holidays. This value of fairness persists in our family even to this day when my children are in their 30s and in-laws complicate the plans. I was so happy to have both children, a son-in-law, my Dad and a niece and her husband with me this Thanksgiving–a rare treat.

My heart goes out, with supreme understanding, to all who struggle with loss at the holidays. I remember with vivid clarity the time I spent Christmas totally alone.

I was living in New Mexico on San Juan Pueblo land in a little 100-year-old adobe house with a tiny propane heater supplementing the wood heat.  That year the grown-up kids were at their Dad’s and for some reason, saving money perhaps, I decided not to go to my own parents. All my close friends in Santa Fe had gone to visit their parents, or were having their own traditional family celebrations. I know all I would have had to do was mention that I was going to be alone and I would have had invitations, but I was too proud.

Farolitos and Christmas lights, San Juan Pueblo

Pueblo people in New Mexico have lived in the same place for centuries. They never suffered the dislocation forced on most other tribes, although they certainly did suffer repression of their religion and customs. Pueblo children were sent to government schools where their hair was cut and they were punished for speaking their Tewa language. The tribes incorporated many Catholic traditions, finding a way to weave them into the structure of their own beliefs, a lesson we could all learn given these times of religious fanaticism.

It was in this setting that I found myself alone on that Christmas nearly a decade ago. My closest neighbors, part of a large Pueblo family, were at the husband’s parents for Christmas on the other side of the pueblo. All was quiet in our little neighborhood.

I bought a tree for myself and figured out how to turn on some ancient Christmas lights that had never been taken down still hanging on the eaves. On Christmas Eve I made my own farolitos, little lights made by placing a votive candle in sand in the bottom of a paper bag.

And then I walked up to the pueblo plaza where the tribe was dancing. The Matachina dance is only on Christmas Eve, and not every year. The men dance accompanied, oddly enough, by fiddlers as well as traditional drummers. The dancers are fierce looking with a sweep of dark fringe covering their faces. The dance is rapid and intense– no smarmy silent night here–the mood is deeply, almost angrily, emotional.

My breath was taken away–some powerful force was at work here, some blending of native and European, some calling of spirits, some celebration of vigorous life. Whatever it was went straight into my unconscious, completely bypassing reason, as if in a dream. I was stunned.

It was snowing lightly as I walked back home and most of my farolitos were still burning. They are to be left burning all night “to light the Christ Child’s way.”

In the morning snow covered the ground and the farolitos were all burned out. I lit a fire, made coffee and opened packages alone. I cried, missing my children. I remember my mother sent me a lovely angel statue, which made me cry more.

Then I bundled up and took off walking with my dog, Freddie. Uno, Snowflake and Cricket, the neighbor’s motley crew of dogs, joined us as we walked over snow covered pepper and squash fields, irrigated in the summer, down to the banks of the Rio Grande. The beach, covered with smooth peebles, was now also covered in snow. The river flowed strong and silent—the dogs waded out a ways for a drink. I thought I was pretty lucky, all in all.

Snow at the pueblo backyard looking towards the fields, Christmas morning

Dec. 8, 2001

FAMILY TIMES
____________
Judy Gibson
Dells Events
October 27, 2001

Two occasions of truth and beauty brought tears to my eyes in the space of two days last week.

The first was the sight of the valiant, inexperienced whooping cranes, nearly the last of their kind, following a little noisy plane over the river, learning how to migrate between Wisconsin and Florida.

I waited along with a small group of people on the Wisconsin River for a good look at the cranes that lift off first thing in the morning. I thought of all the effort and the money being spent to try to save these stunning birds from extinction. But that wasn¹t what made me cry. I cried when I saw them in the sky, coming out of the mist, following as they are born to do in that V formation

Even geese, plentiful as they are, flying in that formation high in the sky makes me catch my breath. I’m not sure what it is although it may be the perfect integrity of the natural world combined with the beauty and grace of the birds flying in a flock, their own extended family, doing together what they could not do alone.

This time that feeling was multiplied by a hundred as these historic birds soared above on a mission they were unaware of.

How fragile is life.

The second occasion was in stark contrast to standing out at dawn on the river My son lives in Chicago and this gives me an excuse to visit the wonderful art museum there. The next day after the cranes, I stood in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Starry Night.” Of course I am very familiar with this painting of swirly pattern around the moon and dots of stars in the sky over the south of France.

I have loved this painting, but nothing compares to standing a few feet away feeling an impact of the beauty and almost painful tenderness. Van Gogh painted this toward the end of his life, he killed himself not long after, and he painted it while he was in an asylum. The exhibition was so well done, illustrating the friendship and competitive artistic relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

Van Gogh was so excited about Gauguin’s coming to stay with him that he painted something just to hang in the room he furnished to please him. Van Gogh was much less sure of himself and it was agony to keep his own integrity in the presence of Gauguin. It was also when his own mental health was crumbling. Then, out of that pain and near the end of his time on earth, he painted this pulsing masterpiece.

I found myself tearing up there, ignoring the crowd of other people moving around me. My son said you could feel the energy coming out of the painting.

It felt just like when I saw the cranes.