I feel like there are easily 55 ways to leave the past behind. 55 ways to move forward into my final chapters of life…they could be decades, they could be years, they could be days…there might not even be another chapter, who knows?! I watched the brilliant show Six Feet Under for all of its seasons and I know there are as many ways to go as there are humans doing the living. I definitely have a really hard time driving 55 but I feel mighty confident that I will have a really easy time BEING 55. I have grown and changed over the last 16 months, dare I write “evolved,” in ways that I never really wanted to, but did, and had to, and I’ve made monumental adaptations to how I think about a number of people and a number of things, and I think these ‘modifications in me’ will serve me well in these later pages of my story. To be very clear, while this is my last week of being 54, and I am feeling excited for who I have grown up to be, when you have a dad whose philosophy in living, whose dharma is to know that any day, any week, any year, this hour even, can quite well be your last in the land of the living, “tomorrow you could be run over by a pie wagon,” it gives one a clear heads-up that one ought to try to be content, and find beauty and joy in every single day, even the terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad ones…

I have herstory/history of getting grounded. I mean this, now, on this edge of 55, both figuratively and literally. From the time I lied to my parents when I was in middle school about staying over-night at a neighbor’s house, but instead went to the school dance, that for some reason, which I can’t recall, I was already not allowed to go to/grounded from something else, and I was caught in a lie about where I was the night before and became a girl who got grounded, again, while being grounded…I was grounded for what feels like all of my teenage life! Because of terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad circumstances, I moved out into my own rental at 17. THAT experience in life was so horrific, that I would have rather been grounded in my bedroom for a year, or years, to be honest, but that’s another story for another time, it’s a long ago past that I have moved past…

The point is, I got grounded a lot and finally learned that I am a terrible liar and terrible faker and terrible hider. I am a person who does far better in life when I am truthful, authentic, and transparent, an open book perhaps. I suppose what has made me a “simpler” kind of woman has a lot to do with how complicated my teen years were, and I suppose too that my “open book” ways of being work for me, because trying to be silent or secretive did not suit me in any way whatsoever. Lying does not work because people like me always get caught, not telling any truth or the truth just gets jumbled and tumbled into nonsense, and so for me, This is how things are, this is how things happened, this is what is, is what works for me. Period.

Now that I am older and growing old, “getting grounded” has a much more profound meaning to me…grounded in my ways of thinking, grounded in my comfort of home and “nesting,” grounded in my relationships, grounded in my practicality, frugality, and deep desire for financial stability, grounded in my habits and behaviors, grounded in the very best ways, or so that’s how it feels lately, to me. Am I “where” I had hoped to be at this stage of life?? NOPE, not even a little bit close…nothing about the life I have, or am living is remotely anything like the life I had imagined for myself as a young woman, that I’d be having as an older woman…not one detail is what I thought it would be like, to get to this chapter…but somehow I have managed to find a way to be okay with that, to be okay with all of it, that nothing worked out as I had wished, and nothing became what I had hoped, and nothing IS what I anticipated or dreamed it would be, and I have had to be okay with the ways I have failed at life…BUT because I have completely embraced THE LIFE I DO HAVE AND CREATED FOR MYSELF, I feel pretty good, pretty happy, pretty content… I have learned that the Root Chakra, the first of the seven, is incredibly important in yoga practice because it literally is from where all of the energy starts and how we find balance…getting grounded is, as I perceive it, the first step in all healing, growing, and advancement of one’s true self because if you are not rooted and grounded you surely will never be balanced…the dark and the light, the fast and the slow, the yin and the yang…all starts, it turns out, with getting grounded…