Tag: aging

What Is The Best Way To Capture Moments?

Posted on August 18, 2015 by

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”

– Jon Kabat-Zinn

The morning is glorious. I’m up early, alone. As the sun rises over the quiet lake. I’ve got my legs up on the pier, balancing my notebook and coffee next to me. The sun is warms my face and the breeze blows down my neck thanks to my newly cropped off hair, just cool enough to be glad I wore my sweatshirt. Wild bunnies and chipmunks scurry in the bushes next to me, undisturbed by the water skier gliding by. The waves lap gently against the shore; paddleboarders and kayakers are my only human companions, and they appear as intoxicated by their surroundings as I am.

It honestly couldn’t get much more perfect for an introverted-nature-loving-writer.

This is what summer should be like – distractions including only a jumping fish, the glitter of the rising sun on water, and the slight smoky scent of bacon wafting from down the road.

This moment is mine – simple and free for absorbing every little bit. It didn’t cost me anything, just the price of being awake, rising early to show up and experience it.

moments on Lake Tahoe dock

My writing over the last four years has evolved into an exercise in capturing moments – the intenseness, the frustration, and the beauty of loving fiercely, thinking deeply and teaching audaciously. As simple as it sounds, it truly has been anything but. Trying to capture the intenseness of the experiences of my life, endeavoring to scribble the sights and sounds and smells to share with an  unknown audience challenges me in such an acutely intriguing way. Snatching photos of moments to enhance my words has unlocked my view of what can be contained in a frame, forcing me to stop and think and consider what is around me.

It is forcing me to pay attention.

I breathe deeply, grateful to be here today.  As I approach 50 I feel a shift in my gratitude practice – it has become a slowing, a releasing of what is unnecessary, hurtful, and holding me back. Recently, a teacher friend asked me how long I thought she’d be able to keep up her energy for teaching. As I thought about it, I realized that it isn’t the energy level that changes – it’s the level of energy I want to use in different areas of life that changes. The more mindful I become to the moments around me, the more mindful I become to how I give of my time. I’m becoming selective and selfish and miserly with my time and energy, and at this point in life, I’d rather spend two hours soaking in the morning sun on this pier, writing and sipping coffee and thinking about this huge, wide Universe and this one wild life I’ve been given than just about anything else.

And I realize I’m on summer vacation now. I fully understand the gift of having a morning on a pier, the ability to not think about students and lessons and the outside life. It’s not the vacation energy I am so infatuated with. It’s an energy balanced by the peacefulness of aging, of being young enough to still settle in on the wooden dock, feeling the warm wood under my legs. To know all I have is all I need. To trust that my kids will be OK, that my husband will be well, and that my teaching will provide me with the means to fill another area of my life that’s opening up and calling for attention.

It’s an energy pushing me to pay attention, to write just for me while hopefully offering a glimmer into some part of life that needs to open up for you, too. Maybe this moment you’re suddenly paying attention to somewhere you’re stuck, or scared, or maybe you and I can find we’re kindred spirits-another soul who finds joy and happiness in thinking deeply, loving fiercely and teaching audaciously. Someone who doesn’t give a fuck about trying to impress you or do the things women are expected to do. Someone who wants her words to match her actions, and for her children to live fully and help make the world a more awesome place.

Someone who wants her life to matter.

Toni Morrison writes, “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” I think I know what I’m doing now.

It is enough to just be here on this dock, at this moment, with the breeze blowing the pages of my spiral notebook and the sun blazing in my eyes, casting shadows as I write. This moment is too blinding to photograph. It’s just me, here, paying attention and capturing its beauty to share with my kindred spirits.

What Is The Best Way To Capture Moments

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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Can You See Me Aging?

Posted on January 17, 2015 by

Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Betty Friedan

It’s a winter Saturday morning, dreary and grey and bare. Outside my window I look down on my garden; the trees bare, branches arcing and cascading with delicate, raw beauty. The rose bushes are pruned, the soft flesh of the grapefruits fall with an ugly crash to the grass below. Verdant reen grass, green shrubs, green moss landscape my view, with little other color to brighten my spirits. The bones of the garden are exposed in all their raw and graceful and startling vulnerability, green but not growing. We both are waiting to bloom.

bare branches

Outside my window I set up a new bird feeder this winter, right next to the birdbath. I carefully filled it with seed, positioned it next to the safe haven of a Lavatera bush, under the bare bones of the pistache tree. I’ve followed all the steps, but still the birds flit and fly around it. Not one is perching this winter. They won’t stop where I want them to. They refuse to land. What do they have to fear? Maybe they know something I don’t.

This winter, I’m in my 50th year of this life, fifty years of aging gracefully. I can feel it in my bones, in the sinew of my shoulder, in the crick in my back when I bend down to clip the fragrant narcissus blooming in my backyard bed. It’s hard, this aging. It’s hard when Facebook flashes images of my youth; class photos from elementary school, sixteen-year-old sojourns to Stinson Beach, the goth days that stilled my soul. I click and eagerly ingest the memory, scan the photos for others I recognize in their youth. Sometimes I see them aging gracefully, too.

People see my photos and say I haven’t changed. But it stuns me, really. Physically, maybe not so much- a few pounds heavier, my face a bit fuller, my breasts a bit lower and my body baring the glorious work of motherhood. But inside, sometimes I don’t even recognize myself. I feel the stripping down happening this year, the leaves falling to the ground and in place, my bark, my branches growing and reaching and sometimes fracturing and not caring who sees.

I see my daughter’s face, clean and fresh and smiling. Her friends look just like her, really. Their eyes shine with the wisdom of college freshmen, off and eager and full of the energy that youth and growth offers. Her second decade, her time when the world is brimming with experiences, her mind teetering with the excitement of a new home, a new school, a new love.

My son towers over me, long and lanky and grinning with the kind of smile that makes me wonder. His eyes gaze with an old wisdom yet his body pulsates with the youthful need to move, to skate, to ski. His time when dreams deferred have altered his course, his world changing and he is riding it out, gracefully.

I tell my middle school students that well behaved women rarely make history. I write and read and teach and share my stories, feeling bits of raw bone shining through. I prune and rake and weed and dig, waiting to bloom, to wake up, to uncover the beauty, to expose the substance, to pull off the overgrowth. To strip down to my core, to discover the beauty of aging gracefully.

Fifty years, an indicator of a number of breaths and beats and moments my body as been growing, aging, learning. Can you see the grey and the lines and the wisdom that comes with half a century of work?

I won’t stop. I have nothing to fear.

I have everything to learn.

Can you see ME?

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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Mirror, Mirror

Posted on December 4, 2013 by

Brown eye

Brown eye (Photo credit: Mommyof4Ruggies)

“I think your whole life shows in your face, and you should be proud of that.”

– Lauren Bacall

I’m not sure I recognize her as I should, that face starting back at me in the mirror. I look away, and then back, fascinated at what reflects back.

 A single grey hair erupts from the crown; sparkly against the darkness, it shines in glory and a sort of unexpected grandeur.

  You’ve earned this, it whispers.

Looking closely, another strand peeks out from the temple, as if playing a game of hide and seek.

Deep brown eyes stare back at me, protected by long, black lashes. I tilt my chin up just a bit, and they play along, more accustomed to looking down,

 but willing to give it a chance.

I remember, don’t you? they cry back.

I flick on the the light and lean in a bit closer.

A crescent shaped line forms around my mouth. Where did that come from?

Has my life been this full of laughter? Or has every smile just etched this deep, unknown to me?

You’ve earned this, it smiles back.

 These battle scars, these trophies of my growth, bear witness to a life well lived,

to an adventure of risks and rewards, to love and lasting memories.

This life does show on my face, and yes, I’m proud of that.

 

Writing reflections inspired by december prompt-a-day with writealm.com.

Join us by sharing your posts on Facebook, on Twitter or Instagram

 using the hashtag #writealm.

 

 

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Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

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