Address to the Hemlock Farms
Community Association Women’s Club
Steer Barn Meeting Room, October 10, 2009, 10:30 am.

I wasn’t pleased as a teen when I asked my mother whether I was pretty or not and she responded that she thought that I would be a late bloomer and that I would be beautiful and not pretty in a traditional sense. Now at 53, when I am find myself comfortable in my skin, I’m delighted with the idea that, as a late bloomer, there is great potential in this second half of my life.

And while I realize that my question to my mother was about physical appearance—I was a petite, reddish-brown frizzy-haired, shy, artistic adolescent in the midst of a long-legged, blond, straight haired, beach-party stereotyped groupie of the 1970s—I believe my question was about how I fit in the world and how I would make my way.

I come from a line of long-living strong women. My grandmother died two weeks short of her 99th birthday, with her older sister outliving her by a couple of years, dying at age 103. My mother, at 79, swims a couple of miles a week, is working on her abs and declares that she will be contra dancing with her younger partner at age 100.

When I turned 50, I was happy to be on what I considered the right side of the century mark, to put the uncertainty of my teens and the turmoil of my 20s and 30s behind me, utilize what I found to be the centering years of my 40s and bloom into the next part of my life. I thank Jill Barbier for inviting me into reflection about how our lives take interesting twists and turns, always offering the opportunity to more fully find our place in the world, live a true expression of our love and bless the world with our unique gifts.

And while we think we have been meandering through our life in a rather haphazard way, using the metaphor of a stream, I am wondering whether we unconsciously make our way through our landscape, joining with other streams, merging into mighty rivers and finding our way to the wide-open ocean.

Unitarian minister and transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that if you watch a sailboat making its way across a lake, you will see it make 100 tacks, sailing this way with the wind, and then turning about and sailing the other way. And while the details of the experience is a zig zag, if you track the course of the boat, you will find it to be a straight line and that it was always on course.

I’m wondering whether that isn’t the path of our lives? We zig zag here and there and, in the end, wind up where we were going, even if we don’t know it in the moment.

In one sense, we are consumed in the now, distracted by the past and anticipating the future, but still encapsulated in our present. And with that notion of being in the present, I would like share a chant with you, which I will accompany on the Reverie Harp that is based on the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle, who wrote the book the “Power of Now” and “The Good Earth.” Some of you might be familiar with “The Good Earth” as it was featured on Oprah last winter. Eckhart is saying that all we have is the present moment, and that there is nothing that has happened in the past and nothing that will happen in the future that actually has the power to take away our ability to enjoy the moment. In the now, in this moment, this is all we have.

This is all we have. This is all there is.
There’s no place, but here. There’s no time, but now.

When I shared this song yesterday with Helene Langhorst, who said that she used to work in the developer’s office here at Hemlock Farms decades ago, she disagreed with the concept that we only have the now and added that she always had her dreams and that we could always relish the past. We created two more lines in our song:
We can dream our dreams; we can hold and cherish our past.

So how is it that this reddish-brown frizzy-haired, now grey-haired, artistic woman stands in front of you? Briefly, I started my work career as a camp counselor at Camp Speers Eljabar, just down the road. My boyfriend, whom I met at camp, was waiting for me to graduate with a degree in studio art from Douglass College, and had found a free house in Narrowsburg. We fell into the publication of The River Reporter, and after 30 years of work and life experience that could be made into a epic film of survival by my now 26-year old film editor son, and following a house fire and the subsequent divorce that broke my heart, along with my refusal to quit, I found that my newspaper work was a community ministry.

Interestingly, there was be no abrupt change in my life with this discovery and my attendance in seminary, a vehicle to more fully inhabit my transformation into becoming a community minister. But though this awareness, I more clearly name my lie motivation and the place from which I want to speak and relate and that is, and has always been, from the heart and soul, encouraging myself and other to live their own authentic lives.

Understanding that we have a unique place in the world; understanding that at any point in our lives we can step into our potential, no matter what the circumstances, is the message that I bring to you today. As I mentioned, I was devastated by the ending of my first marriage and thought it a great failure. It was not my choice, at least not that I was aware of. And I was sad and grieving for what seemed to be a very long time. (In hindsight, it wasn’t nearly as long as I thought.) But what struck me about the experience when I began a relationship with my now husband, Stephen, is that it wasn’t flawed; it wasn’t tainted. It was new. I likened it to a soccer game where you got yourself kicked up and down the field. In the next game, it doesn’t matter that you lost the previous one; it matters that you utilize your experience. It matters that you were willing to go out onto that field and play with all that the gifts that the previous experience has given you.

We are what we are. We are uniquely ourselves. And before we close I want to sing with you another song and the words are:

The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the light is yellow.

We have our own paths. We are blue like the sky, green like the grass, or yellow like the light. We have our todays, our nows; we have our pasts, we have our dreams. We are our journeys, our accomplishments and our injuries. Some of us know our place in the world right from the beginning; some of us are late bloomers and understand our way only after we have gotten there.

And while we might make a 100 tacks, like the sailboat, and need to make additional corrections to take into account unexpected currents and waves or places we have misjudged the strength of the wind, we move forward, always having the opportunity to more fully inhabit our authentic selves.

The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, who served as a direct link between the non-violent teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

May it be so.