Back in Business!!

One day, I walked from my cottage up to the village, a quarter of a mile away,chatted to various people as I walked around, did a bit of shopping and then walked home again. It was one of those completely unremarkable days - a day like many others.The next day, I woke up in the morning, tried to get out of bed and found that I couldn't walk. I was paralysed from the waist down. An ambulance took me to hospital. The doctors there did not know what was wrong with me so they sent me on to another hospital where there were specialists in spinal issues, and there they did a MRI scan. It turns out that a tiny fragment of tissue from a spinal disc, which had slippd out of place way back in the 1970s and had been floating around inside my spinal column ever since, had landed on a certain nerve. It is a nerve called the cauda equina (Latin for 'horse's tail' because it is that shape) and it governs a bunch of things, including walking. In view of my age (nearly 90) and the fact that I suffer from heart failure, the surgeons considered it too risky to operate, so they sent me to a rehabilitation hospital to see how much mobility I could regain. When I went in there, I could not walk a single step. But many weeks later, thanks to the skill and patience of a wonderful team of physiotherapists and nursing staff, I gradually learned to walk again. It took a long time, but eventually,once I could walk fifty metres with a walking frame, they let me come home, and a physiotherapist from the local community team took over and helped me graduate from the frame to just a walking stick. Now, all these many months later, I can walk up the hill again. So far, I can get almost half way to the village. My aim is to be able to walk right up to the village and back by the end of next month. This episode, and all those weeks in hospital have given me a lot of time to think. And I thought about this very neglected blog of mine. A long time ago, I announced my intention to revive it, but for one reason or another this never really happened. But now it is going to. Especially as I am now 90 years old. And if I possibly can, I want to live to a hundred.And I want to chronicle that process. So now, since it is a beautiful, sunny day, I am going to sit in my favourite spot on the front porch and make a list of the things I want to talk about in future posts.

Third Time Lucky?

 It seems that we are somehow not meant to be part of the elders cohousing community we have so long dreamed of establishing. The Barney Fields venture that I was so excited about in my last blog post has now gone the same way as the previous one -- the developer has decided that it is not financially viable. 

This is another huge disappointment for us - in fact it's an even bigger disappointment than the loss of the Dartington site because this one was to be right here in the village we have lived in, and loved, for the past 24 years. I confess it is taking me a very long while to get over this blow.

Once again, the group has re-formed, with some of the previous members and a whole bunch of new ones, and is starting the whole process again, from scratch, i.e. searching for a suitable site for an elders cohousing community somewhere in the Southwest. 

The group is now calling itself 'Elderberries Cohousing' and is actively seeking new members - for details click here.

Sadly, for Sky and me personally, it is now too late. When we started the whole elders cohousing project I was 79, which may already have been a tad too old for such a venture. But I was young-at-heart and full of energy and enthusiasm. Now, not so much, And now I am 87. Realistically, even if this new project were to be wildly successful I would probably be at least 90 by the time we moved in and at that age I would feel myself to be a liability to the group rather than an asset. Sky is a few years younger than me but he is starting to experience some degree of cognitive decline.

However, despite the fact that we can no longer be part of the elders cohousing dream, if the 'Elderberries' manage to succeed in their venture, none of our hard work will have been in vain. Even if I can no longer be a part of it, I can still see the wole thing as a potential case of 'third time lucky'.

As for me, I am not without projects altogether. Starting next week I have vowed to post much more regularly to this blog. And since part of my life's work, ever since my first book was published in 1991, has been to write about ageing, I intend to start where my 2017 book 'Elderwoman' left off and chronicle the experience of being what is now referred to as 'OLD old'! 

I hope you will stay tuned.

Reviving this blog - and a whole new cohousing venture

This blog has seriously languished in recent years. I can't blame the pandemic because the blog started languishing a whole year before the pandemic began. But I have been engrossed in my various projects.

The last time I posted, I was telling you all about our exciting plans for an elders cohousing community in south Devon (on the Dartington Hall estate near Totnes). Everything was going wonderfully well but suddenly, due to a financial crisis the Dartington Hall Trust was experiencing, they pulled the plug and the entire thing was cancelled  Needless to say, we were bitterly disappointed.

But as one door closes, another opens. I discovered that one of our local families right here in our north Devin village had received the green light to develop some land at the edge of the village for housing -- including affordable housing for locals -- and they were interested in incorporating our elders cohousing community into that.complex. Several other local elders were interested in this concept as well as some former residents of the District who wanted to move back, plus various people from other parts of the country. 

So now we have a whole new group and a whole new plan. You can read about the housing venture in general -- and our elders community in particular -- online at https://barneyfields.co.uk/ 

Eco-cohousing for Elders: A project dear to our hearts

One of the things that a lot of people don't get around to doing as they get into old age is to make plans for how they are going to spend the last stage of their lives. All too often, they just drift along, year after year, until one day they reach the point where they can no longer cope with the tasks of daily life and someone else has to step in and make decisions for them—frequently, decisions with which they are not at all happy.

In all the years I spent working in community health, I saw this pattern over and over again. Families, social workers, community health nurses, all faced with the dilemma of what to do with an elderly person who was no longer able to live comfortably—or even safely—in his or her own home and yet was stubbornly resisting the need to move somewhere else. And in so many cases, the solution that was eventually found was really not a happy one, from anyone's point of view. Very few of us really want to end our lives in a nursing home.

The time to plan and made decisions and come up with the sort of solutions that we are sure we shall be happy with is now, while we are still able and flexible and creative enough to think it through.

Furthermore, it is now a well-established fact that loneliness and isolation shorten lives. Like so many other species, from sparrows to wolves to elephants, we humans need a tribe. We need community. We need others around us. Yet, being modern humans with a well-developed sense of self, we also need some space and solitude, especially the introverts among us. Cohousing is the perfect solution. and since an elder cohousing community - unlike an ordinary retirement community -  is designed by the people who are going to live in it, we know we shall end up living with compatible and like-minded people.

So a few years ago, Sky and I came across the concept of eco-cohousing for elders, we knew this was the solution we wanted for ourselves. Not only is elder eco-cohousing a sensible, creative solution for how to live happily and creatively to the end of our days but, being community based, it is also eminently sustainable and ideal for our 21^st Century. Pioneered in Denmark and rapidly gaining popularity in the USA and elsewhere, cohousing communities for elders provide not only the ideal blend of privacy and togetherness that intergenerational ones do but are also specially adapted to the specific needs of older people in ways that range from accessible structures to shared in-house care.

We are now part of a group that is planning our own elder eco-cohousing community in the county where we live. Right now, we are still in the early stages. I shall be setting up a separate blog, at some point, to give details and updates about all this. And I shall be announcing that here when it is ready. So watch this space…

September/October 2017 Travel Report

We have been off travelling again, this time to the USA. 

See: http://www.elderwoman.org/USATrip_2017.html

'Elderwoman' Republished at Last!

In 2015, when Findhorn Press told me they were taking my book Elderwoman out of print after thirteen years, I decided to republish it myself. It has taken me all this time to get around to doing it, but finally, here it is, the second edition, with an extra chapter that I added about how it felt to turn eighty last year.

And now, as well as a paperback with a brand new (and I think much nicer) cover and a cheaper price, there is also (at last!) a Kindle version. 

Here is a link to it on Amazon.com And here is one to Amazon.co.uk.

My hope is that by now there will be a whole new generation of women crossing that midlife threshold who may find the book helpful. And if so, I hope some of them might even take time to go on Amazon and leave me a review.

Please help me spread the word!!

Elderwoman Newsletter - May 2017

The May 2017 issue of The Elderwoman Newsletter is now online at:
http://www.elderwoman.org/May17news.html

Me - A Retrospective

Like most people, I save photographs. And like most people my age, a lot of those photographs pre-date the digital era. But of course paper deteriorates over time. Some folk who, like me, have collections of old photos in a box in the attic, are tackling the task of scanning them in order to preserve them for future generations.
Whether or not future generations will have the slightest interest in my collection I have no idea. And I certainly have neither the time nor energy to scan the hundreds of photos in that big old box.  But I decided to nominate a few categories and pick out just a few pictures in each category to be scanned for posterity.
Here, then, is the first category. Me.

1943

1948

1955

1961

1969

1975 (approx)

1985

1994

2011

2013

It feels strange to think that the further back I go, the fewer people there are who remember those earlier versions of me. But looking back at them has been fun.

Down from the Mountains

Whenever we visit Italy - which we have been doing every year for the past six or seven years - it is usually to the Mediterranean coast because I am such a lover of the sea. But Sky also has a great love of mountains. So this year, as a special treat for him, I organized a trip to the far north of Italy, to the Dolomites.

As usual, we came overland - train from London to Paris, Paris to Zurich and then down into Italy, watching with fascination as Alpine Switzerland gradually morphed into Alpine Italy. I had often wondered what it would be like to live in that border country. So we rented an apartment for a week in the beautiful little town of Ortisei, nestled in a valley between majestic mountains, where everybody lives in gorgeous, Tyrolean-style gingerbread houses bedecked with flowers and you would swear you are on a set for The Sound of Music and yet people are speaking Italian. However many also speak German and a lot of the signage is in both German and Italian. This area once was a part of Austria called South Tyrol but at some point in history it changed hands and became part of Italy called Trentino-Alto Adige. It is fascinating to see this blend of cultures.

Here is Garni Salegg, where we stayed: 

This was the view from our balcony:

It would be hard to find a more picturesque little town than Ortisei, nestling in a little green valley called the Val Gardena. Here's a view down the main street with Sky in the foreground:

And here is a view up the street in the other direction: 

Wood carving is the local cottage industry and there are interesting, innovative examples everywhere you look. (These carved figures have bee colonies living in their tummies!)

For the first couple of days we concentrated on exploring the town and taking some walks in the valley. Then we bought ourselves a three-day pass for all the lifts and cable cars, of which there is quite a variety. We started off by taking a cable car up to Seceda, at seven thousand feet... 

...and hiking across the Alpine meadows...

 ...to an interesting rock formation called Pieralonga. 

There, we had a picnic lunch beside a mountain hut. What a glorious feeling, being on the roof of the world!

The following day, we rode the funicular to Resciesa, high up on the western side of the Val Gardena.

There, we enjoyed a cup of coffee on the terrace as we gazed out at the beautiful mountain scenery.

 In the afternoon, we took a bus down to Selva at to the other end of the valley and rode a cable car up on the eastern side to a spot called Ciampinoi. The views from here were amazing.

On the third day, yet another cable car ride on the  eastern side, this time from Ortisei, took us up to six thousand feet and to the edge of a glorious, undulating plateau called the Alpe de Suisi, dotted with trees and criss-crossed by trails, some of which wound their way up into the far mountains. There, we took two short hikes, one part way down into a shallow valley...

... and the other along the edge, with magnificent views of the mountains.

After a wonderful week of 'ups and downs' in this delightful little corner of the Alps, we spent a few days in Verona. The weather was hot and Verona was extremely crowded with tourists... 

...especially around the area of 'Juliet's balcony' (so called). 

However we enjoyed walking around the city and our little B&B on the bank of the River Adige was a delightful and very atmospheric place to stay. 

After Verona, we headed south and east towards the Abruzzo, a rugged mountain region of Italy that we had never visited before. Here, we enjoyed a peaceful week in an apartment in the historic centre of Sulmona. This time there were no crowds, and almost no tourists at all and everything felt very laid back. Sulmona, with its narrow streets and ancient alleyways...

 ...and its beautifully preserved medieval aqueduct... 

...is a most pleasant place to visit...

...and a great base for anyone planning to explore the Abruzzo's several national parks.

One of Sulmona's claims to fame (as well as being the birthplace of Ovid) is its'confetti' stores, of which there are at least a dozen along the main street. Whoever knew that so much could be done with one simple confection, i.e.sugared almonds?!

Yes, all the bright and flowery things you see in this picture are sugared almonds.

It was a great trip to the mountains, to Verona and to Sulmona. And now it's over.

After a four-day train journey via Milan, Geneva, Paris and London, we are home again.
(And already planning our next adventure.)

At This Time of Year...

.
...in our Devon hedgerows, 

the campions reign supreme.

And when I get to the top of this lane, there is another beautiful sight to behold. 

The wild orchids have popped up again...

...like they do every year around this time,

despite the rough treatment this ground has seen during the winter, with those big, clumsy agricultural machines that gouge out deep, muddy ruts and hack the hedges around.

Nature is so forgiving, so resilient. Will it always be able to bounce back, just as these orchids do? As climate change bites ever more deeply and the sixth great mass extinction picks up speed, what will survive? Who will survive? In a hundred years, a thousand years, will the orchids still pop up each year? Will the campions still reign supreme in the month of May? How many more years will the hawthorn tree outside the bathroom window of our cottage blossom in glory, like it is doing right now and probably has done every year since the cottage was built in 1733?

Who knows? But right now, in this moment, in the midst of all this beauty, and despite the dark despair that so often tries to overwhelm me, I feel blessed. 

Living in these times can feel schizoid. But as Charles Eisenstein said in a recent essay,
"I am fond of saying that no optimism can be authentic that has not visited the depths of despair. But today I have realized a corollary: no despair is authentic that has not fully let in the joy."

I think he is right. So much so that when I look at these orchids and I start to cry, I realize that it is neither joy nor grief that makes the tears flow. 

It is both.

Deep Green Living

Once again, I have had the pleasure and privilege of editing a book in the GreenSpirit series of ebooks. This latest one has the title Deep Green Living, and it deals with themes that are very dear to my heart. It has a lot of very beautiful writing in it, too. Like several of the other ebooks in the series, it is an anthology. Some of the pieces have been published previously in our GreenSpirit Magazine and some appear in print here for the first time.

The ebook is available through both Smashwords (in all the popular ebook formats) and Amazon, and it costs less than a cup of coffee.

The reason that we at GreenSpirit sell our ebooks for next to nothing is that we are not the least bit interested in making money from them. The only reason we produce them is that we want to introduce our message (about loving the Earth and caring for it) to as many people as we possibly can.

(In fact, we would be perfectly happy to give them away for free. The only reason we don't is that many people like to use the Kindle to read their ebooks and to publish a book on Kindle means you are obliged to set a price.)

I am hoping that some of our readers will take the time to post a review on Amazon or elsewhere. Even just a few sentences and a good rating will make me a very happy bunny indeed. And I know the contributors will be delighted that their work is being read and reviewed.

Click here to read a list of contents, find out more about the book and its contributors and click through to it on Smashwords and Amazon.

Roller-Coasters and Robins

Most of us who have been parents will probably recall that our children's behaviour seemed to cycle between periods when everything seemed calm, pleasant and easy and periods when chaos reigned and we started to wonder what we were doing wrong. I remember very well the day, nearly half a century ago, when I discovered a book in our local library that explained how and why this process occurs.

"Research by the Gesell Institute of Human Development has shown that this pattern of behavior is very common and that children’s growth is not always steady and progressing from less to more maturity. Instead, their development follows a course in which smooth, calm behavior often precedes unsettled, uneven behavior. It is almost as if children need to take two steps backwards developmentally before taking a huge leap forward.

In fact, all children grow through predictable stages of development beginning at birth and extending far into their teen years. Some experts in the field refer to this occurrence as going through periods of equilibrium versus disequilibrium. Children cycle in and out of times when they are more a joy to be with, It cycles up and down and in and out of times when their behavior can be more or less challenging – (disequilibrium). Hence, the “roller coaster” of child development.

The equilibrium periods can be looked at as a time when your child is consolidating learned skills; practicing what he has struggled to master; they are plateaus in development. The disequilibrium periods often occur as the child is entering a new, quick time of growth and development, when he is mastering new tasks and working on new abilities."

http://centerforparentingeducation.org/library-of-articles/child-development/developmental-stages-the-roller-coaster-of-equilibrium-and-disequilibrium/

It was a huge relief to me to discover that this roller-coaster of psychosocial development throughout childhood is perfectly normal and not some sign that I was somehow being a bad parent.

I hadn't thought about that in years. Until yesterday, when I suddenly found myself wondering whether the increasing disequilibrium we see and sense all around us as our materialist, consumerist Western culture starts to come apart at the seams is in fact part of a similar pattern.

Do humans, collectively, go through a similar set of stages to those we see in individuals? I suspect that maybe we do. There are certainly many 'experts' around today who say that we are now in a new phase of evolution. But we know from history and biology and paleontology that new evolutionary projects don't always proceed smoothly or easily—or even successfully.

If we are indeed "entering a new, quick time of growth and development, when we are mastering new tasks and working on new abilities" it will be because we have no other choice. Overpopulation, the ruthless exploitation of Nature and a doomed-to-be-short-lived reliance on non-renewable fossil fuels has brought us to the point where we MUST learn new skills and learn them very quickly if our species is going to survive at all.

Shall we succeed? Nobody knows. I feel sad, sometimes, that I shall almost certainly not live long enough to greet—and enjoy—the next stage of equilibrium. For that will surely be a time of peace and sustainability, when humans have at last learned how to live in an ecocentric way, like true Earthlings, knowing themselves to be a part of Nature and interdependent with all other life forms. If indeed such a stage is ever reached.

If it is not, well perhaps it is as well for me that I shall die unknowing and still hoping. That way, on my deathbed, if I hear the robin singing in the tree outside my window I can die still believing that there is a chance. I can die thinking that maybe—at least for the next few billion years till our sun becomes a supernova—there will be robins, and trees for them to sit in, and a song for them to sing. 

Off Travelling Again

Yes, I have been neglecting this blog for several months. And that, of course, is because we have been 'on the road' once more.

Here's my latest trip report - once again from Italy.
http://www.elderwoman.org/Italy_Sept-Oct2014.html