Seventy

Jay turned seventy yesterday. The evening before, he got a lovely birthday blessing from Rabbi Molly at our tiny congregation in Oneonta. There were 10 of us, including the rabbi, for Shabbat services and a pot-luck dinner. The contrast with our huge congregation at Beth Am is still a little stunning. I do miss the music, and Rabbi Janet, and our dear Chavurah, but the intimacy of the ten of us together for Shabbat has its own sweetness. Holly, who turns 63 this week was on the bimah to share the birthday blessing with Jay. And there were nine people to hear me say my mother’s name, gone eight years today, before we said kaddish.

Jay is always thoughtful about his life, about his spiritual journey, about what he is learning and how he is changing. The turning of a new decade prompted a lot of reflection and conversation for us yesterday. We are both still a little surprised by the unexpected turns in life that brought us together and then brought us here, to our beautiful hill out in the country. There were the things utterly outside our control, Joe’s cancer and Nancy’s murder, and then there were the things we chose. We both chose twelfth step work long ago, and we shaped ourselves through it in ways that made it easy for us to connect with each other, with a common language and a common set of beliefs about how to live consciously and well. We both chose joy as a way of honoring the beloved partners we lost and all we had learned with them about love. And then we both chose this re-potting, finding different soil for a different phase of our lives. We are so blessed.

There is the birth of spring, the growth of summer, the ripening of autumn, and the aging of winter. Maybe it’s part of why we chose to live in a place with such big winter as we age. Winter simplifies and focuses life. The colors are muted, the sound is muted, we spend more time quietly inside, we pay more attention to the basics – to shelter, and warmth, and food, and companionship. Just now, it’s snowing, and the hills have disappeared behind the curtain of snow. The wind is pushing great clouds of snow across our hill. There will be drifts to contend with. I’ll wade through one of them carrying Charlie out to the barn.

Living with such distinct seasons and under such a big sky triggers thoughts of cycles, of the timeless journey of the universe and of the finite trips around the sun of our own lives. For me, living in a big physical space, a space where things mostly happen at a slow pace, seems to widen and deepen my thinking. The fast pace and crowding of the Bay Area were like static for me, blocking out my own thoughts for a lot of the day. Even in the sanctuary of our beautiful garden in Palo Alto, there was always, at every hour, the background thrum of traffic on 101. Here, there might be the tapping of a distant woodpecker, or the talk of crows, and there is the tink of pellets feeding from the hopper into the burn pot in the stove, but these small sounds never feel like an intrusion or a distraction.

Cold and snow outside, but inside we are warm and fed, Charlie and Hazel Tov snuggled next to me. Jay and I have made our first seventy trips around the sun, the last ten of them together. I’d love to do a lot more trips with him on this hill, but I don’t think about the future much. It’s easy to live in the present here. This morning, I couldn’t see any stars, but I could see the moon and Venus and Jupiter through the pre-dawn clouds. They will be there whether we are here or not. At seventy, we know our place in the scheme of things a little better.