Mostly Water


There’s something about reaching the birthdays that mark decades that shifts the space in our heads. Next year, in November, I’ll turn sixty. I teach teenagers – most of them see sixty as being close to death. How could anyone be of use once they’re past thirty?

Grandma Moses
Perhaps I measure myself against this youthful barometer. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Hilary Clinton is eight years older than me and she’s set to be the most powerful woman in the world. I love Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson). She was an American folk artist who only really started painting at the age of seventy eight. She continued producing work until she died aged one hundred and one. One of her paintings sold for over $1.2 million. She’s also proof that you don’t have to look like Kim Kardashian to be on the cover of a magazine. Go Grandma!

Go Grandma indeed! I wonder how she felt as she neared her centenary. Probably the same as many of us do now. The world is too busy; there are too many new-fangled things. Despite this, she chose to make meaning of her world. Instead of retreating, she continued to advance. Her tapestries and paintings showed a gentle world, full of warmth and family values. Hers is a world of hope.

The world has never been gentle but it can be made gentle in places, depending on how we choose to be in it. Hope must take us forward. We must interrogate our purpose at every age. I don’t think I’ll live to be a hundred, but I am alive now.

I've spent the last ten weeks in a cumbersome cast, hauling my not insubstantial self around on crutches. On Friday, the cast will come off. I see it as a metaphor for my life. There are many things that have encased my heart. There have been bad choices, the loss of loved ones and my own wonderful ability sometimes to see myself as useless.  I’m not. Neither are you, no matter what the world is whispering in your ear.

My name is Ruth; I will soon be sixty. I choose to fight to abandon my cast and crutches as long as I have breath. I choose to live the flow, not to wait for the ash and dust.

Mostly Water

I'll be sixty soon.
There, I said it, my number's up.
The house is still standing firm,
As far as I can tell, there's no fire on the moon.

I've been to ceremonies, dedicated to dust,
I've scattered a lifetime of ashes,
But I'm not ashey or dusty yet -
I'm mostly water and running.

There's a river raging through my heart,
Tumbling in torrents through my thighs,
Wearing boulders to rocks in the bend of a knee,
Turning pebbles to sand in the palm of my hand.

Of course there have been droughts,
And dams and silt and stink and mud,
We all know the ebb and the flow,
The nights, thick and awash with blood.

But, in the delta of my heart,
Something fertile-fresh is stirring.
I may be close to home, who knows?
Still, I turn to the scent of the sea.

Ruth Everson




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