Retirement and figuring out what I am going to do when I grow up

So, I got a call (telephone, not God) this week from an interim stated supply who thought I should talk to her church about becoming their stated supply. I reluctantly agreed to come and talk to the session. I haven't heard back and I'm really relieved because I don't want to go there.

I need time to see what God has in store for me for the next few years. I am so burned out from the resistance in the congregation I serve.

Dinner last night with a group of women I don't know very well. It was so much fun. One woman mentioned that she and a friend were turning 40 and trying to figure out what they wanted to do next. Living in this time is such a gift: there are so many things for women to do and try. We can be one thing this moment and something else the next.

One thing I really want to think about is growing older. On the one hand, I fight like crazy to stay healthy (though eating my way through lemon tarts is definitely not the way to do this). I fantasize about getting my neck fixed. I want to face the reality that I'm not as strong as I used to be, that I can't do what I once could do. And it will not get better. I want to learn to accept the limitations age brings without turning into one of those women who are bitter, angry, and frozen into selfishness and rigidity. I want to continue to love life.

I think it was Joseph Campbell who talked about Hinduism as having four stages of adulthood (this was for men, but anyway, I think it applies to women). The first stage is student: learning, then making a living, then a householder and finally focusing on the spiritual nature of life.

I'm really feeling a pull to the spiritual, to being. I'm also feeling a pull to creativity.

Well, it's time to brave the heat and pull up weeds. It's a nice metaphor for what I want to do for the next little while: pull up the weeds that choke growth and life. (On the other hand, weeds are also living . . . not sure where my analogy is going now, but I definitely am going outside.)