70

Celebrating my wife, Teresa Jordan

Birthday cake made by our good friend Carol Sherman Rogers

Teresa just turned 70. We got together when she was 35 so I’ve been with this extraordinary person half her life. Teresa is a practitioner. She loves to take on practices with a steep learning curve. She’s best known as a writer and a visual artist and she dives deep. For instance, she’s intensely interested in animals and when she draws or paints them she understands not only their anatomy but the nuance of their spirit. She is a devoted friend to a diverse lot of people and understands how to love without bounds. I hit the jackpot.

Dark Sheep Study by Teresa Jordan

For more than two decades, Teresa has practiced Zen Buddhism. During the pandemic, this path led her to start training as a hospital chaplain, and today she is a resident chaplain at Portland Providence Medical Center, one of the city’s largest hospitals. Each morning, as the Spiritual Care Department gathers for the handoff from the night before, a chaplain offers a spiritual reflection to start the day. Teresa used her most recent turn to reflect on aging. She agreed to let me share her thoughts.

At the Start of a New Decade

I just turned 70 and I wanted to offer a few words about aging. It has been such a surprise. The downsides are real: the effects of gravity, the loss of the easy strength of youth, the aches and pains and stiffness, the grasping for lost words. What I didn’t expect is the lightness that often informs me now, the falling away of insecurities, the growing and delightful sense of belonging.

I think of the great poet and short story writer Raymond Carver. He, too, was a late bloomer when it came to a sense of ease in this world, something he addressed in one of his last poems, “Late Fragment.” These words are carved on his gravestone:

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I didn’t grow up with positive models for aging. My grandparents on both sides were grumpy, and my parents and their friends mostly talked about aging with dread. But I did have one shining example, my Great-Aunt Marie. My grandfather’s sister, she was born in the ranch house in Wyoming where I grew up, and when she married, she and her husband John bought a ranch a few miles away. John was a huge personality, a restless and entrepreneurial man who was often away on one venture or another while Marie stayed home and ran the ranch. That suited her fine. All she ever wanted was to spend each day out of doors with her horses and her cattle and her dogs. She continued to ride well into her 80s, until just weeks before she died.

She was a stunning woman. Her face was carved with deep arroyos from her decades of exposure to sun and wind and weather, and her eyes had that shattered sky-blue cloudiness that comes to people who spend their lives at very high altitude, looking toward a far horizon. She was always tidy in blue jeans with a pressed shirt, her pure white hair gathered into a twist. She never walked, she scurried – not from impatience but from a sense of delighted embrace of what the day had in store. There are so many stories about her. I have written about her in two of my books, and she was the inspiration for Molly Gloss’s fabulous novel The Hearts of Horses, about a young Wyoming horsewoman in World War I who rode from ranch to ranch breaking horses for pay while the men were away at war. Today, though, I’m thinking not so much of these stories as the ways in which Marie’s model has gifted my own life with a sense of joy and possibility.

The great women’s studies scholar Carolyn Heilbrun has said that we live our lives by stories, by the texts we learn at our mother’s breasts and throughout our lives. But we are also shaped by example, by what we absorb directly from the embodied experience of those we walk alongside as they show us what is possible.

As chaplains, we are privileged to accompany people through the hardest moments of their lives. It is a sacred witness, and we see the full arc of possibilities in the face of loss and suffering, from those who seem to layer suffering on top of suffering to those who face the most unimaginable distress with unfathomable resilience, acceptance, and grace. Every day as I learn from my patients and also from each of you, my sense of possibility expands. Oh my: I could never have imagined the unexpected gifts that would come in these later years.

I’d like to end with a short poem by Mary Oliver. She wrote “Halleluiah“ when she was 60. As I read this now in the context of my 70^th birthday, I mentally add a few years.

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?

Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

• Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2009

Hummingbird II by Teresa Jordan

If you resonate with these words of Teresa’s, you might enjoy Birds of Praise, a short video she made that explores the connections between visual art, the natural world, and contemplative care.

You can see more of Teresa’s work on her website, www.teresajordan.com