From Stillness To Flight: On Beauty At Sixty

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Let me begin by telling you what I think I know.

Written by Karen Richards

Category

lifestyle

Date

12/06/2023

Length

12 min read

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Beauty is more than that which is seen―more than something you are or are not.

Not night and day, but dusk and gloaming, the faint echoes of light from the sun caught in the lowering sky of evening.

It’s something you do, and feel, made through an unseen alchemy―kneading a ball of stubborn dough between your floury fingers until―like the magic of yeast devouring sugars beneath a damp cloth―it rises unbidden from the darkness.

I find myself here. Six decades in. Still thinking from time to time, sixty cannot happen to me. To others, yes, of course.

Six decades means I can no longer use the word girl to describe myself and neither can anyone else, except perhaps my father. Not a miss, but a ma’am. Not a pretty girl any longer, let alone a beautiful one.

Sixty began with a surprise party three thousand miles from home held for someone who does not welcome surprises. And ended with a day of unexpected joy: dancing to songs of the 70s―James Taylor Fire and Rain, Cat Stevens The Wind―tissue paper and tears, the words of a poem my teenage son wrote for me: as willows fall and darkness seeps, my mom is standing tall, both feet. An opal necklace with two heavy stones that belonged first to my Irish grandmother―a gift from her husband at the end of the Second World War―then to my mother, who wore it for weddings and christenings through the years, resting for the first time in the hollow of my throat. Trying to fall asleep in the blackout dark of a strange air-conditioned hotel room, my husband’s hands clasping mine as we matched our breaths in the moments before our separate dreams overtook us.

Lorum ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet.

Beauty is more than that which is seen―more than something you are or are not.

Not night and day, but dusk and gloaming, the faint echoes of light from the sun caught in the lowering sky of evening.

It’s something you do, and feel, made through an unseen alchemy―kneading a ball of stubborn dough between your floury fingers until―like the magic of yeast devouring sugars beneath a damp cloth―it rises unbidden from the darkness.

I find myself here. Six decades in. Still thinking from time to time, sixty cannot happen to me. To others, yes, of course.

Six decades means I can no longer use the word girl to describe myself and neither can anyone else, except perhaps my father. Not a miss, but a ma’am. Not a pretty girl any longer, let alone a beautiful one.

Sixty began with a surprise party three thousand miles from home held for someone who does not welcome surprises. And ended with a day of unexpected joy: dancing to songs of the 70s―James Taylor Fire and Rain, Cat Stevens The Wind―tissue paper and tears, the words of a poem my teenage son wrote for me: as willows fall and darkness seeps, my mom is standing tall, both feet. An opal necklace with two heavy stones that belonged first to my Irish grandmother―a gift from her husband at the end of the Second World War―then to my mother, who wore it for weddings and christenings through the years, resting for the first time in the hollow of my throat. Trying to fall asleep in the blackout dark of a strange air-conditioned hotel room, my husband’s hands clasping mine as we matched our breaths in the moments before our separate dreams overtook us.

Lorum ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet.

I reject the idea that all those girls have disappeared.

They are all me. Beautiful for their fleeting hours of life. Absent now from the rooms they once inhabited, yet always just beneath the surface, like thin layers of paint on an old chair.

Perhaps then beauty is merely the faint imprint I’ve left behind. Like the remnant of bergamot and spice as a woman hurries from a room on her way out for the evening. The low November sun shimmering prisms through the surrendering leaves of autumn trees. A baby’s first cry, startled and pure, ringing new notes into the world. Briny wave upon wave, the beginning of each curl rolling back into the embrace of the tidal pull, like small children gathered to a mother’s broad lap. Air and fire, earth and water, shifting from liquid to solid, back to the invisible touch of soft air on an upturned face. A last breath, the one that will someday contain the pregnant exhalation of my own farewell.

Beauty will not be pinned down or classified. It resists living behind glass. Splayed wings and pins. Genus and species. Insisting instead on embodying imperfect life―in bloom and in decline―shifting in the course of an instant, from stillness to impossible flight.

My husband, beside me for more than three decades, studies the old photo taken not with a smartphone, but a bulky Nikon camera I lugged around in a shoulder bag wherever my travels took me.

“You look the same to me,” he announces. Wide smile, long hair parted in the middle, same tilt of the head looking into the lens.

The photo was taken just a few years after we met. I smiled with an assurance I didn’t really feel. I was playing the part. Young and free and exploring a new city, cocktails and thrift stores, street musicians and salty pretzels from a cart.

A few years later I would visit a fortune teller, a psychic who held my tanned fingers in her ringed hand and told me I would marry a man I already knew, and bear two children, a girl and a boy. I believed her, and I didn’t. I was still deciding who I would be. What my life would be.

My husband and I spent ten ambling years together before we married, long days on remote Northern California beaches where we hunkered down on woven blankets with bottles of champagne and books, tent camping in Yosemite with our food hung from a tree in a canvas bag to keep it safe from bears, exploring pumpkin farms and apple orchards on the Russian River, hiking in the damp magical shadows of the redwoods, salmon fishing out beyond the Farralon Islands in our little boat, road trips to the painted Arizona desert and the red rocks of Utah listening to R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, waiting for the stars to come out from the cliffs above Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, bright days walking between the smooth rocks and desert yuccas of Joshua Tree.

Did all that happen to me, or to that other girl, gone now so many years?

Beauty is more than that which is seen―more than something you are or are not.

Not night and day, but dusk and gloaming, the faint echoes of light from the sun caught in the lowering sky of evening.

It’s something you do, and feel, made through an unseen alchemy―kneading a ball of stubborn dough between your floury fingers until―like the magic of yeast devouring sugars beneath a damp cloth―it rises unbidden from the darkness.

I find myself here. Six decades in. Still thinking from time to time, sixty cannot happen to me. To others, yes, of course.

Six decades means I can no longer use the word girl to describe myself and neither can anyone else, except perhaps my father. Not a miss, but a ma’am. Not a pretty girl any longer, let alone a beautiful one.

Sixty began with a surprise party three thousand miles from home held for someone who does not welcome surprises. And ended with a day of unexpected joy: dancing to songs of the 70s―James Taylor Fire and Rain, Cat Stevens The Wind―tissue paper and tears, the words of a poem my teenage son wrote for me: as willows fall and darkness seeps, my mom is standing tall, both feet. An opal necklace with two heavy stones that belonged first to my Irish grandmother―a gift from her husband at the end of the Second World War―then to my mother, who wore it for weddings and christenings through the years, resting for the first time in the hollow of my throat. Trying to fall asleep in the blackout dark of a strange air-conditioned hotel room, my husband’s hands clasping mine as we matched our breaths in the moments before our separate dreams overtook us.

Lorum ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet.

I reject the idea that all those girls have disappeared.

They are all me. Beautiful for their fleeting hours of life. Absent now from the rooms they once inhabited, yet always just beneath the surface, like thin layers of paint on an old chair.

Perhaps then beauty is merely the faint imprint I’ve left behind. Like the remnant of bergamot and spice as a woman hurries from a room on her way out for the evening. The low November sun shimmering prisms through the surrendering leaves of autumn trees. A baby’s first cry, startled and pure, ringing new notes into the world. Briny wave upon wave, the beginning of each curl rolling back into the embrace of the tidal pull, like small children gathered to a mother’s broad lap. Air and fire, earth and water, shifting from liquid to solid, back to the invisible touch of soft air on an upturned face. A last breath, the one that will someday contain the pregnant exhalation of my own farewell.

Beauty will not be pinned down or classified. It resists living behind glass. Splayed wings and pins. Genus and species. Insisting instead on embodying imperfect life―in bloom and in decline―shifting in the course of an instant, from stillness to impossible flight.

My husband, beside me for more than three decades, studies the old photo taken not with a smartphone, but a bulky Nikon camera I lugged around in a shoulder bag wherever my travels took me.

“You look the same to me,” he announces. Wide smile, long hair parted in the middle, same tilt of the head looking into the lens.

The photo was taken just a few years after we met. I smiled with an assurance I didn’t really feel. I was playing the part. Young and free and exploring a new city, cocktails and thrift stores, street musicians and salty pretzels from a cart.

A few years later I would visit a fortune teller, a psychic who held my tanned fingers in her ringed hand and told me I would marry a man I already knew, and bear two children, a girl and a boy. I believed her, and I didn’t. I was still deciding who I would be. What my life would be.

My husband and I spent ten ambling years together before we married, long days on remote Northern California beaches where we hunkered down on woven blankets with bottles of champagne and books, tent camping in Yosemite with our food hung from a tree in a canvas bag to keep it safe from bears, exploring pumpkin farms and apple orchards on the Russian River, hiking in the damp magical shadows of the redwoods, salmon fishing out beyond the Farralon Islands in our little boat, road trips to the painted Arizona desert and the red rocks of Utah listening to R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, waiting for the stars to come out from the cliffs above Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, bright days walking between the smooth rocks and desert yuccas of Joshua Tree.

Did all that happen to me, or to that other girl, gone now so many years?

I reject the idea that all those girls have disappeared.

They are all me. Beautiful for their fleeting hours of life. Absent now from the rooms they once inhabited, yet always just beneath the surface, like thin layers of paint on an old chair.

Perhaps then beauty is merely the faint imprint I’ve left behind. Like the remnant of bergamot and spice as a woman hurries from a room on her way out for the evening. The low November sun shimmering prisms through the surrendering leaves of autumn trees. A baby’s first cry, startled and pure, ringing new notes into the world. Briny wave upon wave, the beginning of each curl rolling back into the embrace of the tidal pull, like small children gathered to a mother’s broad lap. Air and fire, earth and water, shifting from liquid to solid, back to the invisible touch of soft air on an upturned face. A last breath, the one that will someday contain the pregnant exhalation of my own farewell.

Beauty will not be pinned down or classified. It resists living behind glass. Splayed wings and pins. Genus and species. Insisting instead on embodying imperfect life―in bloom and in decline―shifting in the course of an instant, from stillness to impossible flight.

My husband, beside me for more than three decades, studies the old photo taken not with a smartphone, but a bulky Nikon camera I lugged around in a shoulder bag wherever my travels took me.

“You look the same to me,” he announces. Wide smile, long hair parted in the middle, same tilt of the head looking into the lens.

The photo was taken just a few years after we met. I smiled with an assurance I didn’t really feel. I was playing the part. Young and free and exploring a new city, cocktails and thrift stores, street musicians and salty pretzels from a cart.

A few years later I would visit a fortune teller, a psychic who held my tanned fingers in her ringed hand and told me I would marry a man I already knew, and bear two children, a girl and a boy. I believed her, and I didn’t. I was still deciding who I would be. What my life would be.

My husband and I spent ten ambling years together before we married, long days on remote Northern California beaches where we hunkered down on woven blankets with bottles of champagne and books, tent camping in Yosemite with our food hung from a tree in a canvas bag to keep it safe from bears, exploring pumpkin farms and apple orchards on the Russian River, hiking in the damp magical shadows of the redwoods, salmon fishing out beyond the Farralon Islands in our little boat, road trips to the painted Arizona desert and the red rocks of Utah listening to R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, waiting for the stars to come out from the cliffs above Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, bright days walking between the smooth rocks and desert yuccas of Joshua Tree.

Did all that happen to me, or to that other girl, gone now so many years?

I reject the idea that all those girls have disappeared.

They are all me. Beautiful for their fleeting hours of life. Absent now from the rooms they once inhabited, yet always just beneath the surface, like thin layers of paint on an old chair.

Perhaps then beauty is merely the faint imprint I’ve left behind. Like the remnant of bergamot and spice as a woman hurries from a room on her way out for the evening. The low November sun shimmering prisms through the surrendering leaves of autumn trees. A baby’s first cry, startled and pure, ringing new notes into the world. Briny wave upon wave, the beginning of each curl rolling back into the embrace of the tidal pull, like small children gathered to a mother’s broad lap. Air and fire, earth and water, shifting from liquid to solid, back to the invisible touch of soft air on an upturned face. A last breath, the one that will someday contain the pregnant exhalation of my own farewell.

Beauty will not be pinned down or classified. It resists living behind glass. Splayed wings and pins. Genus and species. Insisting instead on embodying imperfect life―in bloom and in decline―shifting in the course of an instant, from stillness to impossible flight.

My husband, beside me for more than three decades, studies the old photo taken not with a smartphone, but a bulky Nikon camera I lugged around in a shoulder bag wherever my travels took me.

“You look the same to me,” he announces. Wide smile, long hair parted in the middle, same tilt of the head looking into the lens.

The photo was taken just a few years after we met. I smiled with an assurance I didn’t really feel. I was playing the part. Young and free and exploring a new city, cocktails and thrift stores, street musicians and salty pretzels from a cart.

A few years later I would visit a fortune teller, a psychic who held my tanned fingers in her ringed hand and told me I would marry a man I already knew, and bear two children, a girl and a boy. I believed her, and I didn’t. I was still deciding who I would be. What my life would be.

My husband and I spent ten ambling years together before we married, long days on remote Northern California beaches where we hunkered down on woven blankets with bottles of champagne and books, tent camping in Yosemite with our food hung from a tree in a canvas bag to keep it safe from bears, exploring pumpkin farms and apple orchards on the Russian River, hiking in the damp magical shadows of the redwoods, salmon fishing out beyond the Farralon Islands in our little boat, road trips to the painted Arizona desert and the red rocks of Utah listening to R.E.M. and Dave Matthews, waiting for the stars to come out from the cliffs above Mavericks in Half Moon Bay, bright days walking between the smooth rocks and desert yuccas of Joshua Tree.

Did all that happen to me, or to that other girl, gone now so many years?