If you live alone, if your family is scattered far and wide, if you recently lost a partner or spouse, if you can’t afford the plane...
Aging Thoughtfully10
Gardening Up To The End
GUEST POST by LISA SAVAGE Around where I live people grow food starting in earnest this time of the year. No matter what our religion or political persuasion, once the soil is warm and dry enough, we all of us poke in some seeds. Some years it rains so often that the seeds fail to germinate and instead rot in the ground. It’s not great [...]
Pat Taub
Recognize Self-Defeating Thinking
Aging can be so challenging for the older woman that it’s a wonder any of us enjoy a happy old age, but it’s within reach once we learn to recognize thinking patterns that box us in. It’s natural to indulge in thinking about good times in the past. Romancing the past can be problematic when it becomes obsessive and obscures the reality [...]
Pat Taub
Aging and Raging
GUEST POST by JANET WEIL “Here’s the check, sweetheart.” The handsome young waiter laid the little tray on the table. Seating me at a booth, he had started with, “I guess it’s just the two of us.” I felt a vague annoyance. Now, after his calling me “sweetie” twice before, annoyance was turning to anger, a familiar emotion [...]
Pat Taub
Remembering Tina Turner – Beyond Suffering
GUEST POST by JORINDE VAN DEN BERG As I climb the three flights of stairs up to our condo, I think to myself, “Neither dragging up my groceries nor my weary old bones is something I will miss when we move into our single-level home in the 55+ community next month.” Recently, I have started feeling as if my powers are waning and I can [...]
Pat Taub
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
We all have core stories we tell ourselves that keep us trapped in a negative narrative: “I can’t seem to speak up when my feelings are hurt; I have a hard time believing I’m good enough; I’m too old to be in a relationship.” Esther Perel, the popular relationship therapist, believes that the stories we tell ourselves are adaptive [...]
Pat Taub
Finding Your Voice
Finding your voice is coming home to yourself, being true to what matters to you, and no longer suppressing your feelings. The noted Canadian psychiatrist, Gabor Mate, refers to finding your voice as acting with agency. In this recent book, “The Myth of Normal,” he contends that nice women, who do for others at the expense of their [...]
Pat Taub
No More (Empty) Earth Days
GUEST POST by JANET WEIL “Who should decide how best to use the resources of the earth? What are the most effective ways to build a more sustainable future?” – Adam Rome, “The Genius of Earth Day” Three years ago, early in the global COVID pandemic, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, I wrote a guest blog post, a remembrance of [...]
Pat Taub
How I Became A Climate Activist
GUEST POST by MOLLY SCHEN I’m coming to climate activism pretty late in life, in my early sixties. I’m no Greta Thunberg. But I can’t stay on the sidelines any longer. I am dismayed by the frequency of severe weather events—floods, fires, droughts, and storms. And I cannot ignore my own lived experience of hotter summers, milder winters, [...]
Pat Taub
Astrology as a Tool for Self-Understanding
GUEST POST By LAURIE FARRINGTON My fascination with astrology began the first time I saw the symbols on those little horoscope booklets by the grocery store check-out counters in the early 1960s. Following many years of self-study, I began my formal practice of astrology in 1994. As a professional consulting astrologer, I use the tool of astrology [...]
Pat Taub
The Night of the Bras
GUEST POST by BARBARA MUDD It was full darkness outside. The spring air was perfect. I was lying face down on the edge of a dock with eight other middle-aged and senior-aged women doing the same thing. We were hanging over the dock with water below us. At the exact same time, we all put our hands into the cold water and began swirling [...]
Pat Taub