Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here

I have such appreciation for being my age, having arrived to a point in time where the journey of life has built the foundation that supports Now. Dreams that revive elements from decades earlier and reintroduce important people wake me in puzzlement, causing me to get up and act, as they did this morning. Why are you appearing now? What are you reminding me?

Writing in this way and/or completing tasks left from the night before may be called for before getting other things underway.. Morning reading of a book that requires concentration may be. No matter, an entire day is open to use fully, and increasingly, with more discernment. This freedom to choose is a gift of age. Those who have been financially “comfortable” in their adolescence and young adulthoods may have known this feeling then. Others of us, instead, have needed to work to live. We’ve supported our chosen creative pursuits nonetheless, simultaneously balanced against the burden of having our minds fractured into the many necessary additional parts that our life’s journey deemed as we learned and met, even surpassed, expectations while doing them. Parents certainly live that reality. More power to they who have succeeded in such endeavors and been able to fulfill their soul’s additional purposes in life!

Time is especially precious now in its possibilities. That my physical body can hold out will determine whether and for how long my new season of spring-like blossoming can last. I read more this morning^[i] about artist Kay (Katherine Linn) Sage’s life and identified with her spirit and desire “to learn whatever she wanted to learn on her own.” Like me, she was dissatisfied with traditional schooling that could not meet her interests that were so much broader and deeper than in the manner information was presented for the benefit of an entire class. Although being taken out of school for three months a year to travel in Europe with her mother, she managed to “[pass] college boards at fourteen…graduating at fifteen” and was fluent in three languages. Her mother, with her father’s financial support, ensured that her daughter thrived intellectually and culturally. Kay Sage seems to me to have been like a human meteor who existed and expired in an extravagant instant. For a moment this morning she appeared again and inspired me.

Next month will be the anniversary of the first year of the rest of my life. During the past years of healing from a serious illness, all the most important parts of my life, and the chosen people within it, have continued and/or have been returned to me. The feeling has been extraordinary, and the way forward is ever more clear as my hands are able to work again and my mind feels as free as it did in childhood and adolescence. Then there was a sense that the entire world was still to be discovered, and there was a palpable knowing that I was a tabula rasa. My present foundation is such that what I do, what I read, feels as if picking up from where I had left off long ago. The midlife break in between was necessary and fruitful, but the present, by contrast, finally feels whole.

Work to be done is about organizing and creating order of (and in many instances transforming) the physical material that remains from the path of my past. I mentally applauded (privileged, famous and wealthy) Sage for the “meticulous fashion” with which she “listed and bequeathed to the people she loved or simply cared about…Every item in her possession.”^[ii] May I accomplish some kind of equivalency in relation to my more humble leavings.

At only sixty years old Sage’s eyesight began to fail, requiring two surgeries that did not help enough. After this she chose to stop painting. Still, her life continued in her own inimitable style for five more years—and she had lived in ways beyond any artist’s dream—until she decided to no longer remain alive. About to enter only the second year of my new life—returned and expanded—I, instead, thrill to continue working, learning and experimenting to the capacity that I have been allotted for this lifetime. Let’s see how far this one can go from this point. I welcome this April with open heart and hands, mentally ready for whatever is up ahead, still trusting the process.

© March 2025 Janet Maher, All Rights Reserved

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^[i] Kay Sage 1898-1963 exhibition catalogue, introduction by her friend, Régine Tessier Krieger, edited by Holly M. Bailey; ©1977 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Exhibitions at Cornell: January 26-March 13, 1977, Art Gallery, University of Maryland: April 5-May 15, 1977, and Albany Institute of History and Art: June 8-July 20, 1977.

^[ii] Ibid.