This week's beauty is opera singer,
massage therapist, poet, and home renovator Kathryn Feigal who is 63 years old.
"Most of my life I have had the
unfortunate anxiety-producing combination of No Impulse Control and Caring
Too Much What Other People Think. As you can imagine, this has created a
perpetual cycle of regret. Now that I’m
three months shy of 64, I’m somewhat dismayed to admit that I
still struggle to preserve or maintain what's left of my imagined dignity. In
confronting a society given over to a collective identification with frenzy, I’m
less inclined to adapt to the illusions that society promotes. Maybe we all
have a degree of Tourette's Syndrome with its accompanying rapping, hip-hopping
bumbledom of multitasking to fulfill spurious requirements for living.
One of my favorite movie moments was
the department store scene in The
Women where Annette Bening, when assaulted by a department store
cosmetic hawker said, "This is my face. Deal with it." Like Annette’s
character, I think if I can avoid the temptations of the eternal youth
marketers, the sellers of unnatural thinness and cosmetic surgery, I may be
able to tap into who I really am.
 |
| Kathryn in flight |
At this stage
in life, this sentence keeps running through my head, “How do I want to live
the rest of my life?” There’s an urgency that wasn’t there before. Joan Baez
said, “You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only
decide how you’re going to live. Now.”
In taking care
of my mother the last years of her life, I witnessed her inability to confront
her fear of dying. She truly raged against the dying of the light. I know that
I want to die consciously. I want to be fully alive when I die. I want to have
lived my dreams.
I feel more
propelled to condensed action since 3 close friends have died in the last
couple of months. One of them lived a big portion of her life trying to please
other people – doing things she really didn’t want to be doing. I now get it at
a level that I never have before that I need to live my own life. To
punctuate this vow, I took a running, jumping, flying leap off a mountain last
summer.
I’m viewing my own personal process of aging as a series of leaps into
future possibilities that I’m igniting with gusto. I’m realistic about the
fantasies I recognize as unattainable and I’m able to release them. Lately I’ve
been going through my house throwing away items that don’t fit in with my goal
of producing and performing my One Woman Show. It’s symbolic of
the balancing force behind the things I’ve given up by aging. I don't need to
fill the spaces I've cleared in my house. Now I have room in my head and heart
for laser-beam clarity into my future artistic expressions.
Here's wishing you the same,
Kass"
Thank you m'dear.
You can enjoy Kathryn's poetry here as well as her neat site Redoing The Undone.
