Tag Archives: happiness

Aphrodite and Me

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Vatican Museums. Image: Freepik.com

Sixty years ago, I sat in a café in Crete, pondering the myths I had encountered up close. They seemed less like artifacts of the past and more like powerful stories begging to be reclaimed. At twenty, on a solo adventure, I came from a young country where 100-year-old things were considered ancient and history was all about men. So it struck me hard: There were goddesses everywhere—in ruined temples, in the Mary Renault novels I was reading, and on the pots and artifacts I gawked at.

And that’s when I claimed Aphrodite as a muse.

I can’t say I spent much time in the years that followed investigating the goddesses, but I saw their competing messages. Hera, wife of Zeus, whispered of marriage, a predictable life, and the need to tolerate men’s excesses. Athena, goddess of wisdom, called me to my chosen work, to a feminine form of leadership in a chaotic, conflict-filled world. Both urged me to “settle down,” make plans, and create routines. But Aphrodite seemed the most complex, claiming beauty, pleasure, and mischief. Her sacred animal may be the gentle dove, but she is also a trickster, playing with humans, challenging other gods and goddesses, and meddling in the male worlds of war and love.

It was the beginning of “second-wave feminism,” which called women to expand their horizons and aspirations and consider different ways of being. I felt Aphrodite’s power as an embodiment of something clearly female yet not subservient.

It was an era when noisy, accomplished women were newly celebrated as beautiful—Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir—and they also claimed the right to choose love without letting love define them. Women hung on their words, marveling that they were so accomplished and also sexy, desirable, and desiring. They cultivated distinctive words and a distinctive look—hairstyle, clothing choices—as if it were easy to be exciting and powerful at the same time.

It was what I wanted.

And Aphrodite, along with Gloria and Simone, taught me to love my body, whether slim or pregnant. I didn’t like the little pad of fat on my knees, but otherwise I saw that my muscular calves, wide feet, and prominent collarbones did not deter the male gaze or women’s appreciative looks. I could be both physically attractive and interesting in a group of men and women while we engaged with bigger ideas.

But all of this reflects the superficial Aphrodite, captured by Botticelli as Venus on the half shell.

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, Uffizi Gallery. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Oh yeah, beautiful but superficial. And goddesses don’t age: They have no stretch marks, wrinkles, or hip replacements. I now have all of these…and I am retired. Why, then, haven’t I put Aphrodite on the back burner, influential in my early life but irrelevant to an 80-year-old?

Because she gives me different guidance than when I was 20.

Because we also often use “superficial” for sensuality, pleasant conversation, and the quick attention we give an idea or image, storing it for later contemplation. But that is part of how I still try to live: not obsessed with one person or one passion, but open to the fleeting – and curious. Aphrodite meddles because she sees interesting details, wants to know more, and wants to see what happens if her touch changes the course of the wind or the meeting of eyes. I often need to remind myself to stay observant, to stay sensitive to life’s nuances. In those details, I find the most joy.  Rushing toward a goal, I may miss a beautiful flower, someone else’s kindness, a sky more beautiful than any painting.

Aphrodite is nothing if not social, weaving together the small and large details of others’ lives and bringing people together. Of course, I wouldn’t mind being called to solitary greatness, like Athena on the Acropolis, looking out over the world. But in the last years of my professional life, I really wanted to be Aphrodite, someone who brought all kinds of people together and encouraged them to create something new that would endure after I left. I love the story of Theseus establishing the cult and temple of Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite of the people), where people celebrated her each year for fostering civic unity.

Relying on her mattered as my husband Dan and I, drawn by family, moved from Minneapolis, where we had lived for decades, to Boulder. Aphrodite encourages me, when I meet someone new for coffee, to say, “I think we can be friends,” an explicit gesture that invites relationships and connection beyond the superficial and seems to speed the dance of creating meaningful connection. The joy I feel from creating new bonds that matter—not displacing but adding to dense relationships that have grown over decades—is one way she works on me.

Her mischievous side—including her willingness to intervene in the lives of gods and mortals—is part of the story of my old age: no longer an elegant temptress but an everyday oldster who has adopted the credo “stir the pot and see what happens.” It doesn’t always work as I hoped—Aphrodite’s intrusions can sow chaos—but being playful still pleases me.  These days, however, I am much more comfortable apologizing if my playfulness misfires.

She still meddles with me. It just looks different at 80. More tender, more relaxed, but still pointing toward love, beauty, and relationships.  She is always calling me to slow down, pay attention, experiment, and have fun.  Aphrodite may be ageless, but she understands women’s aging with a fully female compassion.

Growing Soup

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When my daughter Jane was small, she would put her hands on her hips and declare indignantly, “When I grow up. .  . I’ll stay up as long as I want. I’ll watch as much TV as I want, or I won’t clean my room unless I want to.” We smiled and let her complain.

Sooner than I imagined, Jane was in her twenties, with an undergraduate degree, no job or clear vocation, wanting a car, and those things that come with growing up. I remember her declaring to me, “All my life, I’ve wanted to grow up, and now that I am, I don’t like it. Nothing is the way I thought it would be.”

Those words could well apply to me and growing older. Unlike Jane, I was never in a rush to grow old, but still, I’ve been doing exactly that, making me inclined to say, “Nothing is the way I thought it would be. My body just can’t do what it once could.” Some days I rail against these changes. I want 45-year-old Karen back. I plan exercises and diets that will magically restore me. I adopt schedules to take better care of myself. I resolve to make new friends, find a passion or renewed purpose in an unknown something. Maybe I’ll paint a bird house, make a resistance hat, or start making my own bread. Maybe I’ll do all of these things – or something else that is different.

But I still go to bed another day older.

This morning, reading a Lenten meditation by Parker Palmer, I saw another way to consider growing older. He argues that although we were originally an agricultural society, tied to seasons of growth and rest, we are now a manufacturing one, and the “master metaphor of our era” comes from manufacturing. Rather than “growing” our lives, we make them. He notes our everyday speech: “We make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love”.

I wondered, could I reframe growing older into a positive perspective?: I could ask how can I grow time, grow friends, grow meaning, grow money, grow living, and grow love? I could move on from the “making” approach that probably fits much of adulthood and embrace the growing in growing old.

One suggestion for growing old is from Cynthis Bourgeault’s Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging.Number 5 is:

Watch what happens when you try to draw energy from an outmoded image of yourself.. . .You get an immediate rush of ‘Ah, I’m my old self again!!’ But that is exactly who you do not want to be. Your old self is the sacrificial lamb you will lay upon the altar of your deeper becoming.

Sounds like Bourgeault is talking about hanging onto our former self versus growing into a deeper becoming. I have no idea of what the “deeper becoming” might be, but I’m willing to find out.

As I engage with these ideas—growing instead of making myself into the perfect aging senior, I’m reminded of my second husband, Gary.  Gary did not cook at all. When I met him, he lived on Special K for breakfast and Healthy Choice frozen meals for lunch and dinner. When we married and forgot to say “no presents,” someone gave us a crock pot. Gary thought it was the greatest cooking invention ever.

He loved homemade soup, and the crock pot was perfect for making it. I’d be off to the office in the morning and he’d say. “I think I’ll make some soup today. What do you think should be in it?” I’d add some broth and maybe leftover chicken and, as I ran out the door, suggest that we could add noodles later.

While I was gone, Gary grew the soup, scouring the refrigerator for leftovers and the cupboards for things that might add flavor. I’d come home to a completely different amalgam of soup than the one I left. He grew the soup with what we had and with his imagination. And like many things that grow, some soups were forgettable, others unexpectedly outstanding.  But because they grew organically, there was no recipe for replicating any particular soup, and that’s what made his soups so interesting.

While I was busy making a life, I was also growing my own life soup, with a variety of personal experiences. Some have turned out great and others I wish I could do over and would just as soon forget. But in the end, it’s the growing that counted.

The other Karen mentioned in her blog, Who Is the Old Lady Directing the Circus? “growing down,” acting with greater spontaneity and less regard for the product than the process. Surely by 82, I’ve earned the right to grow up, down, or sideways. I hope I can grow like Gary’s soup, adding wisdom from my cupboard of life and a pinch of adventure, stirring in love and more love to taste. 

What Makes Me Me and You You

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Donald Earl Evans 1926 – 2012

My stepfather, Don, loved three things in this life: my mother, fishing, and tinkering, especially under a car. Don adopted my two sisters and me when I was ten. He was boyish, enthusiastic, deeply in love with our mother, home from WWII (He’d joined the army at 17.), and excited to start his life. He always had a project going. Take the worm farm he built outside our front door. What ten-year-old isn’t fascinated with a worm farm? It was my job to carry out the scraps from dinner and to turn over the dirt. When it came time to go fishing, I got to fill a can with squirmy night crawlers.

Don always planted a vegetable garden. He’d give me a packet of radish seeds to sow because radishes come up fast. I witnessed the marvel of seeds. He put me in charge of weeding. After pulling weeds a few times in the hot sun, I suspected he had tricked me into doing the hard part of gardening. But I didn’t mind. I felt important.

He built new stairs for our house. I watched him saw pieces of plywood in a stair shape and then lay planks across the cuts. He leaned them against the garage where we could climb up and down. Next he added a picket fence to our yard, drilling the post holes, another curiosity for me to see. It seemed as if he could do anything.

Don bought a Webcor turntable, and Bozo the clown records that I listened to over and over.  

He loved Glen Miller, and gave our mother a gold embossed, white leather album of Miller’s greatest hits. Music filled our house in the evening. Don also loved cars. I once got to go with him to Cicero Avenue in Chicago to buy a Packard, his favorite automobile after the Olds.

I was the one Don took fishing. He taught me, by example, to sit in a boat or on the Lake Michigan pier, not talk, and fish all day. He once took me muskie fishing. We didn’t catch a thing, but a muskie followed the lure to our boat. These experiences were magic.

North Pier, Racine, Wisconsin

But over the course of my teen years, Don changed. He stopped making things, fixing his car, and fishing. Instead, he went to night school and worked his way from a tool and die maker to an engineer. He and my mother bought a bigger house; my mother took a fulltime job to finance their American dream. The new life was stressful, and instead of tinkering with something to offset that stress, he relied on a cocktail (and maybe two or three) at night. He developed an edge, and we three sisters avoided him. More than once, I heard our mother say,” I wish we could go back to where we started. He was happiest lying under a car fixing it. We don’t need all this.”

I can’t reliably pinpoint why, but Don lost his essential self, the things that made him Don, his unique creativity. My mother died, and Don lived to be 86. He spent his last few years at the VA hospital, where gradually I watched the curious side of Don return. For him, it was too late for fishing and tinkering, but for me, it was not too late to see the cost of pursuits that deny one’s essential self.

To me, Don is everyman, especially of his generation and veterans of WWII. He’s also a cautionary tale about losing yourself and straying from the things you love. I had the lesson of seeing the changes in Don, from creative young man, to striving type A, and back to a resigned acceptance of what is. Seeing these changes taught me to seek what is authentic in myself. I remember the first time I went to a counselor in my 60’s, and she asked me what my goal was. I told her I wanted to live an authentic life (I wasn’t sure I was, and I wanted to change before it was too late.).

In retirement, I’ve aspired to live authentically. Two books that have supported me are The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life by Gene D. Cohen, and The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Mattersby Susan Susanka. They both argue that it’s never too late to find what you love and do it. Cohen says that creativity is built into us, not reserved for the young. Karen’s recent blog about the talents and contributions of older women highlights the ways we “elders” can manifest our creativity.

Susanka is more aligned with my personal focus, finding your essential self. I had the cautionary tale of Don in mind in early retirement, when I identified that as a child and a young married adult, I had loved to make things. At the time I was exploring my Norwegian roots, so I thought, why not rosemaling? A door opened to a latent artistic flare and to new friends.

The poet Maggie Smith has a writer’s perspective on creativity and authenticity. She advises staying “elastic” and open to surprise. When I sold our house and moved, I set Smith’s book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful front and center in my new apartment. I didn’t want to dwell on what I’d lost but rather on making my place beautiful and affirming what makes me me.

I believe Smith’s advice can be extended to our lives in retirement or at any time of life. We can make our lives beautiful in our own way. Accessing our essential selves, the things we love to do, our lifelong interests and talents outside of work, can be the foundation for surprising ourselves in retirement. What makes you you? I invite you to explore and enjoy.

Dear Old Age

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Savador Dali: Alice in Wonderland

April 20, 2025

Re: Old Age

Dear Old Age,

You snuck up on me. One day I was going to the gym three times a week, and the next I was shaky in the knees standing up in the morning. I give you credit—you attacked me in a vulnerable spot—the family weak knees. I can almost hear you gloating. “Those Evans/Jacobson women, they’re weak in knees. That’s where I’ll come for her.”

I recognize that weakness in the knees doesn’t always imply old. Plenty of younger people get knee replacements. But it’s a symptom, and if I could only fix the symptom, everything else would be fine. I wouldn’t be getting older, and worried that I won’t get to do all those things I still want to do.

I want move to Norway and live there. Go to the family farm, Vaagenes, and rent a cabin, long term. I’d even settle for that second home on Lake Michigan . Sadly, I’m not going to do that. Darn, Old Age, you stink. . . . . . . Heh, wait, I got to live in Salzburg for three months just a few years ago. I stayed in a Zimmer with a tiny kitchen, bath, puffy duvet, and a big window with no screens and tiny, biting mosquitos. I ate boiled eggs every morning, a gift from the chickens cackling below that window. I do know what it is to live somewhere completely alone and in a foreign place! I do know that I can adjust to the new and learn about different cultures. Ha Ha – fooled you Old Age!

What about that dream of bicycling the North Shore, carrying camping gear, finding a secluded spot and setting up a tent in the evening? Of course, I still want to do that. I’ve never camped. We’d (notice I’m not alone—there must be another lover in here somewhere) sleep under the stars, fish for our dinner, and make love in a sleeping bag. Okay, it’s not going to happen for so many reasons, but don’t forget the Parkway and Lake Nokomis, my happy places where I biked with abandon. Been there, and almost done that, Old Age!

I’ve always wanted to turn a manicured, pesticide polluted lawn into a habitat for pollinators. I’d thumb my nose at my neighbors letting that residue drain into the beautiful lakes and streams we have in Minnesota. Old Age, gotcha again—I turned our lawn into a field of clover, seeding it summer after summer until the plants matured and bloomed into a home for the birds and the bees. I once saw a flock of flickers land and pillage the soil for healthy worms.

Another thing, I could get married—again—have the storybook ending this time. We’d meet, fall in love quickly, never argue, and agree on the same TV shows. As we near death, we’ll hold hands, serene as we fade away. Okay, three’s supposed to be the charm, but I might need four tries at marriage. I know, it’s a silly idea, but nothing was silly about being married the first three times. I had children, grandchildren. I held hands in movies, cuddled before falling asleep, wrestled over bills and where to live and how to live. I comforted lovers, and they comforted me. So, Old Age, look at all the love I’ve had along the way.

There are so many different lives I could have had in this amazing world –become a Buddhist, live off the grid, move to DC and protest. I want to try them all, but I’m running out of time.

Okay, Old Age.  I concede. I’m probably not going to live in Norway, or bicycle and camp under the stars. I never was a gardener—I detest getting my hands dirty. As for a fourth marriage, not sure I have the energy. I’m not interested in fighting, Old Age. Truce. . .     I actually like the life that I have, even if I want all the other experiences too.  I can even accept getting old, if you help me use it to build something different, something equally new, even if it doesn’t look flashy from the outside. I’m still here. Include me, inspire me, and I’ll always show up.

Love, Karen