48 things.

a lyrical essay in a list for my birthday.

1. I watched a video of Francis McDermott talking about aging and how if we don’t look old then nobody will know who the elders are.  We won’t be recognized. It really struck me as such wise words. How will we recognize the elders if they all want to look young? I love Francis — and in many ways (not all) —  I love getting and looking old. I want people to know I am becoming an elder, or trying to.  But how does that look? How and who can we define what that looks like? Is it just allowing nature to take course and doing nothing? But then there are thousands of years of cultures and adornments that would say that is not the case. Just letting our looks be is not more honorable. Using our body as a palette is ancient. 

2. You will find me as an elder not with gray hair pulled back in a bun wearing a shawl and a hemp mumu or whatever the “look like an elder” might make us consider.  I will not forgo makeup (as a matter of fact I think I may decide to start wearing it for real, finally). You will find me in the corner with my cards, holding a rolled cigarette, my hair possibly teal, or maybe platinum blond. My lips will most likely be Gwen Stefani red. My eyeshadow is a perfect shade of 1973 baby blue. I hope to find a mesh kimono. I will be, if my back allows it of course, because I don’t believe in creating more pain or suffering for anyone including myself, but if possible, I will be wearing platform clogs. Wooden heeled. Fishnet ankle socks. I will not be fighting my age. I will be creating art from how I feel.

3. I keep seeing things that say “aging gracefully” — articles, advertisements, podcasts. I have been scrolling definitions of grace all morning. None of them really resonate (attractive, dignified, elegantly).  So I went to etymology sources and the one that does resonate (had to skip right over middle English and Old French) from Proto-Indo- European: gwerH: to praise, to welcome. I will praise age, welcome age. Be grateful for age. Because we are all here to shrink back down to mushroom mush and become something formless, shapeless, a blessing to the earth. We are all moving in that direction. Towards the humus. 

4. Become more of who you are. 

5. Don’t believe that being an elder looks a certain way. 

6. Each year I feel more inclined to show off my cleavage. Or maybe this is because I finally have some because one of the gifts of aging for me has been gaining weight and that means my boobs are  big. I remember my old zie (aunts) were short, plump, smelled like Nina Ricci, always had their hair in a perfectly formed helmet updo, the wild winds couldn’t move that hair. I was shallacked. They wore makeup, fake gold jewerly, including horns, crosses, and large faces od Jesus (maybe it was real gold, who knows), and fake furs (maybe they were real). But I knew they were my elders. Not because they looked old. Or were styled like an old witch of the woods. But because they behaved like some wise ones. Because as years passed, the more their cleavage was exposed, the more space they held and took up. That line between their breasts got longer and longer, and their shirts got lower and lower cut. Their facial hairs got longer, too.  The way their pastries melted in your mouth, you knew they knew something magically.  The way they spit to protect me, you knew they didn’t care what the world thought of them.  The way they spoke of bad luck and how to cast it away. The way they laid the cards on the table. They way they held you close so you couldn’t breath. That is how I recognized them as elders. 

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7. I look at my mother, age 92, and I think of the quote by Leonard Cohen, where he is paraphrasing his teacher, who told him “the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. We go through life over-identifying with being the hero to our stories.”

8. After my father died, my mother became a ghost. A lonely version of herself. Transparent. . We can smell lonely off of her. Of course this is grief, but it is more than grief. It is letting go of the story. It letting go of who she was with him.

9. Not only was my father the anti-hero of her story, she was the hero of his. This dynamic was their presence. Always. What happens when all the anti-heroes die, when you have nothing left to fight against, nobody to blame for your story — and you can no longer be the hero of any story that comes from it.  That life isn’t here to get you. There is no need to be recognized. Your story remains open, like a circle, like zero, alone within it. 

10. You can become an elder in this space. You wait. Death is reaching out for you. What a humbling dance this will be. To be everything and nothing and a hero no more and lonely as fuck and yet, you can still squeeze someone so tight they cannot breath. You can still wear perfume and red lips.

11. For me, I will have peach hair with glitter tips and you will know me because I will be lonely. Because I will have loved so much. But realize there is nobody to save, to teach, to change. There is only us. 

12. When my dad died, it was the first time I really felt old. Old as in, I am not a child anymore. Strange considering I was 48 when he died. And I am the mother of three kids. 

13. Seeing my mother become lonely and death not only reaching for her, but her asking for death, I felt even older, I felt like a parent, her parent. Tending to her transition like a mother does to a small child. 

14. There is grief on top of grief. There is being lost. Wandering in the nowhere land wondering, who are we now?

15. Where do we find parenting when we are old, and are there no parents anymore for us? 

16. Where do we find parenting when our parents were never the best at parenting?

17. Where do we find elders when there is no thought about humus, about soil, about learning to be lonely, about becoming more the self, about not listening to what the internet says? Where do we find elders in our own backyards? 

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18. Have you ever sat and listened to a white pine? 

19. Do you know the story of an ever flowing creek singing when it hugs the big white rocks?

20. Have you ever sat inside a cave that was carved by lava and scraped handfuls of black fine dirt from its floor and stuffed it in your pocket and let hundreds and hundreds of year old songs move through your cells?

21. Have you ever leaned against a ridge made of quartz and spoke to the little beings, primarily the ticks, and asked them to find another place besides your body to nourish? And then they don’t listen. But you have to listen to them?

22. Elders are everywhere

23. Parents are everywhere

24. If they become lonely, it is our job to sit with them, alone, and listen. 

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25. Grief will make you do some crazy shit though, that you never thought you’d do “at your age” — grief fucking, grief lying, grief burn this whole house down, grief that comes in hate, in lust, in confusing. Grief that makes you act 16 again when you are far from being a teen.

26. It’s normal, listen to me, it’s normal. 

27. Grief is living and it’s a spirit and if we don’t see it, like really see it, and witness it, it will blow your shit apart. It’s also ok when this happens, but there are things to just be aware of. 

28. Maybe don’t get on the motorcycle at 2am heading to an unknown location in a foreign country because you have drank grief away but now it wants to party. Or maybe you absolutely should get on the motorcycle and see where grief wants to take you. 

29. Usually it’s to the sea. 

30. Maybe don’t say yes to everything because “grief ain’t gonna get you down today” and then your body feels like a warzone and worse — your mind is just an electric circuit that blows out all the lights. 

31. Let the lights just go off once in a while. 

32. Let the couch hold you for days. 

33. Call in sick. 

34. Get on a bike alone and go to the sea.

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35. Everything wants to be seen. When I got back from Sicily in June, I realized that I needed to share some of the ancestors that demanded me seeing them there. Caves, volcanoes and salt. These were literal ancestors that came to me and said “why are we not being seen?” Why are you not remembering we came before your grandparents, before their language, before their suffering, before their magic, before their movement, before their food. We are them. We created them. 

36. Humans are not the center of everything. I believe in loving and protecting us creatures, yes, but I also believe we have come to think our narrative is the only one. The apex. The most important story. It’s not. It’s an afterthought. Try talking to caves, volcanoes and salt from the sea like they are your grandparents. Because they are your grandparents. Write me back and tell me how that swiftly changes your narrative about being alive, being human. Write to me and tell me how it was to remember them in you like you do your dead nonna. 

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37.  Today is the shortest day of the year. The story goes that my mother came walking down the stairs (after laboring alone for hours in her bedroom) around 9am. She was wearing a full length fake fur coat. There was the beginning of a blizzard outside. The snow, I imagine, came swirling down like silver glitter and that sharp winter sun was cutting in between, even though there is so much darkness today, the sun always almost seems to shine around 9am, like right now, it is 9am. I imagine the magic in what she says because I have been in labor before, I have gone to the altered state of bringing a human through you, and everything around you becomes un-real. Or magic becomes reality. And snow becomes silver messages from god. 

38. She went to the hospital and had me an hour later. 

39. Even though she did not need it, as I was almost out, because she came from a line of Slavic lay midwives — she knew “stay home as long as possible” and “until the baby is almost out” — still, she was drugged. Strapped down. And I was taken from her with forceps. This is how we treat mothers. This is how we treat babies. 

40. Even when the snow is not snow but silver glitter holding sun particles coming down as a message from god. Even when mother’s see the space between what everyone else can see. Even when Mothers sense from before and after without even having a word for any of it. 

41. But I was born to a tripping mother. In the middle of a blizzard. Today. 49 years ago. 

42. Let me tell you about a couple gifts I have. One of them is this: I bring the most amazing people together. Very rarely does an asshole sneak in. I have a gift of saying “come, let’s get together, with strangers” and then every fucking one of those strangers becomes kin and they are the best humans in the world, all of them, in their own human way. This is a gift I see I have and I don’t know why but how many times will I gather people to travel to Sicily, and each person is more amazing than the next and everyone falls in love in a way that makes them connected forever? What are the chances? Knock on wood. 

43. Here is my other gift: I can bring you so deep into the underworld but with such illumination you almost don’t know you are there. This may be the gift of the moment I was born. Edge walker. Child of the Liminal. Born between Dark and Light. Born on the black of the longest day. Born on the slide of the sun. Born on a day of fires and ritualistic burning. I don’t know. But let me tell you, I can bring you so far down with a smile and the most beautiful candle lit and you think I am all “fun and games” and then you will have no idea how you met with the mother of death and your skin sheds and and you look up — and I am still smiling. I got you. 

44. That is about the extent of my gifts. 

45. Well, also, because it’s my special day and maybe I can brag —  I can make a really good botanical cocktail, a good amaro, and I can bake some decent italian cookies, also - if you want some fried food from the mother land, come over. 

46. And. I am great at holding conversations that move like snakes. 

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47. Speaking of snakes, we moved across the country last year, and there were snakes living on the floorboards of our home. Which was actually fine with me. But what I really wanted to say was, when you move: allow for skin to shed. Also, it doesn’t matter where you live if you decide the most important thing to do is make relationships with the land: what trees? What plants? What is the water like? Who are these rocks? Who has died here? Who can I pray for? Who can I go to when I think I want to die but instead I remember I can lay out here on the cold ground and I can speak by name and ask for support. Because I am beginning to know you. No matter where. This is what I think is the most important. On stolen land, who are we not to repair, relationship, and root ourselves in the place we have landed?

48. I have no special moment here, at age 48, at #48 in this list, to connect this back to the beginning. The greatest gift of this year was a huge letting go. Of feeling young. Of having parents. Of having all my kids under one roof. Of having the same place I called home for over a decade. Of having warmth in a house, a bathtub, a local community. Of feeling like I have a sure thing in my marriage. There is something so free about loss and the grief that comes after it. It’s miserable. It makes me craggy and sassy. It makes me aggressive. It makes me have this huge space for hope. It also makes me soft as fuck. Like, what really matters and who really cares and all the while everything is beginning to face south on my body; cheeks, nipples, belly, and going down, instead of up — for me, it’s the only way to go. 
    

    Happy Solstice. 

May you burn what needs to burn. 

Write a prayer on the bay leaf and put it in the fire. 

Hold an elder close, even if they are not being the kind of elder you want, maybe they are the elder you need. 

Feed someone cookies or allow yourself to be fed. 

Thank you for being here. 

I am going to take a bath now, because today, tonight, someone gifted me a bathtub. 

GIVEAWAY. 

Ok here is the giveaway. This new year I am moving back to doing a few one-on-one sessions a month with folks. 

I hold space in ceremony. I hold space with the cards as the guide. I hold space while we connect with your dead. We listen and dance the conversation together. 

I am here to hold you if you want to be with and ritualize or just be held and listened to and guided around: 

Writing, ancestral presence-ing, general life stuff (tarot comes in deeply for this), parenting, creative work, business support (again tarot is such a queen). 

I want to give away 2 1:1 sessions to light the path. 

Here is what you need to do to be put into the giveaway basket:

1. Share something of yourself, something beautiful and real and true about anything you want, or on aging, or grief, or parenting, or the living breathing land or whatever moves you — on INSTAGRAM (you can quote something from this if you want but try and find words that want to be born from you if you can, because why not?) and TAG me: @marybethbonfiglio (you can create a post or share in a story, it doesn’t matter. 

2. OR. Share this substack or any of my writings from substack on FB and on SUBSTACK and tag me. 

After the new year I will gather all the names that shared and tagged me – and I will let you know personally if you won.  And then we can scheduled a session together. I have missed working 1:1 with people. It’s been a few years.

Thank you for being here. 

Being present. 

Reading. 

I am grateful for you. 

Now go light a fire and become this portal. And send me some birthday love. 49 is fucking fire.

Love you 

Xx