Sustainable Living and Community

Last night we celebrated M's 60th birthday with a community gathering in Berkeley.

It started out with a presentation of her new green business venture.

Then we listened to stories of the early decades of her life, while her 80 year old mother sat in the audience and cried with pride at the success of her only child.

Yes. M's life radiated success. Not in that realm of accruing great wealth or fame, but in what comes from the integrated cloth of a life of rich experience. 

We all got on what felt like her story telling bus and  saw  vivid visions of her life unfold.  Together we  became the richer because of her as we travelled to New York City in the 50's and Alabama in the 60's, as we saw the Beatles and the be-in's, saw a child raised by an extended family, with  a mother who was excluded from the PTA because she was divorced but joined her daughter in getting to Paris.

And when we stopped listening and looked around us in the room we saw M's success as the integrated presence of all these people here with us, all of their lives touched in some way by her vibrant vision, all celebrating her, and something greater than her that she had created in this community of hers.

Then the joy exploded. We danced and danced, uninhibited,  this community of hip 20 somethings with elders in walkers, the dance community of hula hoopers, NIA teachers, Trance Dance leaders with business suited partners in green business ventures. The eclectic music spun by M's young DJ friend an eclectic uniter of styles  from  salsa, to trance dance, danceable  jazz, to 70's disco.  

In the end everyone was dancing around a cake with one candle, held up by two people.

M was shimmying under the cake, disappearing into the crowd, reappearing.

As if to say, this evening  was not just about her, although it was  she who brought us here to celebrate something very real: how wonderful the world can be if it looks this way as we age.

Here was M. so beautiful and vibrant at 60, who had held so many jobs, and just recently lost a business she had  lovingly  nurtured along, who had worries aplenty about how to stay afloat, but here she was,  still dancing, still creating  a  vision for another world of work: 

a sustainable world, a world as big as the city we live in, where we all have something important to do with feeding each other, building for each other, conserving our resources, believing in  the world that we almost wiped out  when our own drive for wealth and survival took over.

M has become  my  poster adult and a role model  for this new world where AGE COUNTS and the concept of ageism I have been writing about become obsolete because this way of integration negates such isms.