Turning 50 on the Dragon’s Tail (Durchslag)

I will turn fifty years old at the end of the month. I reminded myself of this two weeks ago, when I realized I was coming closer to this milestone of mine. There have been so many missed milestones in my family already, it doesn’t even seem appropriate to care, and public celebration has never been my thing anyway. But our culture is going to ask me, “hey, what did you do for your fiftieth,” and it does mark a turn toward the waning moon of my life, so it really does deserve some attention. But it’s proven much harder than I’d have thought, to pay attention. And it’s not the turning fifty part that’s the problem.

Six months ago, I started this thing, this Covid debacle of vigilance and tension, on a cleanse. I had been feeling off-kilter about something or another, I suppose, and I do them once in a while. Nothing drastic, just an ayurvedic approach of eating what is basically an adult version of baby food and taking herbs to reset your digestion. No alcohol allowed, either. So while it wasn’t because of Covid, the timing worked out really well. Everyone was worried about being out of control, and who wanted to go to the grocery store anyway in those early days. So perfect. It was an exercise in control and inner balance. And I nailed it. If I can make it through this daily praxis, I thought to myself, I can just daily-praxis myself through the whole thing. But then time got weird, because we were hunkered down for so long. Memories of February became May.

And so in June, I reminded myself to pay attention to the arc of summer, because I had completely blanked out on spring. I don’t entirely blame myself for that. Spring was jarring this year. I was bundled up in wool and next I had pulled out the linen meant for August. So I said to myself, Hallie, tamped down by Covid or no, re-enter the cyclic nature of life. And so began a “hey, lady, pay attention, the moon is already quartered, halved, full, and what have you accomplished since it was new?” That has actually been helpful, although the Fourth of July and Labor Day still felt like kissing cousins. But now, with my birthday, I have tried to carefully mark time once again.

Unfortunately, counting the days to my birthday has inadvertently led to counting days to an election. I feel it like this monstrosity of a dragon, tossing its neck and burning swathes of life through its mouth; raking landscape and knocking down people with swings of its tail. It has brought fires, and protests, and poison oozing from the pores of the world wide web. It is stomping and smashing, leaving quarries of wreckage in the earth with every imprint of its mammoth paws and claws: an election, a reckoning, a pandemic, half-truths, meanness, kindness, a volley for who can do what better. Paying more attention to time has felt like I’ve fallen, and am now hanging onto its tail for dear life as it steadily pillages east, toward the capital.

It’s been the joke: It’s not five o’clock somewhere, it’s 2020 everywhere, drink whenever you want. While I’ve never been the most disciplined drinker, this is now like period television, where the woman “feels her vapors come on,” and is handed a thick glass of brandy to shoot down. I have tried to limit my gaze that way. But then it’s hard to count days. So, as willpower will have it, with more and more intention, I am paying more and more attention. Not in a tamped, Covid stasis way, and not in a brandied stupor.

My third-floor balcony has two slabs of slate that cover the top of the brick railing. The slabs get warm in the sunshine, and I can put my palms on them, feel the energy there, and drink in my landscape. Gaze at the trees. I have done this now, several days. And, in honesty, it doesn’t just happen on my balcony. It happens driving in my car, or in a silent moment at work. When I still my mind, take in breath, and allow it to release in rhythm with my surroundings, I cry. I am in mourning.

Hallie Beth Durchslag, PhD, lives and works in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where she teaches, writes, and maintains a private practice as a Jungian-based, psychodynamic psychotherapist. She has an abiding interest in the complexity of what makes us both human and transcendent beings, and has done extensive research into the connection between human physiology and a collective psychology. She is the curator of The Anima Mundi Project, which hosts classes and workshops for holistic personal development and community-building. Her new book, The Collective Unconscious in the Age of Neuroscience: Severe Mental Illness and Jung in the 21st Century (Routledge) was released in July 2020 (www.routledge.com/9781138057364).