My favorite thing about getting older is watching the process.

It thrills me to watch myself becoming more and more who I truly am. As the years go by and I get older and bolder, the old ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ and bindings of family and cultural conditioning peel away one by one, like onion skins, leaving me freer and freer to be myself.In the same way that I watch the seedlings in my garden sprout and grow and blossom and fruit, I watched, with fascination, as my daughters grew from babies into toddlers and on towards teenage, adulthood and then into motherhood themselves. Now they love to watch and to revel in their own children’s growth process, just as I watched and revelled in theirs. Sometime in the next decade they will reach menopause. And I am sure that they will move into that transformational process with that very same keen, watchful curiosity and absorption, just as I did. As I approach my 74th birthday, as I shed more and more of those onion skins and live ever more fully from my essence instead of from my ego, the world expands. Being a crone is fascinating. I watch, I change, I learn, I grow, I become. I love being old.