Midlife can be a time of loss, grief and anxiety about identity, greying hair and creaky knees.  It can also be an invitation to find a new way of being, one that is richer, deeper and more gleamingly radiant than what has gone before.

To celebrate being fifty, I made a Fifty Shades of Gold booklet, pictured above, exploring this journey, which I gave to my friends. I made a Fifty Shades of Gold website too.

Now I have been invited to speak on Fifty Shades of Gold at two beautiful venues in Birmingham. I’d be delighted if you would  join me.
 
 

Birmingham Cathedral, Thursday, 13 March:  5.30 for 6pm

Jake Lever‘s awesome work, The Blue and the Dim and the Gold will be on display in Birmingham Cathedral from 28 February to 11 April. In the evening on Thursday, 13 March I will use this installation as a source for reflection on midlife, spirituality and change. The talk will include time for quiet and discussion.  You get to see the work in all its awesome glory and have the chance to ask questions.  It’s Fifty Shades of Gold in the flesh – well, in the paint and gold, in the case of the artwork.

Entrance fee: £4

Booking: recommended but not necessary – 0121 262 1840 or enquiries@birminghamcathedral.com

Google maps: Birmingham Cathedral

Winterbourne House & Garden, Tuesday 18 March: 12.30-1.30pm

I am delighted to be speaking at the gem that is Winterbourne House & Garden as part of Birmingham University’s Arts & Science Festival, in partnership with Writing West Midlands.  Jake’s work will be at the Cathedral so I will be showing it in a different way – using digital images showing detail that can sometimes be missed. I’ll be using poetry and Jungian literature to explore the golden years euphemistically known as middle age. This will probably be a bit more literary and a bit less quiety than then gig at Birmingham Cathedral.

Entrance fee: free

Booking:  recommended but not necessary – artsandscience@contacts.bham.ac.uk 

Google maps: Winterbourne House & Garden

Jake has been working with the image of a boat as a way of reflecting on his father’s journey through cancer to his eventual death. The picture, featuring a lone figure in a boat pausing for a moment on a gilded lake, is an invitation to any who have been touched by terminal illness. It will be toured in hospices.

For me, it has become a picture of the journey through menopause, so much so that I now find it hard to imagine the process in any other way. It could be about any kind of change, where the future is unknown, where turbulence and peace sit side by side and there is an acute awareness of the passing and stillness of time.

The piece is the size of a house

I have called this post “Panel by panel”  because I am amazed by the size of the piece, which is approximately the width of a terraced house.

I would have thought that to make something of that size you would have to work on it full time and have an enormous studio at your disposal in which to lay it all out as a whole.

But Jake did it in whatever hours he could squeeze between a full-time job and a family and he made it up panel by panel in a small room in the family home.  He could only piece it all together by taking the panels into the garden.

Process is a metaphor

That in itself is a metaphor of what work is like – what it has to be like – at a time in life where there are so many commitments it isn’t possible to give yourself to anything in as whole-hearted and focussed way as us intense peeps might like.

And yet Jake shows that somehow it is possible to keep your eye on the bigger picture.  Hour by hour, panel by panel, we get there….

May it be my worship

May it be the growing of my heart and the connecting of my soul

May it be my reaching out and drawing in

May it lead me home

This post was written while on retreat at the zero carbon house, Balsall Heath, Birmingham looking at these golden hands by Jake Lever.