Reflections at 75
By the Rev. Connie Yost
I turned 75 in early August, spending the day at my favorite spiritual site, Mt. Rainier, doing my favorite hike. The mountain and weather were glorious this year, and though the wildflowers were slightly past peak already, they were glorious, too.
I celebrated with friends and family later in the month and that was glorious as well. I decided not to wait until I turned 80 for the celebration, “just in case.” My mother was almost 100 when she died, and the women on my Dad’s side of the family were in their 90’s when they died, so chances are, I’ll be around at 80 and probably 90, maybe even 95! Still, you never know.
Age changes things and my task is adapting to the changes which includes a constant assessment of what is important for me to do or let go. I’ve whittled my ministry down to support of farm workers and immigrants, especially through my work as President of Farm Worker Ministry Northwest and Board Secretary of National Farm Worker Ministry. I also founded a nonprofit, Friends Stay Warm, which pays the utility bills of local low-wage workers when they are in desperate straits.
It is heart-breaking work but also heartful work, especially when we get a chance to be face to face with farm workers as we did recently in North Carolina. I wish everyone could have dinner with these hard-working people and then they would know these people are not rapists and criminals and job-stealers, but people who are doing an incredibly difficult and often very dangerous job, subject to being exploited and disrespected and just simply ignored by the people they feed. They have families, many are women and some are children, and they are just trying to do a good job for poverty wages and survive despite the odds. And yet, they joke and laugh and share the warmth of their culture with us as well as their food and precious down time. They make us know why we do the work of advocacy and presence, and why we will keep doing the work no matter how little ever gets done to help them.
After my birthday celebration, I went to Bend for an Alison Krauss concert and then on to Ashland for plays and Eugene to visit a friend and farm worker advocate, and then home. While on the road, Dolly Parton died, and then in quick succession Wendell Berry died, and then Gloria Steinem did. Oh my God. My idols, my mentors; these are people who are such a part of my history as a woman, as a minister, as a person trying to navigate my place in the world as I age.
What a great life they all led! What joy and solace they all brought to others through their work and example. I can remember when the first Ms. Magazine was published and I collected each one and gave 25 years of the magazine to a university in the late 90’s. I can remember an acquaintance saying he didn’t think Dolly was that talented (back in the 70’s) and I remember thinking, just because she’s country and blonde? Boy, was he wrong! And I remember being so inspired and comforted by the words of Wendell Berry when I was founding my first ministry, an organic farm and program for at-risk teens in East Los Angeles.
I began this year focused on my aging and turning 75 and reassessing, once again, what I want to do with my time, which includes celebration, travel, support of farm workers and immigrants, and the nurturing of my health and personal relationships and my garden. The deaths of my mentors reminds me that a life well-lived goes on far past the time we are here on earth. That is legacy, and that is what I am thinking most about now. What would you like your legacy to be?
I close with these words from Wendell Berry:[i]
Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
[i]Excerpt from “2007, VI” [“It is hard to have hope”] by Wendell Berry, from This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems (Counterpoint, 2013).
