It is no joke that the waters of youth run dry someday. I have been going back and forth between appreciating ideas handed to me by Elizabeth V about the rights of older people and listening to lyrics and words from songs and the world around of me that say children are the people group to focus on. So in my walk this morning I was thinking about how we are only young once, and what is the ultimate youth? Really I was thinking in those terms exactly, though they might make people cringe to think so dualistically, at least I know it carries that problem. So I thought about a phase of my life when I was unfortunatly hanging out with forty to fifty year old environmental professionals as a volunteer. I thought of a man named Steve L who carries a lot of unexpected impish wisdom. He said I need to enjoy my youth, to hop the next freight train and see the world, to live it up with Earth First activists, or dread my hair, or live on the wild side a little. I walk this straight and narrow road so intimidated by the idea that I might become mentally ill again. Meanwhile, as Mike B. pointed out recently, and as I used to think a lot in high school, most of the world goes would enjoy the psychotic thinking that I am so afraid of. That is why after all people self medicate, right? I try so hard to be safe and normal. But I really don't like normal people, thoughts, or ideas.

There is this common, true philosophy that people do not take to heart as much as they should. It is something like this: every day is your last, every moment with someone special however painful or insufficient is actually more of a delight than you appreciate at the time generally, so we should live it up.

Enter Elizabeth V. Her philosophy that governs her life somehow tangles the passion for life into the truth that people nearer to death are being left behind by the powers that be, the governments and the systems that run our society. Elizabeth is my hero. She forces people to think about things that they usually wouldn't. But she is not a negative nay-sayer. She is not negative nor a nay-sayer. In fact the has cultivated in her life a type of vibrant purity that is captured in the expression pura vida. When she became a grandmother she was not knitting footies (though that is ok); she was in college, getting a good old fashioned zero tuition education, yet throwing herself against a corrupted/veiled (not transparent) educational system, making use of study abroad oportunities and grants, hosting a party for the day of the dead with a shrine to the departed and lots of alcohol.

I did not know I was going to write about Elizabeth when I started thinking about age and role of life. I know it is kind of a bother to be posted about on the web, but I think she won't mind. Peace!