Lifestead

Creating a new word isn't easy.  I don't care for amortality -- living agelessly -- because of its automatic association with death and because it seems contradictory -- you're praised to be better at it the more aged you are.  It also seems too artificial, LasVegasy, soon-to-be waterless.

I moved on to alife and belife, already used as product or company names, then joylife, which a cancer support group has taken.  I like the timelessness of joylife.  To paraphrase "The Christmas Song" (a/k/a "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire"), joylife could apply to anyone "from one to ninety-two."  If Mel Torme and Robert Wells were writing the song today, I bet they'd find a way to fit in a bigger number than 92.  After all, our life expectancies have increased nearly 30 years since not long before they wrote that song.  Haplife came to mind, as a combination of happiness and the idea of viewing any given day as a half point in your life, but haplife also is taken -- not just by an insurance company.

Lifestead grabbed me and has stuck for the moment.  Lifestead.com appears to be defunct and no one else is using it (are you?).  It bugs me that someone else thought of it, but that's life, isn't it?  Lifestead suggests steadiness -- through good and bad times with strength and persistence.  It offers a parallel to another word I like, homestead or homesteading -- seeking a level of self-sufficiency, higher than most, on your own piece of land.  Lifestead -- seeking a high level of existence during the life that is all you have, whether or not it be everlasting.

"Where did this come from?" says Virginia.

A bunch of places.  Rob Bell, the evangelical minister who questions the existence of hell.  Shirley MacLaine, who has been here and there again and again (I don't mean hell).  Life Line Screening.  National healthcare.  Marathoner Grete Weitz killed by cancer today at 57; the vision of Waitz finishing the 1992 NYC Marathon with 60-year-old Fred Lebow who was fighting brain cancer at the time.  Mastering a spring flu or cold or combination and taking a "brake" from running.  A summer garden soon to be planted.  Free-range eggs and raw goat's milk.  Karen walking with a friend.  Books, updates, poems, stories to write.  Music to play and be written.  Son to watch man-becoming.  Artichokes waiting to be transplanted outside.  Life to be, life to watch, smile.

Lifestead on Elk Cliff Farm.  Like.