There is a quiet that settles into the bones around this age. Not the quiet of resignation, but the quiet of a room where the candles have all been lit and the air knows that something meaningful is about to happen. Sixty carries its own gravity. It is a strange and beautiful weight, like an unseen hand placed gently on the back, guiding me toward the work that still needs to be made.
People ask what it feels like, performing for strangers night after night, writing long after midnight, building stories that drift from page to stage and back again. The truth is, the artist’s life does not grow smaller with age, it grows deeper. The colors get richer. The shadows get wiser. The stories, once sharp and clever, now come with softer edges and a warmer breath. At sixty, I feel as if I am finally speaking with the voice I have been tuning my entire life.
There is something profoundly freeing about reaching an age when the masks fall away. I no longer perform to prove anything. I perform because it is the language of my spirit. I tell stories because they are the way I stay connected to a world that spins faster than any of us can truly hold. I create because creation is the closest I have ever come to prayer. And when the audience leans in, when the table lamps glow, when the room hushes itself without being asked, I am reminded that presence, genuine presence, is still the most potent magic there is.
But the freedom of this age does not come without its cost. There is a loneliness that threads itself quietly through the seams of the work. Not the kind that wounds, but the kind that waits. An artist’s life is often a life spent on the road, in the wings, behind curtains, in rooms where the air is heavy with anticipation but light on familiar voices. I have grown comfortable with solitude, perhaps too comfortable. It has become both shelter and studio, companion and muse. The silence carries me, but sometimes it echoes.
My kids and grandkids live far from the mountains I now call home. I miss them in ways that are hard to articulate without brushing against the tender places. Messages and photos help, but they do not replace being present for the small, ordinary moments that become the stories families tell for years. Sometimes I find myself rehearsing in the empty parlor before a séance, and I catch a phrase or a gesture that reminds me of them, and the air tightens a little in my chest. Distance is its own kind of haunting, gentle but persistent. Loving from afar is an art form I am still learning.
Even so, sixty brings with it a steady sense of purpose. After a lifetime on stages, across tables, and inside notebooks, I understand myself differently. I understand what I am building, the legacy in progress, the threads that connect every choice and chapter. The late nights, the ink-stained hands, the haunted hotel hallways, the whispered conversations after shows, the notebooks filled with half finished poems, all of it reinforces one truth. An artist’s life is not measured in applause or ticket counts, but in how honestly one dares to show up.
And these days, I show up with more honesty than ever before.
There is a tenderness that surprises me. At sixty, emotion sits closer to the surface, but it is steadier than it once was. When I speak to an audience about presence or willpower or the invisible stories we carry, I feel the words resonate inside my chest in a new way. I am no longer reaching for them. They are reaching for me. They arrive with the weight of lived experience instead of theory. I have walked through enough fire to know that the flame is not the enemy. It is a sculptor.
That fire shows up in the work. In the stories I tell at séance tables, in the magic that folds itself into philosophy, in the essays and poems that find their way into my blog, my books, and the notebooks I scatter around the house like breadcrumbs. My art has always been about connection, but now the connections glow with a softer intention. I no longer need to dazzle. I am more interested in igniting something quiet but enduring inside the people who sit across from me.
The balance between work and the solitary life is delicate, like the edge of a well worn tarot card. Some days the scales lean one way, some days the other. When the work takes over, I am consumed in the best possible way, disappearing into stories, rehearsals, candles, ink. When solitude grows too large, I take long walks and talk to the mountains, or I sit at the table with a cup of tea and let memory speak. It is not a perfect balance, but it is a meaningful one. That is enough.
Sixty is not an ending. It is not even a crest. It feels like the clearing of fog on a morning you did not realize was overcast. Suddenly everything is sharper. The past looks softer, kinder. The future looks strangely inviting. There is still so much to build, so much to teach, so many stories waiting to be told. And for the first time in my life, I feel fully prepared to tell them.
I have learned that most of the artist’s life happens in the unseen spaces. In the quiet. In the late hours. In the pauses between performances when the mind wanders through memory and possibility. Those spaces are where the real work is done, the work that never makes its way into videos or books or shows, but which shapes everything that does.
Maybe that is why sixty feels so sacred. It is the age where the unseen becomes just as important as the seen. Where the audience is not the only witness that matters. Where the artist begins to understand that the truest part of the craft is the part no one applauds.
And so I keep going. I keep creating. I keep performing for the souls who gather at my table. I keep writing for the ones who find their way to my words when they need them. I keep tending the flame, even on the nights when solitude feels heavier than usual.
This is an artist’s life at sixty. It is tender, solitary, vibrant, meaningful. It is full of longing and full of purpose. It asks much, but it gives more. And though I am far from the people I love most, I carry them with me into every room, every story, every whispered moment when the candlelight warms the edge of the table.
If anything, sixty has taught me this. An artist does not age out of their magic. They age into it. They grow toward it. They become it.
The Truth Is ... 
