Super Seniors

Homer Nottingham, 84

Farm boy from central Arizona, American Express division VP, Kiwanis Club member, recipient of the William A. Dunlap Fellowship Award for supporting pediatric care.

I’m on a mission of health and wellness!” declares Homer Nottingham, who spends his weeks offering free and low-cost fitness classes.

He was living in Los Angeles and on one of his business trips to Hong Kong, staying at a hotel across from a park. “I looked out one morning, and the park was full of people. They’re out there at 6:30; they just go out and do it!” “It” is the ancient Chinese practices of tai chi and qi gong. Nottingham was intrigued, so he tried it, too. The complex, repetitive sequences of seemingly simple movements — flowing, punching, pulling away, turning, balancing, pausing, flowing again — filled him with an energy the overweight exec had never felt before. “It was the most amazing feeling!” he recalls.

“It’s all about preventive medicine. Stress and tension – like we’ve all suffered during the pandemic.”

Homer nottingham

For more than 20 years in Nevada County, the lanky grandfather has been a fitness apostle, proclaiming the ability of tai chi and qi gong to connect body, mind and spirit by building new brain cells and forging new neural pathways. Studies from top universities verify that these practices fortify the brain’s cognitive reserve, a kind of back-up system our brains use to continue thinking when dementia sets in. 

“It’s all about preventive medicine!” Nottingham explains. Stress and tension – like we’ve all suffered during the pandemic –settle into the body, eventually manifesting as physical symptoms and disease. Tai chi and qi gong release that tension while challenging your brain, strengthening your body, lubricating your joints and cleaning your lungs, he declares. “In the United States, we have the best medical system, the best pharmaceuticals, but we’re 32nd in the world for health. Why is that? We’ve never had a preventive care system! That would eliminate 60 percent of illness and injuries.”

Nottingham offers low-cost classes at area assisted living facilities, fitness clubs and at Pioneer Park in Nevada City, donating the fees to charity. He also trains others to lead, spreading the word that, as we age, we can keep our bodies and minds in better condition than we thought.

HomerNottingham.com
homer@homernottingham.com
(530) 263-1627

Vivian Tipton, 58

Grateful adventurer, counseling junkie, picture of transformation

By Kylene Yumul

Sixteen years ago, Vivian Tipton got a phone call while on a cruise in the Cayman Islands: Her son, Joseph, had died of an overdose. She felt like she couldn’t move air through her body. For a while, she couldn’t take care of herself or even speak properly.

Her son’s death was only the first of three big losses Tipton would experience: Both her brother and father died of pancreatic cancer. She and her brother were very close. As children, they cut a hole in the closets of their adjoining bedrooms so they could go back and forth to each other’s spaces. They misbehaved in high school together. She was with him when he passed. Now, Tipson says his death hurt differently because that gut shock wasn’t there, just an aching grief. 

“The hardest thing for me are those moments when I remember how long forever is. Forever is really long,” Tipton says. “But I don’t live there all the time. I know that love heals all, and I’m not scared to love. I’m not scared to do it again. I have friends who’ve had deep losses and they close. I didn’t want to close.”

“When you’ve touched your deepest sorrow, you understand that deepest joy.”

Vivian Tipton

Tipton started running 5Ks and 10Ks to deal with his loss. Training for a marathon, she would hang out with her brother in her head, talking to him and yelling at him like she always did. Tipton ran her first marathon when she was 50. But around six years ago, she had her right knee replaced, so she switched to bicycling the trails and hired a professional to learn to ride safely. 

Tipton is the executive director of Hospice of the Foothills, but when she retires, she plans to make exercise her everyday priority. She had her first child at 19, so she has always fit exercise in around the people at the center of her life. She longs for the day when her body, her vessel, is at the center, and other stuff fits in around that. She’s preparing now.

“What lights me up? The top of any hard effort. The top of the hill,” Tipton says. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m ever so grateful to be here. It’s that one percent when I’m not that keeps me grounded, so I don’t try to fly off the top of the mountain on my bike.”

Michael Kimmes, 70

A wood-repurposer extraordinaire! He loves the beautiful possibilities in the woodgrains gleaned from doomed trees. Wood relegated to firewood is reborn. A true artisan.

Michael Kimmes likes to say he was rescued from an orphanage and a life of near-slave labor. Now, he rescues trees destined for firewood.

The native of Dublin, Ireland, was nearly four when an American couple adopted him and brought him to California. As a youth, he worked at a sawmill in Oregon and fell in love with the smell of wood and the timber’s exposed interior. Kimmes eventually found his way to a mentor, wood products manufacturer Earl Roberts of Yuba City, Calif., who taught him how to read the bark of a tree to divine what beauty lay deep inside.

In his South County home, Kimmes picks up a guitar, its body glowing with gold, amber and sienna curls and waves. Certain trees, in certain soils or conditions, produce these structures that, when revealed by saw and sander, create stunning natural art coveted for custom guitar backs, high-end collectible gun stocks, jewelry boxes and turned bowls by artisans around the world. Kimmes gleans his wood from old farm properties, aged orchards and lands being razed for development, often getting leads from friends. He favors walnut for its three-dimensional quality. California walnut, in particular, can produce a clear, bright, highly figured grain, unlike the flat-brown and dark-toned varieties from other parts of the world.

In the late 17th century, Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari popularized such dramatic wood by using it for his violins, cellos and other instruments; people still use the term “fiddleback” to describe it, Kimmes said. The guitar in his hands was built by the late and renowned Lance McCollum, of Colfax, using highly figured walnut Kimmes harvested, then sliced into chunks and sheets in his workshop down the hill. (Fender Guitars and Fodera also are customers.) He strums the instrument to reveal the wood’s acoustic properties: rich tone with a long, long sustain.

“That’s the signature, not only of a hand-crafted instrument, but the quality of the wood itself,” Kimmes says. His voice carries a hint of reverence.

See more treasures created with Kimmes’ wood milled at California Walnut Designs, WoodNut.com

Kalyani Marsh, 60

Grape-picker, caregiver, massage therapist, jewelry maker, lover of wide open spaces, future artist.

In a clear and pure soprano, Kalyani Marsh sings of peace, light, gratitude, joy and the journey of spirit.
Voice twines with guitar, sometimes piano, or both, in her original compositions. Marsh has loved music and singing her whole life, discovering and performing in the Minneapolis music scene as a teenager. In her 20s, she felt empowered by Indian classical dance. “It taught me, through the discipline and intention, that I could become a channel for energy,” Marsh recalls.

She bounced around the country and the world, and started writing songs in the late 1990s as catharsis. “That’s how it starts, usually. Your music is your medicine for yourself,” Marsh says. “I would sing myself lullabies.” She recorded her first CD in 2002, while living in the Bay Area. In Hawai’i soon after, Marsh found herself singing in isolated places. “I would have this incredible experience of nature listening to me,” she recalls. “It was so alive!”

That’s when songs started coming in dreams. One morning, in that sweet liminality between sleep and wake, Marsh heard a voice. “I’m sure it was the Christ, speaking to me, yelling,” she recalls. “He wanted to imprint a message upon me: Be fulfilled on your path!”

She started listening to A Course in Miracles. The spiritual study program “was undoing some part of my ego,” Marsh says. “I learned that I can create, not from misery, but from wholeness and joy.”

Evolving again, Marsh, hit the road, alighting in Nevada City after listening to KVMR Radio. “I wanted to live in a beautiful place where I could be around people and share music.” She arrived with a newly purchased Taylor guitar and $1,000. Since then, she has settled in Rough and Ready. Some of the “beautiful connections” she has formed included a band, Kalyani and Circle Up Music; plus musical tours, playing for local spiritual congregations and, most recently, composing music for meditation. Now working on her tenth album of “song gifts,” she feels blessed to overcome her fears and pursue her passions, because time is precious.

“My songs are my teachers,” Marsh says. She hopes they would inspire self-discovery and healing in others.

Listen to Marsh’s music:
SoundCloud.com/kalyani-marsh

Get a CD: circleupmusic@gmail.com

Of the Earth and Sky
by Kalyani Marsh
Evolving I am, open to a new beginning
I gently connect to the source of life
Dancing in light, I feel inspiration within
Dancing in light of the earth and sky.

Mosaic artist, yard-sale treasure hunter, serial business owner, nature-lover, spiritual explorer, caregiver, grateful learner

In Gracie Robinson’s garden, milkweed, poppies, columbine, love- in-a-mist, coreopsis and daisies find tender space. Whimsical mosaics peep out from smooth rocks, cow skulls, stepping stones, clocks, peace signs and hearts. “All my life, I’ve been involved in arts or crafts,” Robinson says. Nevada County’s alternative lifestyle lured this southern California native 40 years ago. She opened Jewel in the Crown, a Grass Valley toy store where her children rang up sales. Through a store contact a decade ago, mosaic art grabbed her imagination.

Something about being 50+ spurred Robinson to ponder how to make art more central to her life. She attended weekly coaching sessions, wrote a mission statement and journaled. Friends and family hugged her on and built an Etsy site.

Now, “the love of art and mosaic comes first. The motivation comes from a different place,” Robinson says. On top of that, “it’s just so exciting to have someone love a piece of my art enough to purchase it!”

Yuba Love Mosaics (530) 446-5993
On Etsy, by commission and at local craft shows during the holidays