aging – Feminism and Religion

Prehistoric Feminine Icons

In this blog post I’d like to take you with me on a recent visit to the special exhibition “Arts and Prehistory”* in the Museum of Mankind (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris.**

Like the Feminine Power in London exhibition I wrote about last year, this is another ode to human imagination and creativity in connection to the mystery of life.

The exhibition features women figurines and cave paintings from dating between 26.000-34.000 years old, and I wonder how these prehistoric icons can inspire us to look at female bodies today…

Re-Anointing the Body by Eline Kieft

How ‘at one’ are you with your body, and what reasons might there be if your body-sense got separate(d) from your soul-sense?

This piece starts with the difference between feminine and masculine spirituality, and introduces a few reasons why living in a physical body isn’t always easy.

It then invites a shift to the beloved body and how we can start to re-instate our body as a sacred place and love it from within.

Aging and the Ancestral Dark? by Sara Wright

Unfortunately, an inner darkness has been with me all fall hiding in the corners of my mind and disturbing my body creating headaches and stomach troubles during the day. Although I attempt to protect myself from a culture that I cannot control by not listening to news, watching television, movies or perusing social media I am painfully aware of the fact that politicians on an international level cannot even agree to discuss what to do about climate change – this after 30 years of doing absolutely nothing – creating in me a mindless fury that leaves me in black despair. The time of acting locally and thinking globally is long past. Thinking and doing must occur on a global level. Novelist Richard Powers states the obvious: “People can better imagine the end of the end of the world before the end of Capitalism”. Then we can move to the moon.

I have also been forced to acknowledge how difficult this year has been on a personal level. Aging is affecting my energy level, increasing the severity of depressed states, my sense of inner and outer balance. I am vulnerable and know it although I do my best to begin each day with gratitude as I first peer out at my beloved trees, a little nuthatch or chickadee, gaze at a silver crescent, or celebrate a pale pink dawning.

On Her Birthday by Sara Wright

One of the aspects of feminism that really disturbs me is the SILENCE around aging. Reflections on our personal lives are a critical piece that can help women to deal with this inevitable process. Oh, we write about the “wisdom” of the crone, the powers of the “Old Ones”, but we don’t share the poignant, dark, or terrifying aspects of personal aging leaving women without female empathy and companionship when we need it most. I am committed to breaking this silence. My birthday poem speaks to the pattern that lies behind my life and how it determined to an extent how I have lived. Chosen or not.

We come out of a culture that believes that each person has ‘free will’ and therefore the choices we make are our own. I challenge this concept because my life experience has taught me otherwise. Within the constraints of the patterns we live we do have choices. So this is a “both and” approach. Coming to terms with constraining patterns can be painful, but only then can we make choices that allow us to make peace with our lives.

On her birthday…

On her birthday

she surrendered –

A Reflection on Aging by Sara Wright

In feminism becoming a ‘wise’ crone is acknowledged (it is certainly true that experience brings insight), but the vulnerabilities associated with aging remain hidden. I wonder how much of this silence has to do with shame? Does our culture’s obsession with youth keep us quiet? If so this attitude isolates women from one another when older women need each other’s support more than ever. Lately, I find myself keenly aware that I need to write about the changes that are occurring in my own life so that I remain visible to myself if not to others.

When it comes to the challenges of aging the silence is deafening.

Turn, Turn, Turn

It’s May Day. At dawn I scoop water from the brook, first pouring some on the earth and then, returning to the house, I bless the floor of the log cabin that is my home. I light candles for intentions… Too sensitive to light (phototrophic) I am acutely aware that the wheel is turning her face towards the harsh white glare of summer.

A dangerous time.

Winter Turns the Tide by Sara Wright

This winter has been most challenging on every level.

I am exhausted, emotionally and physically. Most of my hair has turned gray. I have become an old woman who needs to be in touch with her limitations.

On December 31st I broke my foot at three in the morning when a horrible crash awakened me to a blocked front door. I shoveled pure ice for an hour. Frantic with anxiety, I didn’t even realize that I had broken my foot until the crisis was over and the door could be opened again.

Embracing Gray by Mary Sharratt

Five years ago, before peer pressure made me reach for the henna.

When I turned forty, my hair started going seriously gray. Fearing that this would make me look “old,” I drank the Koolaid and hopped straight onto the wheel of hair dyeing samsara, getting my hair professionally colored every six to eight weeks. This, alas, proved to be a very expensive and time-consuming obligation. I am not one of those women who views going to the salon as “pampering.” Quite the contrary. I would much rather be writing novels or pampering my pony.

The salon I frequented in those days, which has since gone out of business, had an alarming tendency to play nonstop Miley Cyrus videos. Sitting under a heat lamp with dye on my hair, I was truly a captive audience and could not run away, and the volume was so loud, it was impossible to read or even think. Subjected to such horrors, I could feel my brain cells slowly and painfully dying off, even as my hair was being dyed. I tried changing salons, but they all seemed to have the same loud, annoying soundtrack.

To compound this, my hair grows so fast, the gray roots would be visible two weeks after each dye job and then I had use root concealer to hide the evidence. Finally my scalp would take no more and I developed a skin intolerance to commercial hair dye. That, and one Miley Cyrus video too many, tipped me over the edge. I decided to jump off the hair dyeing merry-go-round and go naturally gray. By this time, I was approaching fifty. Continue reading “Embracing Gray by Mary Sharratt”

The Fierce Initiation of Menopause by Mary Sharratt

Modern Western culture despises aging. Aging women are held in particular contempt. Menopause is meant to be something embarrassing and uncomfortable. The pharma industry peddles hormones and other drugs meant to mask our symptoms. Few women see menopause as something to even talk about, let alone celebrate. But some women are reclaiming the dignity and transformation of menopause as a passage to power. Author and herbalist Susun Weed portrays menopause as a spiritual awakening. She likens the fierce waves of heat traveling upward to our brains to the Eastern concept of a Kundalini awakening that ultimately leads to enlightenment and spiritual liberation. Whether or not you agree with this, you will not make it through menopause without some kind of radical change taking place inside you.

I’ve experienced menopause as an initiation by fire. Having chosen not to have children, menopause has proved the most intense and radical embodied experience and transformation I’ve undergone since menarche and puberty. When a hot flash seizes me, I can no longer continue my train of monkey-mind thinking or be an efficient worker bee of global capitalism. All my old ingrained thought patterns are interrupted and come to a halt as I’m forced to focus on the embodied experience of burning up from within. What if this internal fire is literally burning through old ways of thinking and being that no longer serve me? Maybe we’re supposed to be rattled and disturbed so we can change. It’s even called The Change. So many tired old patterns are falling away from me, because I can’t keep up with them anymore. There’s this profound deepening. A sense of what truly matters.

I resist change so much. I long to remain in the comfortable old rut of the familiar, but menopause makes that impossible. It’s a take-no-prisoners wake up call to the reality of passing time and impermanence. It forces me to reexamine my values, where I truly want to spend the remaining time I have on earth. I’ve always been spiritual, but menopause has deepened my commitment to daily spiritual practice. It’s also taught me to embrace my own fierceness. To say what I mean and mean what I say. Menopausal women might find themselves losing the superficial prettiness of youth. We can no longer pass as objectified eye candy in male-stream culture. With our wrinkles and gray hair, we become something scary but also powerful. Crones and witches. We truly do become wise women if we answer the spiritual call of menopause. If we resist the lure of male-stream medicine to brainwash us into reframing this profound transformation and path of power into a disease that must be treated with hormones and face lifts. While some women benefit from hormone therapy and allopathic medicine, I’m against the generic medicalization of the natural processes in women’s lives.

Pregnant women give birth to new souls. Menopausal women give birth to their wiser selves. Like motherhood, menopause sidelines us on the relentless march towards capitalist achievement and forces us to reexamine our true priorities. We live in a 24/7 culture that expects us to be switched on and working at maximum efficiency every day of the year, as if the cycles of the seasons, sun, and moon didn’t exist. Menopause is an invitation to live in harmony with the tides and seasons of our lives. To claim our time and attention and take our lives back.

If older women truly knew how fierce and powerful we were, we could change the world.

Readers might also want to check out my essay: “Life Begins at 42: Saint Hildegard’s Guide to Becoming a Midlife Powerfrau.”

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her most recent novel Ecstasy is about the composer Alma Schindler Mahler. If you enjoyed this article, sign up for Mary’s newsletter or visit her website.

A Curious Blessing by Natalie Weaver

A few years back, I turned forty years old. On the cusp of this landmark birthday, I wrote about the stigma of so-called midlife crises. I resisted the idea that changes associated with midlife should be mocked, when indeed many of those changes actually represent something like birth itself. I have come to think, however, that I was perhaps naïve in my wild embrace of midlife self-birthing. I still believe what I said before, basically, which was that midlife occasions opportunity for self-knowledge in a way that is largely inaccessible to babies, children, adolescents, and novice adults. What I could not have known a few years back is how much it costs to answer the waking self’s summons.

In the years since I first started thinking about myself as a person in midlife, I have experienced a trifecta of sweeping changes in work, family, and health. My sense of self has been destabilized, and, even more, what I value has changed. In ways, I do not recognize myself, while in others, I do not recognize the girl in the photographs around my house. It seems like she was always hiding beneath her Mona Lisa smile the woman that would show up in a few decades. All these disillusionments! All these decisions! All this stuff in my kitchen and basement! Continue reading “A Curious Blessing by Natalie Weaver”

A Feminist Liturgy of Old and Age by Elisabeth Schilling

blue fleur How the voices speak of what is and isn’t tastes of a superficial sauce I let drip from my lips. In the first dialectic of aging (harkening back to Marie Cartier’s helpful division of conversational foci), usually what is spoken about has little to do with our mental, spiritual, or emotional states. It is not a comment on perhaps what it should be: how evolved in consciousness or how mindful a soul is, how evolved in practices of discipline and surrender one is, how creative we have been in our attempt to ease the suffering of ourselves and others. It is not this because when people comment on age or how old someone might be, it is usually, in my recent experience, from one who knows not a person well enough to address any of these former possibilities nor in a situation where those in conversation have the luxury of mulling over such glittering, dazzling musings.

For indeed, let beings sit together on rocks or leather couches, playfully and perhaps seriously, discuss opinions on reincarnation, what has appeared in Tarot readings of current life stages and what the presence of what that Major Arcana card might represent as intuited by our subconscious. We might share stories of the messages we have lately received from trees, how they surrender so seemingly freely to their baldness as we might, with a few tufts of auburn leaves on a naked limb, how sometimes the bark is smooth and ghostly pale and how other times the trees that catch our communion are thick and rough like we are, tempting us to press our soft flesh into each other’s bark and feel how specks of wood and sap enter us, how we all bend and break and maybe rise up in another season with a flamboyant, hairy green bush, taking up all the space that we can, as we reach our arms in passionate ecstasy to the sun and moon, learning that sometimes we can best speak in silence and trembling. Continue reading “A Feminist Liturgy of Old and Age by Elisabeth Schilling”