The Age of Wise Women
Initiations-Transitions-Rituals
While I thought this five-week Mom-Daughter trip was about me showing Mia the world, it has revealed itself as an initiation of my own. This journey has shown me that I am now stepping into the role of wise woman.
My child is only 9-years-old, and a beauty. In each country we’ve traveled, she’s been revered for her long blonde hair, her golden green eyes and perfect as a button features. Strangers have stopped us on the streets to have their picture taken with her. I had to tear her away from a group of Chinese tourists who wanted her to take photos with each of them in Singapore. As I watch her young beauty come into form, I have reflected on my own younger beauty that has now faded into a different form—one of wise woman, not quite elder, but no longer of the youthful promise. Now, it is more a burnished knowing.
It’s taken four weeks of travel to realize that this is what in fact has been occurring—that I have officially transitioned into another, new to me, phase of womanhood. I didn’t have a name for it quite yet, as I have been preoccupied with teaching Mia the ways of culture, manners and the world, ignoring my own emotions and awakenings in order to pour them into her. But now, as I sit on the porch of a glorious beachfront room, with a pot of tea steaming in the Sri Lankan sunrise light, I am clear and feeling joyful to have a name for where I am now. Wise Woman.
I am no longer going to have children, and I am very deep into a nearly sixteen year marriage. I no longer have taut skin and perky breasts. My skin is soft and lax around my neck, and I am squarely placed in menopause. I’m no longer flirtatious nor am I ever the youngest in a room, when I used to always be the youngest in a room. I never have had an issue with age, my friends growing up and even now range from younger than me to thirty years older than me, none of the numbers have ever quite registered as pertinent.
And yet, I have been in a sort of internal crisis, a not knowing that I have never known before—that of middle-age, that of newness that is simply older. This change begets knowing nods from other women, and men who used to flirt with me now come to me for advice. While I used to have promising decades ahead of me, I am now thinking of my legacy. It’s not over the hill, it’s quite in the middle of the depths of the hill where I find myself.
And this morning, as I prayed for a way forward with my latest book, Love in Detail, one in which I’ve been laboring now for over four years, I heard my angel’s comforting voice say, “self-publish it, you know how.” And in fact now I do know how. I have not only built and lost a multi-million-dollar tea company, but I’ve been a publisher at a top five publishing house in New York for over 4 years—the equivalent of a college degree. I’ve also begun again, a new tea company where the learning has been delicious and the creativity has fueled much of my days. Yes, I do know how to do this.
But, I cannot know how to do it and still be lingering in my naivite, that not-knowing space of youth where a rescuer could arrive in the form of an investment banker or mentor, lover or hero. Now, I am aged, like a fine wine, into the less wild steppes of adulthood. There are less dragons to tame here, less slamming doors and mood swings, less drama and more fond reflecting. It all quite happened while I wasn’t looking, and I’m just now realizing this five-week journey through Asia was never solely about Mia, it was in fact about me. I have needed clarity and a title, I’ve needed instructions from beyond the circle of friends I love. I’ve needed more than a workshop could bring to me, I’ve needed it to come from deep within my soul, intrinsically bursting from the spirit that guides me.
And yes, I know a lot more now. I can watch these beautiful young women heading to yoga, their eager bounce and curious minds leading them to the next adventure and not feel sad or remorseful for my simple desire to write and not join the boxilates class or the surf camp. I have been remorseful that I simply don’t want to do it, yet also confused a bit as to why I don’t. Frankly, as a wise woman, I am no longer obligated to do anything I don’t want to do, and that’s simply it. I don’t like classes where I have to change my schedule to meet others’ schedules, and I don’t want to sweat with a bunch of Australian athletes in bikinis. I’ve been totally liberated!
And there’s Mia. Strangely, I am bridging the generations, straddling decades. My daughter who is so vulnerable and tough, her desire to play Minecraft and be left alone wants to be held and cuddled in the lightening storms. She has been pointing out the dimples on my legs, asking me why I made choices I made, like getting the boob job or why my hair falls out in the shower, and it’s been annoying and poignant, as well as the platform to educate her on the folly of my twenties and the tenderness of aging. Because at 44 I’m still the accumulated choices of those years when my insecurities and doubts pervaded every day of my life, and I’m now the softened woman who relies on self-compassion to get through the day.
How can I be “so old” while raising a little woman who is yet so young? I don’t feel a touch sad or jealous of her as I’m told many aging women feel of the beauty and promise of a young girl, but I do feel nearly an alien with a big job ahead of me both today and in the decades to come. I feel like the youth I had is a far continent to hers. She faces extinction, while I faced verbal abuse. She faces climate change and fighting for the rights of nature in order to survive while I faced very different, more personal cliffs to scale. She is being raised with emotional intelligence while I was raised memorizing Bible scriptures as if my life depended on it. Our experiences have nothing in common except that they are both mine.
Enter the Wise Woman. For those of us who are raising the next generation, or who chose not to have a child, there has to be a rite of passage. There needs to be a means for us to celebrate the end of one age and the start of another—which varies from woman to woman. Of course, there is the maiden-mother-queen-crone/wise woman but what are the ceremonies that bring us to each with awareness, joy and guidance? I am a student of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, but even her classes do not teach what to do, how to do, when to do these rituals and burials, rebirths and initiations. Where are the women of the tribal past who can hold our hands and bring us to the edge of one phase and into another?
We have lost these teachings in the flames of youth obsession. We have diminished the sacred ceremonies and hand-holding of women’s work as we’ve climbed the corporate ladder. We have become found in the board room and lost in the psyche. I have hungered a deep hunger for elder women to bring me this knowledge, that which is earned through blood and deep work, I am craving more. We are all craving more.
More wisdom, more deep joy in aging, more permission to be the “Knowing One” and less seeking of the past. I want to set up a throne for myself and have those who need guidance come to me, I don’t want to have to write a ton of blogs and posts in order for them to find me—can’t that be something we put in the past? I’d like to move beyond the “tip jar” lifestyle where I send wisdom out hoping someone signs up for a workshop, and into the world of receiving. I can’t do that if I doubt my wisdom, but mainly I can’t do that if I don’t know I am now a Wise Woman.
Isn’t this all any of us want? To know where we are in the cycle of life, on the wheel of existence? To be told more than our “estrogen levels are low” and our “thyroid is off?” Don’t we want to be told that our souls are now ready to share their light and wisdom and hope and meaning with the world rather than our “metabolism has slowed” and that “after 40 we start losing our eyesight?” I mean, give us a fucking break!
Stop fixating on the effects of aging on the body and start celebrating the effects on our souls!
Sure, I want to “stay pretty.” I want to stave off the effects of wrinkles and thinning hair, cellulite and chubby middle regions, but I won’t be reduced to this being the rite of passage for my wisdom years! It seems the physicality of the aging process has become the entire conversation! As women, we talk about menopause, sex, anti-aging procedures, adrenal fatigue, hormone levels, anything and everything happening to and in our bodies has overtaken the gloriousness of what’s happening deep inside of our souls. And while we are celebrating our youth standing up to the patriarchy, we should continue to celebrate our wisdom years and lend a hand to those coming up in the ranks, as their success or failure in battling the bogeyman of greed and Earth’s destruction is really subject to our sharing—or lack of it.
While the world’s animal kingdom goes extinct, so many of us are struggling with the low self worth that comes from isolation. From a not-knowing that we are now Wise Women and the means of survival is reliant on us standing in our rightful places on this planet. A misogynistic bully who denies sexually assaulting dozens of women holds the highest office of the land while we battle depression and anxiety—but, if we see that our depression and anxiety can only be cured by picking up our mantles as WISE WOMEN who are rightfully angry, we will never be cured of this malaise. Instead of a prescription, we need a battle cry!
I want nothing more than to live a vital life to 100, I just never knew until this passage of my own into the heartlands of Asia, that I was craving guidance in this new phase of my own womanhood. I thought I would be guiding Mia, when in fact I am the guided, the seeking.
My sweet mom had an absentee alcoholic mom who never honored her own passages, so she never taught me to honor my own. There are very few offers to help guide women into and through these years, when there are many that guide us into motherhood. It seems the buck stops after we’ve secured the next generation. But here too, I am a child, not knowing where next to step, but by the aged way I look, it never occurs to people I might be feeling this way—it didn’t even occur to me!
I felt a lot of support as my belly produced children, I have felt less emotional and spiritual support as I have had my middle grow in older age instead of with child. I have been given advice on how to “get my sexy back” but I don’t need that, I need advice on how to not give a shit about “my sexy” as much as I give a shit about my soul.
We don’t need more sexy, we need more sacred rites to guide us away from wanting to relive and replay our maiden years, we don’t need older women trying to be hot—we need them being wise and relentless.
So, this trip wasn’t as much about my daughter’s rite of passage as a global citizen, but about my own rite of passage into the Wisdom Years, knowing what I have been missing and what I must now create for myself and others.
I don’t want to teach another platform-building course unless it helps women find their footing in the soul work that creates a better world. I don’t want solely to teach you how to publish your next book, as that’s easy, what’s not easy are the transitions we undergo that no one talks about.
Perhaps we are all lost in transition, finding our footing as our partners and bodies age. As our ideas mature and our hearts bear the burdens of a world getting destroyed by the greed of old men—our male contemporaries that have gone wild with power. What if we could end climate change by taking all the energy we use on the next diet fad and storm the fucking corporate headquarters that are killing off our bees and destroying the air we breathe? What if we stopped trying to get our sex lives to be hot again, and instead took the rage in our loins and aimed it at ending the patriarchy’s bullshit coverups and lies.
A real revolution needs to happen and it has nothing to do with Botox and Keto diets—it has everything to do with not allowing ourselves to be trapped by listicles and ridiculous beauty regimens, for if we let that shit go, we’d have time to offset every carbon particle in the air and upend the very systems that have kept us thinking we have to look a certain way in order to get shit done. It simply isn’t so.
Breaking this spell and guiding one another into the AGE OF WISE WOMEN is where we are being called. I for one am going to stop trying to look younger and instead embrace the power of my well-earned, burnished wisdom. No more clichés about “Fifty being the new Thirty” Because fifty is what it’s meant to be—not killing itself in the gym but empowering itself in the Capitol and in the circles of women we are meant to gather.
If you haven’t joined me at ZhenaTV or at ClubMagicHour please do, there is much more to come on this subject, for it is what has found me, stark naked, staring into a sea of you and me.
If you haven’t joined me at ZhenaTV or at ClubMagicHour please do, there is much more to come on this subject, for it is what has found me, stark naked, staring into a sea of you and me.
