Growing old isn’t an achievement… It just means you’ve survived X number of years. Becoming an Elder is the real achievement.
But some people confuse age with wisdom and assume that, because someone’s lived a long time, they will have developed, as if by magic, the sagacity of Merlin or Lao Tsu… (Where are the wise women recorded, I ask myself???)
Come on!
We’ve all met at least one older person who’s still bitter. Or one who’s still playing the victim with blaming… even if it’s just the government! Or one who’s controlling, or frightened, or… as so often is the case… one who’s still asleep to themselves.
The number of years you’ve lived don’t create wisdom!
Inner work and healing do, as do radical self-honesty and acceptance, and the willingness to question everything you once believed.
A Wild Elder isn’t just someone who’s simply lived for decades. She’s someone who’s allowed life to transform her.
She’s chosen truth over performance, owned her shadow instead of projecting it, faced her grief instead of burying it, AND allowed it to transform into wisdom. She’s chosen Love over fear and her life as a message, service over status.
That’s why not every older woman becomes a Wild Elder!
Some become so simply because they’re an older version of a woman who’s been doing the work for decades, anyway. Some, because in midlife, they’ve been helped to recognise that this time of life can be a sacred rite of passage into elderhood and eldership.
That, when our culture’s telling women they’re in decline and makes them invisible, this time of life can be a powerful pathway to the most potent version of themselves yet!
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about ageing…
The world doesn’t need more people who have merely lived until they’re long in the tooth… And I promise you, that happens literally!
Instead…
The world needs more women courageous enough to become Wild Elders, to serve those with us now and those who come after us, all sentient beings, and our beautiful blue planet.
Do you agree?
Or do you think age alone deserves the title of Elder?
(First published on LinkedIn)
Love and wild warm wishes…
For women who’ve reached, “There has to be more to life than this!”
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