September always feels like a little death to me, a signal to get ready to hibernate, if only I could! Summer begins to loosen its grip, evenings creep in earlier, and leaves start considering the annual drop.
This year, the feeling seems particularly poignant with the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and a wise Wild Elder, Diana Whitmore, one of my first psycho-spiritual teachers over 40 years ago.
Three lives, three endings, and three reminders that none of us gets to stay.
But here’s the thing we don’t talk about nearly enough…
We are dying all the freakin’ time!
And not just physically… At the same time, it can be a very creative thing…
The woman you were at 30 had to die for the woman of 40 to emerge, as did, or will, the woman of 40 so the 50-year-old you could, and so on. Indeed, I see all my previous years as apprenticeships for the accolade, and where I am now in my late 70s, of Wild Elderhood.
Identities end, roles fall away, children, if you have them, leave, careers stop fitting, our bodies and relationships change. Dreams we once clung to become strangely irrelevant.
And midlife can bring a whole bloody bonfire of endings down on your head!
No wonder it can feel unsettling.
We’ve been taught to treat endings as failures, cling to what was, and get ourselves “back to normal” as quickly as possible.
But what if something in you is supposed to be dying?
Nature understands this perfectly. September doesn’t desperately glue the leaves back onto the trees; it lets them begin to fall.
Because death and creation aren’t opposites, but beautifully balanced dance partners.
So perhaps the question this September isn’t, What am I losing?, but…
What needs to die in me now, so something more truly me can live?
Yes, woman… What needs to die in you now, so something more truly you can live?
Love and wild warm wishes…
For midlife women feeling out of sorts, disconnected and
who’ve reached, “There has to be more to life than this!”
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