Rising into the Storm: Women Who Burst Open with Age.
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We women of a certain age, plump juicy raisins on the outside, sweet and sour grapes on the inside, occasionally awash in wine can no longer be strangled by the twisted tentacles of the vineyard.
We are ascendant. Listen. You can hear the quickening of our individual voices forming a collective chorus synchronized and buzzing like cicadas loosed from their shells. Every seven or 17 years? No longer. We’re done with schedules, here for the duration and getting louder by the second.
It’s not a trend or a wave it’s a life-force tsunami giving birth to an endless, sparkling curl. Our anthem: Be true to yourself, even if it means leaving and living alone. Risk it.Find your purpose. Live it. Shame is so yesterday. Secrets are cancer. Vulnerability heals us and the world.
Subversive thought bubbles have hovered over us for years, and now their fragile skins have turned to soap, thinning, reflecting the colorful prisms we yearn for.
We’re clearing our throat chakras to release the buried treasure of all our chakras root, sacral, hear, third eye, crown bursting the levees of emotional plaque that kept us glued in place, strata upon strata.
Until we got quiet and away, we had no idea how bound up we were.
Spiritual gingivitis makes our mouths bleed. First breaths after all that waiting can be fevered, even foul. But as we scrape and breathe fire, we realize that anger and politeness don’t mix. We don’t have that kind of time. And neither does the world.
I had a revelation in my thirties that anger was not an art form. That thought freed me my truth had to come out or I would choke on it. I was taught art was perfect and I wasn’t. My perfectionism had been holding me back.
In my fifties I have a new revelation: Anger is art imperfect in the making the finger-painting of the crippled soul, the defiant spirit, the repressed rogue called mercifully (or mercilessly) to task. Anger and art are necessarily messy, best expressed in living color.
Oh yeah, I see it blazing in red and orange, every shade of blue, white hot, gangrene green and mourning black.
Creative tension has me wrestling with myself. To what end? So I can keep my knees pressed together like a good girl and pin both shoulders of my shadow to the mat? (Not a winning strategy.)
Finally, I am learning to ease up and be kind when I feel her coming on; greet her like an old friend and see her for the juicy pomegranate that she is. Ask, listen, bite, quench. An answer always comes if I give the struggle an easement, a shoulder on the highway, an eddy.
So often we think we are not enough until we get a second opinion or more credentials. With age we learn instead to seek counsel from our higher selves, The One that floats above us during Yoga practice, walking, praying, communing with nature, or loving with abandon.
It is then we rise like warm air no longer suppressed by the polar vortex. Winds shift. We breathe freely again, and deeply. The river flows, cleared of our old tires and rusted hulks.
Get out of my fucking way.
It is a miracle, this daimon, the constant companion that refused to abandon me when I ignored or second-guessed it or when the river froze over or dried up. As I answer to it now I honor an ancient and newborn voice. Listen. Believe. Tell. Write.
She sits on my shoulder more often, even on the end of my pen.
While my lady-like perfectionism still holds me back, at least now I recognize the enemy: pulp pressed out of 100% man-made American fear. It cuts. It is a paper tiger and a ruthless speed governor. I want it out of me.
On my best days I recognize fear for what it is: a pulpit bully and bullshit artist.
Fear is like the Pendleton suit I wore in the eighties (you know the one) with a heavily-starched white blouse and silk neck scarf. Climbing the corporate ladder, I buttoned up the jacket when standing and unbuttoned it sitting down.
I got it wrong. The trick is to unbutton it sitting down and take it off altogether when standing up. Standing up for myself.
I am 59, divorced and recently estranged from the corporate world. Fear paints me as a writer come late to the party. Fear bitches that I have nothing to add to the conversation. Fear calls it hubris; carps who do you think you are? listing all the reasons I can’t do what I was born to do.
Fear is an old cunt: irrelevant. She is a handpicked token with penciled-in eyebrows, hair like a helmet, taking shorthand in a room of empty suits. She excels at hiding behind drab cubicles with her notepad, documenting my every move, blaring her boat horn when I catch a conspiratorial wave from the Universe.
Poor thing! Fear is scared of her own reflection. On good days I stare her down until she looks away. When I’m on top of the world, I tell her to fuck off.
Fear does not thrive if boxed up, labeled obsolete and tossed in the dumpster. So often fear stems from a biological imperative a worn-out gag for post-childbearing women.
Fear is manifesting in reverse. And a ticket to misery. Contrary to conventional wisdom, misery does not love company. Fearlessness does. Courage laps up love and gives her company something nutritious to snack on. We women are natural-born feeders, our nutritional value increasing with age and experience.
Now our imperative is to share it.
Here’s to keeping company with the burgeoning squall of women who are stripping off their internalized wool suits, stiff shirts, silk nooses, control-top pantyhose, X-Acto-blade pumps all those assimilating fashions and obliterating their plaque.
It’s high time. Time for southern air to meet True North and send our separate thought bubbles skyward like hot air balloons so they can organize into a towering thunderheadpowered by fire and ready to reign.
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Holly Smith-Berry is the founder of talkingumbrellas.com, an online community for women choosing bravery over fear in an often mold-making world. She rocked her own world at 58, when she got divorced, traded her pantsuit for Yoga pants and decided to finally heed her heart’s yearning to become a writer. Her 28 years as a product development executive working with inventors informs her own reinvention: “It’s slow, zig-zaggy and totally worth it,” she says. Holly has two adult daughters who are unapologetic feminists just like mom.
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