This is an ongoing series as I continue to question the why and how of this project. This is the first installment of an evolving vision and experience.
Perhaps it is a symptom of human attachment theory, but I feel that the elderwomen of our communities are disappearing at just the moment I need to see them. I often hear women in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s talk about how freeing these decades of life are. They no longer feel pressure to please anyone but themselves. These are the confident, brave, joyful, genuine, and witty women I want near me. They are confident that no matter what happens to them, they will find a way to gratitude, joy, and love. They know this because they have lived it again and again and again. I need to see, to hear, to feel these women in my life.
I need the Wisdom of Elderwomen.
There’s a lot of pressure to be high-achieving, money-making, family-creating, hustle champions of America in our country of Efficient Productivity of The Most High Impact of Empowered Women. I often wonder what our elderwomen would think of our endless “boss babe,” “badass,” “change leader” pop sermons that leave us all exhausted at the end of every day. We’re constantly wondering if we’re enough, if we’ve done enough, and if it will all turn out ok.
What these women have is Wisdom. What they remind me to consider is that I rarely have to hustle to make change; change will come, and I better conserve my energy to steer through the storms without creating them as well. All this hustle kicks up a lot of dust that blocks the feminine vision of the heart, of intuition.
We’ve seen how the patriarchy ran this planet to a climate crisis and inequality with all of its getting and achieving. The feminine Wisdom that the elderwomen embody is one that requires deep roots grown and developed deep beneath the surface. The elderwomen remind me that it’s the long game, endurance, persistence, and ordinary rhythms that will support the grand beauty we wish to create in our lives.
Men and women both can learn how to cultivate this deep feminine wisdom from the elderwomen.
And, yet, part of me does not blame these women for wanting to disappear in an era when everyone else is desperate for fame, attention, and praise. They are right that it is pretty ridiculous that I want to talk about their ordinary lives. But this is the thing: we have forgotten the rich value of an ordinary life and how to live simply. Ordinary is natural, intuitive, and automatic for them.
Something that is so natural to our elderwomen has become foreign to all of us who feel we must save the planet and everyone and everything on it from imminent destruction of Armageddon proportions. A few years ago, I heard a rabbi on a podcast ask his audience about their pursuit of happiness--as if it was something ahead of them. He asked them to consider that maybe in all their hustle to get there, they passed it up. This wasn’t to say that they missed their chance, but a reminder that running faster and faster will probably burn us out rather than win the race.
The elderwomen show us how to slow down and savor what we already have. Theirs is a Wisdom of Slow Content.
I’ve never been angry about a book title and wanted to burn them all up in a pyre of self-righteousness until I saw Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear on the shelf of my favorite little bookshop. I walked by it for weeks and refused to even pick it up off the shelf to read its summary. I didn’t want to know why a woman in her 60s would write a book giving instructions about how to disappear when it is getting more and more difficult for me to find women to interview and document. They all want to stay in the shadows it seems, and I question the foundation of this project every time I consider that I’m trying to bring the shadow/feminine way of knowing to light. Is this even the right thing to do? Am I trying to do something completely unnatural? Perhaps one of the best things about aging is that you get to disappear, especially as a woman, from the male gaze and pressures of society.
And yet, I cannot let these women disappear. I’m in this project for the long game. Now and then a woman agrees to be interviewed and documented. She somehow understands that we need her--that we need to remember that ordinary, daily tending to our relationships, careers, and homes matter. It is absurd that we have forgotten how to be ordinary. We have forgotten how extraordinary the daily rhythms and seasons are.
The elderwomen show us how to slow down, to see, to hear, to feel, to touch, to taste, and to find a way. Please do not disappear.