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Notes from an Elderwoman: Feeling the Rapture of Being Alive

July 3, 2009 | 2 Comments

Posted by: k daniel

elderwoman This short essay is a gem. I don’t know how to post on this powerful and personal chronicle of aging from the inside out by Marian Van Eyk McCain, author of Elderwoman,other than to urge you to read it. It’s a glimpse into how she borrows Joseph Campbell’s assertion that people aren’t so much seeking a meaning for life as “seeking an experience of feeling the rapture of being alive” – and that that rapture is the essence of being an elderwoman. The essay evokes the lushness of youth giving way to the stark beauty of age, of busyness ceding to fullness, and the experience of being at the fulcrum around which things revolved in her mothering and working life, giving way to an empty nest where she was no longer at the center of anything except herself. Menopause is the mountainous ridge where her body and mind protested as the sap began to leave, before she turned a corner into a different world.

On the other side of the mountain she finds a whole new lightness of being, her body quiet, softer, dryer; lighter, as a leaf gets lighter before it falls. Though the far side of menopause feels like a desert on first encounter, she finds it teems with a stark, real, beautiful, and different kind of life. A life of a spirit that drops ever more deeply into her body with lightness and grace.

Her message in Elderwoman is twofold: aging doesn’t have to be dreaded. It’s an adventure where there are few maps. She also believes that elderwomen have an important role to play in inspiring others to live more lightly and co-operatively on the earth, not through guilt, but through a sense of freedom, joy and deepening sensuous delight.

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Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Izzy on December 29, 2009 5:12 pm

    I think this is one of the most beautiful ideads I’ve read about. I look forward to living lightly in 2010 and beyond. Thank you :-)

  2. k daniel on December 29, 2009 5:53 pm

    We agree, it is a lovely essay, written with powerful authenticity and simplicity of a fully embodied woman at one with herself and with life. What more can one ask of aging – indeed of life!? Kathleen

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