elderhood Archives - Passage To Joy

May 13, 2026May 13, 2026

Invisibility or Visible Ageing?

There is an increasingly clamorous cultural narrative about the invisibility of women over fifty. Whilst it is important to challenge any form of marginalization, I think it is also valuable to embrace our own personal stories. And I don’t believe that these have to be dominated by a negative sense of invisibility. We have choices.

The narrative is not entirely false. In my late sixties, I have sat at the edge of a younger group in a large gathering and dared to say something only to be blanked as if I am not really there.

But, honestly, often I now feel more visible in ways that matter to me than I did as a younger woman.

The visible self

I think that a part of that perception of visibility or invisibility rests in our sense of ourselves. It takes time and effort to understand who we are as we move into a life stage so much less defined by career and appearance. But unless we are able to vision who we are becoming, then to some extent we are not fully visible to ourselves.

Coming to Canada at fifty-one, I made a very conscious choice to live as authentically as possible. What needs I may have had for approval, to be ‘liked’, had significantly diminished by then. To my surprise, I found an immediacy of deep connection with others as never before, people I call ‘heart-kin’.

I had become interested in developing an understanding of what elderhood might look like in contemporary society in my forties when I worked in dementia care. I now began to delve deeper into this (see Sage in training – modern elderhood – Passage To Joy) and what it might mean to me to embrace Crone qualities (see The season of the Crone – Passage To Joy). It didn’t happen overnight, but I have gradually come to a clear sense of who I am and want to be moving forward, as well as of those things I want (and need) to let go of.

I am perhaps more fully visible to myself than ever before, able to see what feeds my soul and what depletes it. There is an incredible energy and sense of freedom in this.

Sitting in meditation one day, I had a delightfully ‘silly moment’ when the thought that popped into my head was ‘I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up’. This became the basis of the Sankalpa, affirmation, that I use in Yoga Nidra and other contexts:

‘I am radiant with health, love, joy and abundance’.

Choosing to be seen

I don’t know if or how this transmits to others, though at some level it seems to. It would certainly be my wish to carry with me some sense of light.

I am still surprised when young women comment ‘I love your dress, your earrings’. That kind of visibility feels unexpected at my age. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere, but more often it emerges from a deeper conversation.

I was definitely startled by the young man in a coffee shop who opened what turned into a deep conversation with ‘are you a very spiritual person?’ He claimed to see my aura and looked to me for insights.

There was the group of much younger colleagues at a conference who, when I commented on our relative age, paid Paul and myself the loveliest compliment: ‘yes, but you have young energy!’ I wear my wrinkles as a badge of honour. But I hope to carry forward joy, zest and an ability to embrace life to the full for as many years as I am granted.

Most recently there was a wonderful conversation in the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) with a young man who had just graduated and was considering his next steps. As we contemplated a beautiful print by Newfoundland artist David Blackwood, an extraordinarily deep if fleeting connection seemed to form. Some twenty minutes later, he was seeking my guidance on thoughts that might be important in shaping a good life.

My daughter teases me for my willingness to talk to anyone and for my openness. But the depth of these brief encounters with much younger people is often startling, rich, joyous and humbling. I experience them as a delightful and heartwarming gift. I am also honoured to be allowed to see into the lives of these young strangers. It is not that ‘being seen’ is particularly important to me in itself. But it seems to open up a connection that is genuine and meaningful.

So I choose to be seen and rarely feel invisible.

The cloak of invisibility

For many women, though, there is a relief in casting off a requirement to pander to social expectations of appearances and roles and donning a cloak of invisibility. They revel in saying what they want and knowing that they can get away with it. They go their own way uncensured, unnoticed, with freedom to observe, think and act, and find it profoundly liberating, a secret super-power. The release from the demands and needs of others may be experienced as a quiet joy rather than a loss.

Liberty

“The truth is, it’s only when you stop worrying about becoming ‘invisible’ that you are able to see yourself. Then you are free. Free to decide what matters to you and what never will, whose opinions you value and whose you can disregard, and what exactly is worth your precious hours on this earth and what is a waste of damn time. And really, what could be more beautiful than that?”

Benedetta Barzini, quoted in Wit & Wisdom from 14 Age-Defying Women in British Vogue

If we stop fearing aging and recognize it as the gift it is, we are much more able to see into the heart of ourselves, our true beauty. And once we are visible to ourselves, the choice is ours as to how we shape the narrative of our visibility.

April 30, 2020May 4, 2020

Sage in training – modern elderhood

When you let go of the career and life goals that have driven you forward throughout adulthood, it is hard to escape the questions ‘who am I now and what is my purpose in being?’ Earlier this year I identified that for me, at this point in my life, my most important role is as sage in training.

The unexpected adventure of growing old

I am very much at the beginning of this life-stage, the start of an exploration that will underpin however many years I may have ahead of me.

Building on my initial delving into the qualities and role of the crone, I delighted in the wisdom of Leah Friedman’s The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old. This joyous and eloquent examination of the decades beyond sixty inspires a sense of real excitement in looking at the road ahead, even as it is obscured by mists of unknowing.

As we enter our later years all of us are fools in the sense that we are stepping off the edge of our early lives in order to explore new territory, that of elderhood, a place unknown and strange to us.
Leah Friedman, The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old, page 96

Friedman reflects that, in Hindu tradition, sixty represents a point of transition from ‘householder’ to ‘forest dweller’, one who begins to separate from the daily demands of life in order to spend more time in contemplation and in preparation for death. Though I am not sure I can make such a complete shift in our modern age, I love the idea of embracing at least parts of the identity of ‘forest dweller’!

It is perhaps important to remember that it is only relatively recently that many of us have had any significant expectation of life beyond sixty. Jean Houston observes that

The years beyond sixty, the years of our second maturity, may be evolution’s greatest gift to humanity.
Jean Houston, Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self

At a more individual level, Leah Friedman speaks of an increasing coherence, perhaps a reconciliation with the paradoxes that so often define our humanity:

By our seventies we have lived long enough to forge our oddities and our conventionalisms – these disparate and sometimes contradictory qualities – into a more or less coherent whole. We can begin to see all of our characteristics as demonstrations of our selfhood.
Leah Friedman, The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old, page 58

She encourages us to let go of the ‘depressing D words’ (decrepitude, decline, diminishment, death . . .) and instead embrace the ‘encouraging E words’ (expansion, experience, expertise, enlightenment, equanimity, emancipation). We can choose how we focus our gaze.

Sage-ing

Elders practice contemplative disciplines from our spiritual traditions and come to terms with their mortality. They harvest their life experiences, pass on their wisdom to younger people, and safeguard the health of our ailing planet. Out of their late-life explorations in consciousness, elders bestow upon the world the life-giving wisdom it desperately needs . . .
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, Preface xiii

To my surprise I discovered that From Age-ing to Sage-ing was written some twenty years ago – it’s a fairly laborious read but repays the effort! At that time, I was working in dementia care, increasingly conscious of the lack of any clear social valuing of aging and feeling a strong impulse towards redefining a model of elderhood. Of course, in my early forties, life took over and that impulse was temporarily shelved.

Now, using The Sage-ing Workbook to provide focus and structure, I am diving into what I think will be both a challenging vision of what aging can be and an excavation of my own story. This is core work for a sage in training.

The curriculum of life’s second half involves more than the completion of our biological imperative. It involves the evocation of soul and spirit . . . a homecoming with our inner nature.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, pages 23 & 27

In From Age-ing to Sage-ing, the ‘jobs’ of old age are defined as

Self-realization
Service to society
Being society’s ‘futurists’

Instead of being retired to uselessness, you can now graduate into the global function of seership, involved in the larger issues of life, the wider cultural and planetary concerns.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, page 30

Further, the authors identify five key roles of old age, which I think of as the ‘5 Ms’

Mentor
Mediator
Monitor
Mobilizer
Motivator

Potential tasks of elderhood might include:

Coming to terms with our mortality
Healing our relationships
Enjoying and celebrating our achievements
Healing the earth
Legacy creation
Storytelling
Visioning / pathfinding
Stewardship
Spiritual connectedness

Phew, not much to tackle then!

Where am I now as a sage in training?

My aspiration, perhaps the most fundamental focus of this period of my life, is to become truly an ‘elder’, not just an ‘old person’, exposing new dimensions of personhood, new strength of being, the continued and marked evolution of uniqueness and discovery of ‘am’. My aim is to embrace ‘eldering’ as a state of growth, not a static condition. My job is to become a sage, an elder, a wisdom keeper,

a harbinger of the possible human . . .
Jean Houston, Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self.

Implicit in this is a commitment to spending time looking inward, yet also to reflecting this outward. As I age, I hope increasingly to be able to draw on my reserves of knowledge and wisdom while letting go of that which no longer contributes to my wellbeing – a shedding of leaves.

This is our time of ripeness, of the harvest of all that we have been.

As a sage in training and based on my reading so far, as I look ahead, I seek

to weave together the needs for solitude and for connection.
to allow meaningful transformation.
to process at the deepest level my past, my story.
to learn gratefully and gracefully to receive, to accept what I need.
to be ‘an agent of evolution’.

Elders function like old cobblers and dressmakers, sewing us back into the fabric of creation. Through their compassionate relatedness to all of life, the reduce our sense of alienation by helping us rediscover our sacred roots. And they do this without suffering from the disease of deadly earnestness. Elders have a wild, almost prankster-like quality that enables them to see the humor in every situation.
Joan Halifax, Anthropologist

Positive images of ageing

The initial exercises in the Sage-ing Workbook focus on existing perceptions of elderhood. I had a lot of fun creating a collage to represent the positive images of ageing that I have internalized! I am fortunate to have in my life some amazing role models for positive ageing who provided real inspiration as I thought about this. All the women pictured are in their 70s, 80s or 90s and all are feisty boundary pushers in different ways!

My ideal elder

An extension of this exercise was to create an image of my ideal elder, flowing out of those positive perceptions. What came to me feels like a blueprint for becoming.

My ideal elder

remains active and engaged within whatever constraints they may experience.
is open-hearted and loving, with a continuing zest for life.
is curious and continues to be engaged with their own growth.
has many connections with people of all ages.
is able to accept what age brings and to let go of what they can no longer do and what no longer serves them.
is authentic and full of character but also humble – they don’t pretend to have all the answers!
finds ways of being that support and inspire others.
is feisty and funny.
is deeply connected – to self, to the wider community, to nature, to mystery, to spirit, to all that is.

Elders are the jewels of humanity that have been mined from the Earth, cut in the rough, then buffed and polished by the stonecutter’s art into precious gems that we recognize for their enduring value and beauty. We sense their radiance in our youth, but we cannot contain it. It requires a lifetime’s effort to carve out the multifaceted structure that can display our hidden splendor in all its glory.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, The Sage-ing Workbook

September 5, 2018

Embracing the age of the Crone – a view from a distance

At 60, I definitely feel myself entering into the age of the Crone. Some definitions would say you begin to cross the threshold at 50. But it was at 44, writing a journalistic exercise about looking forward to a specific birthday, that I first welcomed the vision of this aspect of later life as a woman.

I am looking forward to delving more into what this means to me over the coming months, but I thought I would start with that early vision.

I’m looking forward to being 70. After that I will consider myself to be on extra time, with nothing owed and naught to loose. I will gleefully claim my freedom to ‘wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t suit me’[1].

At a mere 44, the milestone of my allotted ‘three score years and ten’ lies well beyond the horizon. But already I feel the first intimations of the influence of the waning crescent moon, symbol of the Goddess in her final incarnation of ‘crone’.

Perhaps bound up with our contemporary obsession with physical appearance, our pursuit of an illusion of eternal youth, the ‘crone’ has had some very bad press. The word invokes an image of an ugly, wizened, witch of an old woman, maybe embittered and very possibly evil. Is it any wonder that so many women run scared of the inexorable accumulation of birthdays?

I am not soaked in the spell of paganism, claim no great knowledge of its lore. But I willingly embrace its vision of the crone as the ultimate, most powerful manifestation of womanhood. She personifies wisdom, compassion and completion. Her closer relationship to death is not one of fear but a potent awareness of renewal.

So, when I reach 70, dressed in crone’s purple, I will cherish my wrinkles and wear them with pride and relief that youth’s vanity is done. I will breathe deep, walk slow and do nothing, joyously! I will undoubtedly ‘misbehave’ outrageously. I’m looking forward to being 70.

[1] Quoted from “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, voted Britain’s best-loved poem by viewers of BBC TV’s Bookworm

Gina Bearne, 2002