This year, my mosaic project took me into an exploration of the elemental masculine and feminine archetypes. This formed a lovely extension to the deep delve into the Wise Mother/Crone with which I started the year.
For some time I had been intending to create a Green Man mosaic. Growing up in the West of England, the Green Man motif was often present. For a child who loved the woods and the wilds, it was an image that resonated.
There is also a ‘family connection’ so to speak. My maternal grandfather was a Wood. The Wood Coat of Arms is topped off with a Green-Man-derived ‘man of the woods’ crowned with oak leaves and bearing a club. This figure was the image used as crest both for family silver and for signet rings.
Just a note for clarity before I go any further. In referring to ‘God’ and ‘Goddess’, I am using these terms in the context of traditional symbolism and archetype. I am not suggesting that they are beings that I worship.
Exploring the elemental masculine and feminine
Before I start work on any mosaic there is always a phase of exploring ideas, images and concepts. I have always lived my life through symbol to some extent. So this becomes a process that involves intellectual ‘research’, exploring representations that relate to my theme, and soul-searching as to the meanings I am reaching for. I rarely know with absolute certainty where it will lead.
What was interesting this time was that it was soon clear to me that, if I was to create a Green Man, who was increasingly becoming a representation of masculine energy, I also had to create his feminine counterpart. As I worked, I also found that I wasn’t prepared to display either until both were finished. I have always been aware of the importance of balancing male and female traits and energies. In this work, that sense came through loud and clear.
Masculine ‘God’
Researching the Green Man, what came to me was the overlap with Sun God symbolism. I listed the following phrases as key to my understanding of the elemental energy that I wanted to tap into:
Shining God
Light bringer
Life force
Revealer of Mysteries
Source of wisdom
Guardian
Cycles of renewal
In creating my representation, I combined the Green Man with a Sun image. I tried to pick up Spring and Summer greens together with Autumn’s bronze and gold, honouring those ‘cycles of renewal’. I also wanted to access something both ‘ancient’ and ‘energetic’. There is even a hint of the ‘Horned God’.
Feminine ‘Goddess’
My Mother/Goddess image draws on classic Goddess symbolism. I have never, though, seen colour used this way. This form came to me during a group meditation. I had a strong sense of the way the Goddess connects to grounded, earth energy, deeply rooted. She has generative fire in her belly. But she also connects to Moon energy and to the ethereal. This connection is an incredibly powerful force.
As with the masculine image, I mapped out words and phrases that underpinned my conceptualization of the feminine:
Connection and relationship
Abundance
Fertility
Healing
Wisdom
Being
Spirit
Transformation
Nature
Distinct Energies
Working on these two pieces gave me an even deeper inner sense of the difference between these two energies. I believe all of us contain and have access to both. But I can see more clearly how these tend to play out in ‘male’ and ‘female’ behaviours and ways of being, which I hope increases my understanding of that ‘difference’. I definitely came away with a sense of the feminine as more grounded and connected, something we badly need.
That inner voice that insisted I could not create or display one without the other felt important. A world in which we truly integrate the elemental masculine and feminine would look so very different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
To my surprise I discovered thatFrom Age-ing to Sage-ingwas 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.
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.
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,
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
In February of this year, in company with a small online community and led by Kim Rosen, I embarked on a five month adventure, Soul School.
Poetry, music, presence, and the wisdom in our own bodies / feelings / knowings, as well as readings and videos from many sources ignite and waken us. This is an invitation to radical self-honesty, realness, curiosity and community that will at least disrupt who you think you are, and possibly leave you, as Mary Oliver writes, “a bride married to amazement.”
~Kim Rosen
This was quite a journey, intentionally touching on both light and darkness. In this post I gather together of some of the key strands from my personal perceptions and responses to the invitations. This is partly a record for myself. But I hope that, just as the poems and sharings of the course ignited sparks of awareness for me, so there may be something here that leads you deeper into yourself.
What is the soul?
Soul is . . .
Soul is the meeting point
of the impermanent
and the eternal.
Soul is the deep calm
beneath the crashing waves
of a turbulent sea.
Soul is sun’s abiding
presence
behind storm’s devastation,
beyond the darkest night.
Soul inhabits stillness,
is the ‘still, small voice’
that speaks the language of silence.
It is the tendrils of soul
energy
that weave connections
to other souls and to the soul of the world.
My soul is not contained by
my body;
rather, my body exists within the boundlessness of my soul!
My soul is fueled
by unsentimental compassionate love;
by joy and wonder;
by gratitude;
by acceptance;
by laughter;
and by the depths of the
living silence;
all of which bring me to the place
of presence.
Walk softly on the earth holding nothing but an open heart . . .
The land of my soul . . .
The False Self
This was an opportunity to look at the imperatives that bind and keep me from my fullest self.
These are the building blocks of the learned impulses, the self-image
that defines me as ‘facilitator’, ‘changemaker’, the one who makes things
happen and who makes things right, who does what must be done.
And, though they are not in themselves false, indeed encompass much of value, they cannot resonate as ‘true’ when they become rigidified and ‘absolute’; when they are rigid, they build a prison for the soul.
Ruach*
The Siren call of
‘should’
recedes into the tide
of accumulating years.
Beneath the surface, though,
still swirl the subtler soundings
of impulse and desire:
to ‘make a
difference’ or
to ‘make it so’;
to ‘go the extra mile’;
to ‘live life to the full’;
to ‘keep my word’ and
‘fill the need’
Recurrent melodies
within the song of ‘I’,
these deepest ‘truths’
constrain the deepest lie.
*************************
For the wind to blow through me
I must open
to the cracks in the universe
that let the light shine in;
must move
with the ability of grass
to give way
yet return to itself;
must dance
with the fluid abandon
and ecstatic release
of autumn trees.
*************************
Let the wind sing
through me,
carry the breath
of ‘I am’
into the greater chorus
that is life.
Let me continue
to shed old skins,
strip away
the shielding shadows
as I expand
into my fullness.
Let me humbly inhabit the cyclical rhythms of the universe that take me beyond question and answer to the paradox of all that is.
* The Hebrew ruach means “wind,” “breath,” or “spirit.” The corresponding Greek word is pneuma. Both words are commonly used in passages referring to the Holy Spirit.
I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.
I am learning the distinction between capability and capacity. I am learning to sit with the silence and listen to the wind.
Any thought, no matter how wise, is a rigid form, and life is movement and constant change. Any rigid form obstructs the flow of life, even a beautiful one.
~ Kim Rosen
The Beast and the Beauty
The focus of this session was to open to the darkness, the beast within, to reveal, acknowledge and own it so as to reclaim its energy. By definition, this was difficult material and it feels inappropriate to share too much detail.
As I
searched, I discovered that my deepest fear is of the distortions and
perversions of power in both the interior and exterior worlds.
It was
interesting that, in a guided meditation exploring the feminine archetypes, the
ones I shied away from were the ‘power’ figures.
In an apparent contradiction, I am afraid both to be powerful and of being powerless.
I also learned that even a ‘wise gift’ carries with it potential distortion. An early message that ‘making a difference can be as simple as a smile to a stranger’ and other similar transmitted wisdom from my mother has simultaneously been a powerful positive force in my life and has bound me to my false self.
The most important question for me, as I emerge through a time of very conscious transition into my Crone years, is this:
How may I open and deepen into the embrace of my own innate wisdom and power to the benefit of myself and others?
The Essential Self
When we align with who we really are, who-what we are designed to be, we unfurl. Benefit in all directions abounds that has little to do with us. We are simply being . . . and the benefit that happens, in a way, is none of our business.
~ Kim Rosen
Coming home
As I have entered this new stage of my life in which I
am consciously embracing ‘the season of the Crone’, there is a deepening sense
of coming home to my truest self. Increasingly the pervading qualities are authenticity, presence and love. These
are underpinned by a deep knowledge of a calm place of awareness, of a ‘secure
base’ that lies within and is always available to me.
I think this
has only become possible as I have embraced the beauty of imperfection, most
particularly in self and others. Perhaps the most glorious human quality is
that of compassion; in a perfect world filled with perfect beings, compassion
would have no place! This realization allowed me finally to release the last
remnants of the need to be perfect.
I believe that this is what it means ‘to be who I am meant to be’. It is at the heart of both self-acceptance and of a letting go of external agendas and attachment to outcomes.
I am still working towards understanding my purpose as (hopefully!) a ‘wise woman’ or ‘elder’ in a society that is only beginning to re-discover these concepts. But it may well be that living truly to the best that I am, present, authentic, loving, accepting, without expectation, is the greatest gift that I can give to others, to the world. Is this how ‘making a difference’ seeps into the fabric of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’?
Listening
My listening and ‘received guidance’ so often come through a deep attention to the natural world. I learn that I am made of the same stuff, that my patterns are also the ones I see every day in the lake, the trees, the creatures around me and in the turning of the seasons.
I am both as precious and as insignificant as the
wondrous, diverse lives I see around me. I value, hold to my heart every living
thing (even if I admit to a certain ambivalence when it comes to ticks and
mosquitos!). Yet when the hawk swoops on the chipmunk, I accept this too with
love. This is at the heart of what I mean when I speak of ‘unsentimental
compassion’.
I think for a long time that my perception of wisdom and the way I thought an ‘enlightened’ human life was meant to be was to reach a place where I was always able to be calm, never losing my temper or feeling angry or depressed. But when I look at the constant change in nature, the storms, the subtle shifts of wind, and light, the impact of freeze and thaw or heat and drought, I am so conscious that I too am part of this. These shifts are important, a necessary part of living and being, part of the richness.
All things pass – both life’s challenges and its gifts. What remains with us is what we have made of the experiences. So now I have no expectation that I will feel a particular way, will maintain an unruffled calm. Instead there is a growing ability to retain an abiding consciousness of that ‘calm place of awareness’ in just the same way that, in becoming intimate with the shifts in the lake that is the backdrop to my life, I am aware of the calm that lies beneath all.
When the wind blows and white caps form, when rain falls in torrents to break the surface, when ice forms and makes the surface static, that living, fluid state of calm still exists. And before long there will be another moment of exquisite stillness or of evening light reflected back, painting the trees copper and gold.
The Return
I had
supposed
it was sun’s warmth
that allowed the frozen lake
to remember its fluidity.
**************************
This year, I
watch, I listen.
**************************
Sun carves
holes in ice;
night recoats them
with transparent stillness.
Wind comes,
blustering, buffeting force.
Ice creaks and groans
and breaks apart.
The lake
remembers movement;
its interior currents
persevere with wind’s work.
With thaw
come surge and flood,
release and ecstasy,
unbridled power and overwhelm.
The land
slakes its thirst,
opens into
its own messy awakening.
The lake returns to itself, its fluid, shifting moods, and, beneath, that deep reflective calm.
The Unnameable Vastness of Being
There are no words for that inner space beyond all the assumed identities, but the nearest I can get, inspired by John O’Donohue, is ‘eternal presence and belonging’.
I had not consciously sought to ‘just sit’ but
was called to it one extraordinary afternoon by the visiting presence of
Scarlet Tanager, Redwing Blackbirds, Baltimore Orioles, Rose-breasted Grosbeak
and Indigo Bunting.
This Wondrous Now
Spring green and dappled sunlight,
shot with transient jewel bright
flashes of delight:
scarlet, blood-red on coal, gilded crimson epaulettes; vivid orange-gold, blazing; rose breast bursting from black and white; a brilliant scrap of indigo sky, all held within an exuberance of song!
My heart leaps with joy at the unfolding moments; I cannot bear to tear myself from this wondrous now!
To sit with no defined purpose or structure is
still somehow disorientating, sometimes challenging; and even though it is like
a homecoming, there is a kind of resistance. There is also a pull to ruminate.
The flow of sensory input intensifies, and I am
aware of thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations as part of that input.
Yet I also become vividly aware of this sensory
information as just another construct; my experience is partial – other species
see, smell, hear (and probably taste and feel) within totally different ranges;
their reality is not mine. However wondrous, absorbing, awe-inspiring I may
find that which I experience through my senses, there is a consciousness that
this is just a tiny part of something so much bigger!
Who sees, hears,
smells, tastes, feels, thinks?
How does that which experiences in me connect to that which experiences in you?
Allium
Sitting gazing through the window’s glass . . .
A few feet from me, a honeybee works diligently, collecting nectar from a vivid purple allium. Do the florets shift with the subtle disruption of the bee’s wings, or is it just the breeze?
Story
A story unfolds – why is this so compelling?
An invisible filament of spider’s web is strung between allium stems – I deduce its presence because of the catkin and the mayfly apparently suspended in mid-air. For a few moments it seems as if the bee will be likewise captured, held, and my heart lurches – I want to rush outside, to liberate it. But the bee reclaims its freedom, returns to its business of scouring the purple blooms before spiraling into the great beyond – a somewhere that exists beyond my peep-hole into its world.
The story fades.
Colours gain intensity; the furred texture of
the poppy stem and buds makes me want to reach through the glass, to experience
with touch, maybe to smell and taste, to hear the bee’s almost imperceptible
hum.
This reminds me that, even if I have cultivated
sensory presence and relish the joy it brings, it is still all too easy to
forget, to fall into the habit of experiencing as if through glass, from a
place of separation.
I am also aware that, joyous as the sensory
experience is, there is another layer, the “invisible world” of the Celts, the
great unknown and the source of eternal wonder. I feel blessed always to have
carried this awareness with me, a small but widening tear in the fabric of this
limited reality through which I sense that ‘eternal
presence and belonging’.
Paraphrasing John O’Donohue, may you be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished and be able to recognize, in the scattered graffiti of your desires, the signature of the eternal.
Walking in snow-like-sand, entranced by each grain’s iridescent glitter. Does the knowledge of the unseen, the microscopic beauty of the crystal structures, increase my sense of wonder, of joy?
I have always perceived joy as being fed by wisdom rather than knowledge, yet I can see the possibility that humankind’s amazing curiosity and creativity open up ways of knowing, of seeing or otherwise experiencing that amplify perception even when that mode of perception is not available.