I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
At what point do you move from midlife to late life? Perhaps at age sixty in a 90-year life, simply dividing it up by three. I suppose you could cut it up differently and look at only the adult years from age 20 to 90. Then dividing 70 by three you get ~23 and you might hit late life at age 66 instead.
Either way, at age 57 I’m no longer centered in midlife. I’m looking to the next phase, even if it might not truly arrive for five or ten years.
I’m thinking about this because I’m feeling a pull towards something different in my life, some different way of showing up. And I find myself acting in ways to bring that about: choosing solitude over socializing, considering a more minimalist lifestyle, focusing on wisdom and ideas rather than material acquisition and consumption.
In Goddesses in Older Women, Jean Shinoda Bolen writes, “It’s not uncommon for the focus—or archetypal direction—that a woman has had for decades to shift as a woman enters the third phase of life.”
I wrote Thursday about my decreasing interest in enacting the role of matriarch and before that, on the 4th of July, I wrote about setting down the maternal role.
What archetypes, what patterns of behaving and being in the world could replace those?
Among the Greek goddesses, Demeter was the archetypal mother, representing fertility, motherhood, nurturing, protecting her child, feeding others, grief and devotion, and seasonal rhythms. At midlife, the Demeter archetype is often enacted alongside the Hera archetype. Hera was the Greek goddess of marriage.
Shinoda Bolen writes, “The archetype of the sacred marriage is the ideal that Hera yearns for. She wants to be in a spiritual, emotional, and physical union in which the intimacy between the couple is experienced by both as sacred.”
I do yearn for that, for a sacred marriage, a union that has intimacy that is spiritual, emotional, and physical.
But I don’t want a marrage that looks like my last marriage or a marriage that enacts the responsibilities and expectations of midlife, where the wife puts together a beautifully decorated home with many guest rooms, throws amazing dinner parties and holiday celebrations, does the laundry and cleans the house while her husband sits on a recliner and drinks Diet Coke.
Shinoda Bolen describes the version of Hera I might be in my old(er) age:
Some of the happiest crone-aged women are Heras who were devastated at an earlier time, and not only survived but learned and made choices that resulted in their now being in good marriages. She may have been unpartnered for a time, or the original marriage was transformed through counseling and mutual efforts to change, so that she is now in a committed relationship with intimacy and trust. Gratitude is a characteristic of such women who have known the dark side of the Hera archetype and who grew in wisdom and compassion. There are also contented Heras who are in enduring, stable marriages, whose lives seem to others to lack substance and be mainly form. For these Heras, being a social couple is enough.
I was indeed devastated at an earlier time, not only survived, but have learned and made choices that brought me to a much wiser place.
I could not ever be that second kind of Hera, where “being a social couple is enough.”
The goddess that calls to me most right now is Hecate, goddess of intuitive and psychic wisdom:
Hecate is a goddess of intuition. Her three-way perspective allows her to see the connection between past, present, and future. This ability to see patterns that link past situations or relationships and present circumstances is an intuitive way of perception. Seeing how a situation evolved—or where someone is coming from—is not uncanny or mysterious to an intuitive person. At significant junctures, Hecate is silently present as an inner witness. Hers is wisdom learned from experience; she is what makes us grow wiser as we grow older. At significant forks in the road, she recalls the shape of the past, honestly sees the present, and has a sense of what lies ahead at a soul level.
Hecate “helps us let go of what is ready to die: outmoded attitudes, outgrown roles, whatever elements in our lives are no longer life-affirming.”
There is no rush to figure out what’s next:
Hecate is at the crux of the situation when a woman enters the third phase of her life and heeds a pull inward. She appears indecisive or as if her energy is lying fallow, when she is in this liminal phase. If she stays at the crossroad until she intuitively knows what direction to take, she emerges renewed and replenished.
But beyond intuition I also yearn for solitude, and though I was thinking of the Greek goddess Hestia as a symbol of building the hearth and matriarchy, Shinoda Bolen describes her instead as a goddess of meditative wisdom:
It is Hestia you wish to be with when you yearn for time alone, when solitude is a sanctuary, and your soul is at the center of your being. If you know Hestia’s symbolic fire as a spiritual center or inner presence that warms and illuminates your psyche and your body, you will have a feeling of being at home in yourself and in a universe that is both ordinary and sacred.
Of all the stages of adult life, it is in the phase of the waning moon that there is the most time for Hestia. This “archetype of meaning” comes into her own when ego strivings and how we look to others, or the need for a particular relationship, or the needs of others no longer are at the center of our lives. The goddess Hestia was one-in-herself, as many older women who have a sense of themselves as whole can be. These wisewomen are beyond the need or delusion that something or someone outside of themselves will complete them. They are at peace with themselves just as they are.
Shinoda Bolen further writes, “Hestia represents an invisible feminine presence or energy that permates a situation, a place, or a psyche, and transforms it into a sacred space. Hestia’s hearth fire has to do with soul and home, with being rather than doing. Her wisdom is the wisdom of being centered, with an emotional warmth that is generous and not possessive.”
This is what I wanted to channel on Thanksgiving, and I think I achieved it, although there was plenty of doing in order to feel the centered being and emotional warmth that resulted.
Hestia would seem to offer an archetype for getting in touch with one’s Kierkegaardian inwardness, while letting outward social demands fall where they might.
There are many more goddess archetypes to explore in Shinoda Bolen’s book and I look forward to doing that.
For today, I feel content to be at Hecate’s crossroads feeling the warmth of Hestia’s hearth fire, arriving here from my difficult past, acknowledging the beauty of my present, and looking forward to a meaningful, sacred, mystical future.