In my mailbox this week was a beautiful note. Handmade, with watercolors on simple paper, the cursive words were an invitation to come and celebrate the full moon with dinner. “We have realized,” it read, “that our life needs more celebrations.” It went on to say that their plans were simple, that children were welcome. I tucked the note next to my laptop and thought about that line all week: more celebrations. In the era of lifestyle blogs and Instagram it’s easy to hear “party” and immediately feel tense, but I think my friend is on to something different—something brave and worthwhile. A celebration for no other reason than more celebrating is needed. I can’t stop thinking about that. More and more her words sound like a tiny revolution. You know that magnet your friend has on her fridge that says, “Don’t Postpone Joy”? What if we actually lived like that?
Life is fragile and short. That’s awfully blunt of me, I know, but it’s true. The people we love are here for a minute and gone. So are we. Our children are born and it’s so hard and so beautiful and so intensely busy for a few years and then… they’re grown. Our dearest friends move away. Our jobs change or fold. Our marriages and partnerships shift and grow differently than expected. Sometimes we get the worst sort of news.
Life is fragile and beautiful. Spring comes after winter. Our dearest friends visit and it’s like old times again. The job resolves itself or a new one beckons. Our children return for dinners and birthdays. New friendships grow. We discover a new hobby or dream. Holidays are observed. Sometimes the news is good. Deliciously good, even.
Doesn’t all of this deserve celebration? I think we all know that we don’t need more intensely planned and perfectly catered parties. If stress and money could save our hearts from breaking, we wouldn’t be here, holding tightly to our morning coffee and gasping with hope and fear at yet another fresh and beautiful morning. If the world was falling around you, who would you want at your table? If the strawberries were sugar sweet from weeks of heat and the fire pit had sat empty and neglected for too long, who would you want come over and spoon little bowls of berries and cream while the logs spit and crackled? If the best news or the worst news or no news at all had recently fallen through your mailbox, how would you want to draw a circle around you and fill it with love? How do we want to remember these hot summer nights or these dark winter evenings? How can we mark them as significant even though they’re small, powerful even though they’re ordinary?
We posted a photo last week of ladies joyfully jumping under a bright rainbow with a caption that read:“For all the complaining about how rough #menopause is, do you ever hear the other side? Do you hear about the sense of lightness and liberation, the celebration of finally feeling shamelessly yourself? The rediscovery of your voice and your strength? The celebratory bonding with other women? The actual JOY in the menopausal years? Let’s talk about THAT.”
You DID want to talk about that! So many of you shared the photo with additional comments and many of you weighed in with your thoughts. Celebration is not a word you typically hear associated with menopause and yet many of us are having that exact experience. Along with the hormonal transitions, along with the challenges, along with the changes is coming a deep sense of freedom and joy. It’s not getting a lot of press yet, but it’s the truth. In fact, saying it out loud feels like another tiny revolution.
Our theme for this week at Sacred Menopause is Simple Celebrations. We’re going to be celebrating women our age who are ALIVE and living VIVID lives. We’re going to be celebrating the simple, ordinary things which bring joy and beauty to our seemingly ordinary days. We’re going to throw a cozy virtual party where the music is soulful and the table is full of candles and the wine glasses are becoming coffee cups because the conversation is going late. We’re going to talk about fresh starts and new stories and the indescribable pleasure of an old song that brings back that certain, significant memory. We’re going to celebrate because life is fragile and beautiful and precious and we are magically and mysteriously alive.
We hope you stop by again this week and we hope you feel inspired to do some ordinary and revolutionary celebrating. We hope you’ll join in the conversations here and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We hope you’ll share some photos and join in the #simplecelebrations hashtag. Truly, in every single way, your experiences and story belong.
Xo
Annagrace
