“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
~ Anais Nin
It’s a fresh new week and a brand new month. August has arrived fast on the heels of a late-July blue moon and here at Sacred Menopause we’re thinking about shifts and re-creation. One of the most enticing themes in book or movie has to be the heroine who reinvents herself: The poor girl turned aristocrat through work or cunning partnership. The lonely or beleaguered wife who decides she’s done and leaves. The greater second acts of troubled artists and creators.
Most of us aren’t in such severe circumstances and most of our lives are quieter and far less dramatic, and yet we connect with these stories in a powerful way. There is a craving in each of us to be on the outside exactly who we truly are on the inside.
Menopause is a time of great inner change which can often precipitate outer changes as well. We want to explore that with you. We’re shaping this week around the theme of reinvention.The word reinvent often gets used interchangeably with transform and deconstruct, but it’s not the samething. To transform is literally to change shape or form. Deconstruct means to break down or dismantle. Reinvent, though, means to rediscover, to find again. It’s not a tearing down of everything we’ve built or becoming a “whole new you.” This is often the disconnect between the grand stories we see in the movies and our own lives. Most of us don’t want to throw away everything that we’ve made so far or unravel all of the complicated joy and pain. We don’t want to become someone completely different.
The ache that we carry though, the soul craving for a life full of meaning and joy, is worth paying attention to and following. If necessity is the mother of invention, then I do believe that the mother of reinvention is desire.
What are you hungry for? What is the longing lodged deep in your soul? What do you wish to add or subtract in order to feel realigned with your heart? Reinvention to me sounds like opening a window that’s been stuck fast and letting fresh breezes blow across a bed. It looks like a blank canvas prepped for painting and a new box of my favorite ink pens. It feels like a shiny compass, balanced in my palm, with a reliable needle always pointing to my own true north. It smells like the rose garden in my town does every June, when just at the very end of itself spring finally decides to stay. It’s the way my own garden looks after a good, hard rain.
One of the gifts of menopause is the chance to slow down and look again at our life, to see where the air and light need letting in. It’s the chance to listen to our hunger and pay attention to our thirst.
This week we’re thinking about the beautiful cages we can make out of jobs and paths and relationships when in front of us is desire, beckoning. We’re listening to stories of women who are daring to live and love and work in a way that better matches their truest selves. We’re thinking about dark, quiet cocoons and the colorful wings hidden inside. We’re thinking about sovereignty and the power of naming ourselves.
We’re considering the choice between staying a small, tightly held bud and bursting into showy, fragrant, vivid bloom.
xo
Love
Annagrace
