I have 20 minutes to write this, so lucky for you, it should be short1.
When I was around 15 years old, my mother announced one random day, that we’d now “entered the age of Kali Yuga.” She meant this personally, like in our house. I was a tough teenager after all…
“What are you talking about?”
She replied with a story about the huge ages in Hinduism and Kali Yuga being a time marked by destruction and decay. She said it was natural, necessary, but not easy. She said she was rolling with it with a twinkle in her eye. Jeez, an era lasting over 400,000 years, how could she be so cavalier?
As a mother of a teenager. I understand now using such dramatic language around changes in household dynamics and emotional life. My current household has a love of theater baked in, so we enjoy dramatic and colorful language and– when we are lucky– rooted music and brilliant wordplay too. But let me not digress to present day.
I’m feeling like I’m in this “KY” era again.
Thank goodness for moms like mine, but also, WTF is Kali Yuga? Ages that take over 400,000 years feel like a helluva long time to help our kids make it through the the teens and prep to leave the nest, and tend to middle age, and end of life stuff too.
But if you are a woman dealing with “change of life” with teens and elders in tow, you may know what I mean.
And here’s this piece, where I try to create brand new equations and word matrices, that help me re-position my personal, professional, and creative understandings into neat little mental boxes and venn diagrams, while reconciling a messy matrix of knowledge that has me feeling all iconoclastic and saying f*ck it t0 propriety.
See below a poorly shaped word-tree that speaks to this phase:
Ideas of
Interest:
Life v Death
Birth v Death
Sex as opposite of Death
Sex = Creation | Death = Destruction
Sex makes Life | Death gives way for new Life
Supported by:
Practical
vs Spiritual
understanding
of the
terms
above
For those of you who subscribe to astrological stuffs, sex and death also calls into Scorpio energy and 8th House play: often called the house of sex and undoing. On a practical level for mid-life women, there is a very real shift going on in our bodies’ reproductive capabilities, which on chemical, positional, and functional levels alone can be hugely impactful, not to mention spiritually and emotionally a doozy.
Because we live in a culture where good women are lauded for bearing the “creative” side of life, but shadowed for showing the destructive side, it feels impossible to be “good” and still be complete.
I’m finding this right now. It’s a bitch.
This is menopause: a full natural restructuring of matter and mind.
Sometimes I feel insane, but you know, my job is to help others know they are okay and still have a place in society and nature, and keep myself out of trouble, and maybe even spark a laugh or two about the big stuff like life, death and maybe the subtler forms of sex and love.
Perhaps this phase where the expression “not suffering fools” really sets in. I need to keep my language light, and the groove real, so let’s just rest for a moment on The Queen of Soul’s Chain of Fools.
But what happens to women who don’t have this kind of creative medium to say her peace? Or the cash flow to spa it and dance through the fun of sisterhood? Do they make other things? Do they remake themselves? Do they just go all Medusa on the world and freeze lesser mortals to stone?
That’s a tough role, but I guess someone’s got to do it (for Perseus to succeed, anyway).
I’m still trying to birth my post-menopausal self as an mindful, kind creative. The labor’s been a little long, honestly.
And as much as I dislike being visible, there will likely be more ‘behind the veil’ writing around life stages, process, and how middle-aged folks can get through a post-reproductive phase to bear good stuff for the world to come.
My work will likely be interspersed with creative process & prompts, original art, silly pop culture references, personal stories, and wordsmithing for the joy of it.
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FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT