In September 2019, Leica asked me to speak at their Pavillion at Photoville-Brooklyn about my Wisdom Anthologies project and the feminine perspective. This is an excerpt of what I shared with the audience there.
The elderwomen teach me to be resilient—that the dance of life is, as Alan Watts says, to let life live me rather than trying so hard to live life. The elderwomen have finally let go of control and practice the beauty of chaos. They trust life. Practicing chaos is about dissolving into our essence--to put aside the masks and the control and the hustle, to trust ourselves so deeply that we know if we resonate our own song so purely, so consistently, so joyfully, that things will come and go in ways that will continue to increase our possibilities, our entropy—to move toward our essential limitless being rather than trying to contain it in a false sense of order and predictability.
Stories are essential for resilience.
In an age of overwhelming anxiety, fear, depression, and loneliness we need to find our elderwomen. We need to find each other. We need to listen, to exchange stories, to open hearts—even if and especially if they are full of grief and trauma so big we fear we will break open. We might break open, but the elderwomen are a testament of resilience. They too have broken open; and they too have learned how to piece it together again and again, each time with more compassion and wisdom.
When you sit with the elderwomen this is what they’ll show you:
• Do not be afraid of the dark. The universe is mostly dark matter, and we live somewhere in its womb.
The womb is where anything and everything is possible.
• Go slow to go fast. But just go slow. Like a sonic low torque—a speed that is rooted deep in the earth.
• Feel your way through this life. Become a sensualist: feel, taste, touch, hear, and see your way through this life.
• Become familiar with your own interior ecology—your own intuition, your own authority. Your own counsel matters most.
• The seasons repeat themselves, though with nuance and subtleties. Accept the changing seasons. Dance with them. They are inevitable.
• Cultivate more time for solitude and quiet—practice slowing down, become familiar with the silent hours.
• Luxuriate in the questions without need for answers. Mystery is enlivening.
• When the heart breaks, let it soften into grief—this is the rich soil of joy. Let the healing waters release from your eyes, and find deep rhythms in simple inhales and exhales. Receive hugs and love without guilt.
• Tend to your domestic realm. Care for yourself and those you love: the mundane and ordinary tasks of the day matter. Make time to prepare meals, make your bed, water the plants. Take time to be holy.
• Risk mysticism, and try something because you love it, not because you’ll succeed. Live from the heart. Practice courage.
• Integrity is first knowing what you want, then protecting it no matter what. Stay true to your heart.
• There is intelligence in the flesh—knowing lives within the entire body, not just the head.
• Trust in the storms, in unpredictable emotions, they clear the way and restore beauty.
• Surrender, do not resist.
• Create, do not force or make.
• Practice letting go—so in the end, when death comes, you can greet it and say, “hello, dear friend, I know you well.”
When you sit with an elderwoman, you listen. Deeply. Because you will think you have a list of important questions until you understand that there must be silence as she searches for what she wants to share with you in that moment--do not interrupt her silence.
There will be laughter at how absurd life can be; and there will a piercing poetry. In this anxious, overwhelmed, overstimulated and over-exposed world--the elderwomen have a pace, like torque, that will move you--slowly and with power.
They will give you their blessing--they will see you, hear you, and honor you. And they will remind you to slow down; to knock it off; to cry when you should cry; to laugh when you should laugh. They will witness you and your efforts.
And we can sing with them. Sit with them and hold their hands--because when we touch them, we will know what they know, though we will not be able to articulate in any spoken language.
