Of
Ingenues and Swamp-Witches
“Your
inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever
been and the age you are at this very moment.”
Anne
Lamott (Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, p.123)
A year or so ago, I made
a wall-hanging I titled “Life Cycle of the Southern Belle.” It is
a triptych with the first panel being the novice, the innocent
maiden. She is a paper doll, surrounded by outfits just like real
paper dolls, with the little shoulder tabs to hold the
clothes on. She's quite green, of course. The center panel is the Belle
as we know her; sultry, slinky seductress, what we would now call
eye-candy. She is actually wearing a large red day-lily on her head
so that you won't miss the point that she is the veritable flower of
Southern womanhood—white Southern womanhood, to be sure. And the
third panel is a swamp-witch rising out of the body of some poor
schmuck she's...well...destroyed. The piece is meant as a joke of course;
never-the-less, it comes from lived experience. There exists the
eternal maiden, the seductress, and the hag in every woman at every
age. And many other characters as well. I think that is why we don't
feel as though we change on the inside even as our bodies age.
It is only by degrees
that the reality of change sinks in. My particular ah-ha moment came
when I tried to reach an errant baking dish in the lower cabinets in
my kitchen. I had to get down on my knees and almost crawl inside the
cabinet. That part was awkward enough, but it was the getting-up process
that was a shock. It took a while—and several iterations were
involved. Whereas once I bounced up like a ball, I now had to do a
sort of 3-point turn on the vertical. It was ugly. Truly ugly. Once
up, I thought of my mother—actually, I thought, I have become my
mother! How can that be!
It is an interesting
phenomenon, and I think not just a human one. My son's Corgi is about
thirteen years old, and will still fly out the dog door or sprint up the
stairs. Then you can almost hear her saying, “What was I thinking?”
as she hobbles stiffly away. We are eternal inside—we have an
eternal soul that never ages, but it does gain wisdom from the
experience of living our lives. The wisdom-gaining part is dependent
on our level of consciousness. We must develop self-awareness to gain
in wisdom. We can live a long, long life, and stay an ingenue, a
paper-doll, if we choose. If we are a man, we can play the role of
Peter Pan, or worse, Capt. Hook, our whole lives. But if we want to
grow up inside, we can appreciate all our parts—our innocence, our
juicy sexiness, our swamp-witch—and still have the wisdom of the
crone or the old wizard, all at the same time. Life is deep, and
rich, and wide, and exciting. Becoming self-aware makes it more so.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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