"Rootbed of Fertility"

 

Old Woman Archetype

“Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.

There in the rootbed of fertility,

World without end, as the legend tells it.

Under the words you are my silence.”

May Sarton (“When a Woman Feels Alone,” found in Traveling with Pomegranates, p.6, by Sue Mond Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, Viking, 2009)

          Forgive me for writing so much about aging—I guess it’s on my mind these days. In Traveling with Pomegranates, Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Taylor, write a coming-of-age story—Sue, because she is turning 50, and must allow her 22-year-old daughter to fledge the nest after graduating college. It is a passage that all of us encounter whether we have children or not, and at different ages. It is a transition from one life stage to another, from one identity to another. In Sue’s case, from active motherhood to independent woman with her own life. Ann confronts the eternal post-college question of “What now?” Both women ask what will my future be? Who will I be in it? Where shall I spend it? What do I want to accomplish? Who will share it with me? The life stages are different, but the questions are the same.

          Most of us just bulldoze our way through these transitions, as though it’s just another day, another “nothing much.” Until we hit a wall, that is, and find ourselves crying for no apparent reason, realize that our heart is broken over some loss we can’t name. It may happen when we fledge our last child, when we end a long-term marriage or lose a spouse to death, when we retire, when we move to a new location—anytime we sense that we are starting over. As human beings we like to know what comes next. Sometimes what initially looks like freedom, what seems to be life opening to endless possibilities, turns out to be a time of loneliness in which we drift for lack of an anchor.

          The Old Woman archetype is a double-edged sword—she lurks in all of us, and we fear her. But, as you can see in May Sarton’s poem, she contains the “rootbed of fertility.” Her fertility is not that of a young woman, hers is deeper and wiser, fertility of the soul and not the body. She holds the wisdom of the ages, and the understanding of human relationships. She is to be feared only because she is fierce and unafraid. When we are going through these life transitions, she is the silence beneath the words. She is there always, whether we are young or old, male of female. She may look like a crone, a witch, but she holds the answers to those big questions that transitions produce in us.

          We can ask, and she will answer. We can approach her with respect, and she will provide a rich blessing. Besides being a crone, you see, she is also the grandmother of us all.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane