Now That I Can Hear, Can Anyone Hear Me? On Invisibility In Middle Age…..

Women in midlife can be invisible. After years of bodily scrutiny, much unwanted, a woman in the middle of her life, or as she is now called, an elderly woman is seen as, well, an elderly woman rather than a person with an infinite amount of experience and potential.

This lack of exterior scrutiny may facilitate a depth of time to build and strengthen one’s inner life and come into her own sense of value through her personal experience and thoughtful observations of her life events. The same would apply to world events if she can escape the doomed position that the best she can hope for is to be protected from the terrors of the world and her own fears of life by a hovering partner.

But if she can catalyze this time of outer invisibility into a sensing curiosity about herself and others and how solutions are formed and how people are loved, she stands a chance of addressing the self that is caught in the unseen magnificence.

I am thinking about the body, the body that changes and spreads its wings in a heavier format, hips ample, breasts then full or perhaps empty from long past years of nursing.

Many a woman feels, whose body is this that grows, and is invisible at the same time?

Who will care if I improve myself, and who if I don’t?

If the former goal has been external praise than this now falls flat.

There is a period of unacknowledged mourning where one is scuttled to the side like pigeons who have flown accidentally into an armory, mistaking the vast open metal doors for a portal to the sky.

With no air currents, how is one to find a way out?

The Body in the Lost and Found

I suggest the body as a home.

It can take a while to find one’s personal direction.

A group can be good and some instruction on how to begin to feel oneself from the inside,

on how to somatically source one’s power and vulnerability simultaneously.

Maybe it's vulnerability as power, and strength as the ability to go deeper and to express more.

Now a chance to encourage all the parts of oneself-no longer dividing the self into good and bad-but embracing the shattered magnificent symphony and unearthed beauty of it all.

The body contains all these worlds.

It is The Guggenheim of Self-Creation,

for that is what this time proposes,

that we come into ourselves anew,

rapt and hungry

to be quietly liberated in our own skin.