retelling our stories

Reclaiming Our Power, Retelling Our Stories

“We are all longing to go home to someplace we have never been—a place half-remembered and half envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time.” Starhawk, The Spiral Dance.

Crones' half-remember and half-envision a time when we had a powerful leadership role in our tribes. In the past, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles. They were the ones who held the myths and wisdom stories, the ones who knew where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They served as guides for younger adults, caregivers, and mentors for the community’s children.

Storytelling is a way of teaching that gives meaning and understanding to life. It began in ancient times with our ancestors who told stories around the campfires. Just like words, stories have power. They speak to our subconscious; they shape our perceptions and form a basis of cohesiveness within tribes and cultures. They also cause a natural exclusion of others, encouraging judgment and ‘othering’ of those who live outside of our interpretation of life’s meaning. Creation of stories and beliefs about what is right and wrong creates a duality of thinking; a framework of how to believe that is very subtle and often not in our awareness. It divides everything into good or bad, beautiful, or ugly, strong, or weak, evil, or saintly. It is what political and religious leaders use to control their people. It is how women lost their role as powerful elders in the culture. 

Why does this matter? It matters because how we think about aging women and thus ourselves, depends on the stories and images we hold in our heads. The images we hold today are not helpful. It is getting better due to the brave actions of some strong, wise women in the culture who are demonstrating what women can do. For the most part, older women in our culture today are ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous or to try to look younger if they wish to be respected and noticed. You know, dye your hair, stay thin, have eyelid surgery, fake eyelashes, Botox to erase the wrinkles. The greatest compliment being, “Oh you don’t look your age, you look so young.” Older women are held up as objects of satire with late-night comedians who think it is funny to make fun of them. If they have more than one cat, they are victims of mockery. A cat lady who is sad and lonely and uses felines as a substitute for a man.

Ancient belief systems tell a different story.

While researching the best example, I found was Irish folklore and the female figure they call Cailleach. She is a power and fights the exploitation of animals and the land. Irish mythology is highly female-centered. Many of their stories tell of Cailleach’s closeness to the animals, both domestic and wild. In one folk tale she scolds a servant boy for setting out to turn hay on what will become a wet day. He asks how she can be so sure of her weather forecast and she tells him that the crow and the deer are reliable advisers. The stories tell us that the wisdom of the animals is to be valued as much as the wisdom of humans because animals have a way of being in the world which we do not. They understand things we do not. Below I share one of her stories because I love the image of a fierce elder woman standing up for herself. There are many stories like this one, including powerful creation stories that are very different from the Western Creation story we all grew up with. There are a couple I share at the end of this lesson.

            The Story of the Old Woman and the Priest (A story from Southwest Ireland)

One day, a parish priest visited the Cailleach’s house to ask how old she was. He thought, as such men do, that he was a fine fellow, and very clever; he’d heard that she claimed to be as old as time, and he wanted to catch her out. Well, the old woman replied that she couldn’t quite remember her exact age, but every year on her birthday, she told him, she would kill a bullock, and after she’d eaten it, she would throw one of its thigh bones into her attic. So, if he wanted to, he could go up to the attic and count the bones. “For every bone you find up there in that attic,” she said to him, “you can add a year of my life.” Well, he counted the bones for a day and a night, and still he couldn’t make a dent in them. His hands, they say, were shaking as he pulled at the door handle and left.

The Power of Creation Stories

For two thousand years, our Western culture’s creation story is based on masculine domination over women and over all the creatures of Earth. Women were created from man’s body to please him because God saw that he was lonely. I remember as a young girl believing I had one less rib than my brothers. The first woman was blamed for causing all human suffering because she was seeking wisdom and knowledge. She talked to an evil serpent. She shared the “evil” fruit with her partner. God punished them by throwing them out of paradise and made women subordinate to men forever. For she could not be trusted. She may see the beauty of snakes and continue to seek wisdom and knowledge, both very bad things.

These messages formed a foundation of a culture where women are not to be trusted. Men have control over women and the natural world because only men can be trusted with wisdom and knowledge, not women and not crow and deer. The story justifies a world in which men have dominion over all the animals and plants. Our ancestors saw the plants and animals as our brothers and sisters and teachers. I believe the patriarchal push of a domination-based culture is the cause for climate change, decline of the nutritional value of our food, animal cruelty, and the cause of mass extinction of species, leading to the destruction of Mother Earth.

In western culture, women have been trained well not to share their gifts of intuition, their ability to connect to Universal wisdom, and their faith in Spirit, seeing on unseen levels what many eyes cannot see. Women were burnt on stakes, drowned, buried alive or incarcerated in cruel and dirty insane asylums if they did not comply to the teachings and rules of men. Today, there is still a subtle message to not shine, to dim our light so as not to upset the masculine power structure. We know agism and sexism directed at older women in our culture impact our physical performance, impair mental health, hasten the onset of dementia, and strip us of a feeling of belonging, thus causing loneliness in epidemic proportions. Isn’t it interesting that twice as many women are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s? There is a price to pay when we feel invisible, that we believe we don’t matter, when we do not know or share our gifts, and when we spend years under the dominion of the masculine culture.

Because words matter, and older women matter, older women will be referred to as elder women. It implies authority, ‘a leader”, a trusted figure that matters in her family, community, and country. I use the word masculine because it is not about men or women, it is about masculine energy, traits and characteristics. The fight against the patriarchy isn’t a fight between men and women. It is not a fight against men. There are masculine and feminine qualities in each of us. We have those qualities in different amounts that vary at various times in our lives. As a young mother I was happy to surrender to the feminine traits of nurturer. As the owner of a business, I valued developing masculine traits of leadership and reasoning. The fight is to put the world back into harmony and balance with respect for both the feminine and masculine. And to once again value plants and animals as our brothers and sisters and teachers. To share equally in reciprocity.

One of the most damaging results of the Western creation story is how it kept women from each other. The message that women are not to be trusted meant we did not trust ourselves or each other. Our ancestors shared daily responsibilities; they gathered food together, cared for each other’s children. They shared wisdom passed on from grandmother to mother to daughters. They shared insights, intuitions, and visions that benefited the entire tribe. My wish is to reclaim the respect for women and the natural world. I wish to reclaim sisterhood. We reclaim our sisterhood by meeting in circles and sharing in deep friendship. We replace archetypes and stories diminishing the feminine with the ancient ancestral wisdom that still lives within us. We can once again bring balance and reclaim our natural feminine role as elders. Elder women matter, we have dignity, and we embrace growing older as a gift to share. When we believe in the superpower of Love, we share the energy and vibration of love all around us. We lift up humans and non-humans with the energy of love. This is a purpose worth striving.

Some things to try:

1.      Begin to identify feminine qualities and see them positively.

2.      Are there aspects of being a woman in our culture you have buried?

3.      Do you see love-driven, receptive, relatedness as positive traits.

4.      Is there a place for intuition in running a business?

5.      Which feminine trait is your strongest? Which masculine trait is your strongest?

6.      Can you see the value of bringing both the feminine and the masculine traits in balance?

7.      If you want to know where you fall on the spectrum of feminine/masculine, you can find the Bem Androgyny Test online.