On Courage: Stepping Into the Light
Filed Under All Posts, Courage, Group Posts | 1 Comment
On a regular basis, our six authors share their girlfriendly points of view in individual posts, blogging about whatever strikes their fancy. Once a month, we pick a subject where we all chime in. In this first group post, we reflect on courage and stepping into the light. Please continue by reading the posts below.
Growing Older: I’m Addicted to It.
Filed Under All Posts, Courage, Group Posts, Humor, Parenting, Prudence Baird | 3 Comments
Hi. My Name is Prudence, and I’m a Baby Boomer.
It’s not simple being a Boomer. You have to Take It Easy – especially these days with the less-than perfect balance and vision.
You have to live One Day at a Time – I’ve never figured this out, so we’ll just pass on it.
And, you have to Keep Coming Back, It Works!
Okay, that last one is bullshit.
Read more
Becoming 50
Filed Under All Posts, Carine Fabius, Courage, Group Posts | 4 Comments
“Wait until you turn 60,” a friend said to me recently. It was a dire warning of things to come because she was having a hard time with it. I tried to imagine that world of dread and loneliness (she’s single, I’m married); I tried to think back to that time, when 40 was approaching, and I wanted to hang on to my thirties—it had been a decade so full of possibilities, growth, fun and accomplishments, I didn’t want it to end. But the forties turned out to be fine, too: more possibility, more growth, more fun, more accomplishments—just getting better all the time.
As the fifth decade approached, I have to admit that the feeling of sliding gleefully into more, more, more! softened a bit as the mentally prepared for, but always unexpected changes began to kick in Read more
What It Looks Like From Here
Filed Under All Posts, Courage, Group Posts, Melissa Howden | 3 Comments
Becoming a woman of a certain age caused me to pause and take a look around. The number 50 appeared like a big round sound calling me to prayer. It posed the questions of “What’s been, what’s so and what will be?”
In the stair-step years leading up to 50, I’d lost my mother to emphysema, my lover and partner of ten years to another woman, my grandmother to suicide and my best friend of 30 years to Lou Gehrig’s Disease. So much of my personal history had been wrapped up in those four women. This life moment demanded review and renewal.
Read more
I Don’t Hide My Age, But…
Filed Under All Posts, Cathy Fischer, Courage, Group Posts | 2 Comments
I don’t hide my age, but I don’t flaunt it either. Starting and participating in Fifty is the new… is very much an act of bravery. In a way, I’m coming out of the closet. Not that the door was pulled shut, my age just hasn’t been all that important.
When people find out that I’m in my fifties, 51 to be precise, they usually display some degree of shock. “Really? No way!” Then comes the unintentionally impolite guessing game, “I thought you were 35, 38, maybe early forties at most.” I feel guilty taking credit for my perceived youthi-ness. Read more
Stepping Into the Light
Filed Under All Posts, Christie Healey, Courage, Group Posts | 1 Comment
“Stepping into the light” can mean so many things: spiritual illumination, truth telling, healing, even death. For me it means engaging in a magical process whereby you arrange your thoughts and feelings into that marvelous form called the story. Whether written down or spoken, we humans are all about our stories. The storyteller is an ancient character, an archetype in our psyches. For thousands of years storytellers have gathered, arranged and passed on our histories, nightmares, moral dilemmas and realities wrapped up in stories that find their familiars in the myths and legends of many cultures. Read more
Courage
Filed Under All Posts, Connie Stetson, Courage, Group Posts | 2 Comments
A very strong, courageous woman has shared this poem by Marge Piercy with me. In that we are writing on courage this month, it seemed to address this subject more powerfully than I ever could.
What I would offer to my sisters is that now is the time to let our hearts show, to come forward, to stand in the light where we must be, to make ourselves powerful in numbers, in deeds, and in words. Speak, speak, and speak the truth, always.
For strong women
by Marge Piercy
A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov. Read more
