An Ode to Menopause

On my last descent, I did not rise; I made a home in the deep, dark belly of The Mother, and here is where I now live a life cultivated from quiet connection, compassion and creativity.

A life where I let the light in at my own pace and command.

I do not need to be blinded and beguiled by a false light at the end of a misguided tunnel.

I am happy to remain in the fertile darkness of The Mother and play with Her dappled light as I choose.

I spent the first while of this final descent fighting to rise again as I had done so many times before, but this time, The Mother kept knocking me back.

“Down now”, She would say, “down now is where you’ll stay”.

The fear gripped me, “but I was not finished”, I raged…

“I know” She would reply… “But down now, you will stay”

But I am still young. I still have more to do; I want to go back, back to the body I knew.

“I know”, She would reply… “But down now, you will stay”

I kept railing and fighting and trying to climb till I gave up and lay in a pool of my own victimhood and regret, sobbing for all that I thought I had lost and was losing. Loathing the stranger in the mirror staring back at me.

But the Mother kept holding me in the dark embrace of Her womb, in that cave to which all women must return.

After what felt like years of struggling, my eyes adjusted to the fertile darkness.

I surrendered and allowed myself to be held in Her powerful but soft embrace.

Now, it is my own voice I hear:

“Down now I will stay, deeper I will go. I am not finished; I am fertiliser to grow.”

I am on the edge of truly expanding and understanding this final descent, of feeling myself become so much more than a rising and falling tide; I am becoming the cave Herself, becoming the Earth again, down now I will stay.

As I cultivate this deeper connection and compassion, I learn that this is not a journey of birth, as the initiations of maiden and mother were.

This is a reclamation, a becoming, a powerful Chimaera gaining her fire-breathing head as the three become one, and something new yet ancient occupies this fertile darkness within the belly of the Great Mother.