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Older women have learned the importance of reasonable expectations. We know that all our desires will not be fulfilled, that the world isn’t organized around pleasing us and that others, especially our children, are not waiting for our opinions and judgments. We know that the joys and sorrows of life are as mixed together as salt and water in the sea. We don’t expect perfection or even relief from suffering. A good book, a piece of homemade pie or a call from a friend can make us happy. As my aunt Grace, who lived in the Ozarks, put it, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.”
The Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s
Mary Pipher
The spirit, which we share, is a sacred blue torch, burning and devouring the dry plants, And growing with the storm and illuminating the faces of the goddesses.
Secrets of the Heart
Kahlil Gibran
The heart says to us: the cosmos, this marvel of wisdom, beauty and goodness, suffers. It is ailing. This great organism which cannot have been born out of sickness, whose birth must have been due to perfect health, i.e. to perfect wisdom, beauty and goodness, the totality of which was its cradle-this great organism is ailing. The continents-and the planets-grow ever-more hard, petrifying: this is the "sclerosis" of the cosmos. And on the surface of its land-masses in the process of petrification, and in the deeps of the seas, and in the air, there reigns the struggle for existence - this is the fever of inflammation in the world.
But sick as it is, the world still retains- everywhere and always-characteristics of its primordial health, and shows the working of forces of its new health, its convalescence. Because alongside the struggle for existence there is cooperation in order to live, and alongside the mineral petrification, there is the succulent and breathing cover of the plant kingdom. The world can therefore be lauded and wept for at the same time.
This is the origin of the problem of the Fall: that the world is worthy of being sung for and wept for at the same time.
Meditations on the Tarot
Robert Powell
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