EMBODYING THE CREATRIX

An insightful passage in “Creatrix Rising: Unlocking The Power Of Midlife Women” by Stephanie Raffelock

 

— In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a steady and accelerated evolution of women that begs the question: Is this a Darwinian moment?

When my mother approached older age, she told me that growing old was a terrible thing. For her generation, this was not an isolated attitude. America is a young country that values youth and sexiness above substance and depth. In her generation, how else was a midlife woman to feel but used up and disposable? The perception of the old crone has long been supported by advertising. If advertising only shows older women as feeble, frail, and unattractive, whether that’s true or not, the attitude infects the culture, and we begin to take the images as truth. Worse, if advertising never shows an image of a woman over the age of forty-five or fifty, the unspoken message is that she is useless and invisible.

Is the way that our culture views older women uniquely American? In other countries, where they dance the tango up to the very end of life, mature women are not defeminized or desexualized the way they are here in America. Here, we tout anti-aging cures as if age were a disease, and women spend billions of dollars on keeping the face of youth for as long as possible, our identities and our creativity tied to some false form of beauty.

A friend who is about to turn forty told me a story that illustrates our biased American way of seeing older women. She and her husband were vacationing in Italy and had stopped at a shop across the street from a beach. Returning to their rental car, they found it wouldn’t start, so they attempted to push it out of the parking space to roll downhill, where they’d seen a garage. As my friend’s husband pushed on the car and she steered, a woman came running across the street from the beach to help. Appearing to be in her late sixties, the woman was wearing a bikini and sandals. She was tanned and lean, my friend told me, but her skin was crepey and her musculature ropey. A little bit of a belly sagged over the bikini bottom. Without any conversation, the woman placed her hands on the car next to my friend’s husband and helped to push. Once the car was out of the parking spot and set to roll downhill, the woman ran back to the beach, with a quick wave.

“What was so striking about the incident,” my friend said, “was the lack of self-consciousness this older woman had about being in her bikini. She ran to help with the same amount of strength and determination of a much younger woman, only she did it unabashedly, unashamed in her bikini.”

Hearing the story, the word “unashamed” landed with a painful thud because I knew that here, in America, we shame women for growing older rather than revere them. A seven- ty-year-old woman publicly enjoying the sensual delights of the sunshine in a bikini would be a less likely scenario here than in other places in our world.

All over the planet, women like Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and Jacinda Adern are the heads of government. They’ve proven that women are strong leaders, yet Americans are not yet inspired to elect a female president, though I believe we’re getting closer.

This brings me back to my feeling that a Darwinian moment is upon us as we collectively engage in acknowledging that a revolution of creativity, self-worth, and courage is taking place with women—especially older women, who are beginning to embody the emerging archetype of the Creatrix.

To embody the Creatrix is to learn her nature and her qualities. By nature, the Creatrix is a sovereign soul, a seeker, tapping into a higher vibration and consciousness that has always informed her, but now she loudly speaks and proclaims the truth of that higher octave. She weaves the qualities of creativity, courage, self-love, and acceptance along with the practice of gratitude into a pattern that is reshaping the collective consciousness of older women and how they are seen by the culture. Her strength comes from a knowing, a spiritual knowledge that she is the constant consciousness that is as old and wise as the universe. She no longer strives to prove herself through the trappings of youth but remains an uplifter to younger women…

On Amazon!