Something that has been on my heart for many months now is the longing to live closer to the land. Where small farms still operate, the market is the center of town life, where bread, wine, olive oil are simply what you eat – there’s something deeply nourishing about this for me. It reminds me of being in the countryside in Italy. Wandering the markets in Florence. A kind of busyness that is connected in a way that we have lost here in the US (at least where I live).
This is the passage I am in right now. Sage years. I’ll be 70 later this year and yes, I’m going to make a big fucking deal about it. You should too…at whatever age you are. Talking about getting older as a curse simply makes it a curse and as I’ve said many times in my writing – I have never been more excited about my life. Never felt more possible than today.
I’ve been moving towards being closer to the earth, to nature, to community in small ways as I can (absent moving to Europe which is more of a longing than a real intention). I volunteer at a local farm and have one hardy tomato plant on the back deck here. I have heirloom seeds waiting for the moment I am in a more permanent place. My pantry is always stocked with sourdough ingredients – there’s a loaf resting on the counter right now for a gathering tomorrow. The Gratitude Table, a monthly gathering of women has been an amazing place for human connection and building community.
My longing is for a place where that’s just how everyone lives. Where infrastructure supports connection and sharing, where the food is cleaner and the pace is more human. This feels real and valid in a world where over consumption is consuming our souls. There’s something deeply soul nourishing about this. And I believe feeding people is an act of rebellion in a system that punishes those who have little for the benefit of those who have far more than enough.
I imagine, within that community, a little patch of land of my own. Vegetable patches, a flower garden, and maybe chickens for eggs. Community tables spread outside where people gather to share their harvest, to nourish body and soul. I can feel the joy, the connection, the sense of peace in this place. A knowing that as long as we hold one another, we are all okay. A place where all are welcome, no one is turned away, and everyone is nourished always with whatever is on the table – whatever seasonal ingredients are available.
I believe we lived this way once – before industrialization created robber barons and the world began to spin out of control. We have lost sight of when enough is enough, and the current way of living cannot sustain itself – the cracks are visible now, if you’re paying attention. They’re in the cost of insulin. In the boarded-up storefronts where markets used to stand. In how far you now have to drive to find a tomato that tastes like anything at all. We keep calling the unraveling progress because scale is easier to measure than connection. But you can’t scale a market town. You can’t scale a shared table. The moment you try, it stops being either.
We put chemicals in our food, lace it with addictive sugar, and then end up needing medication and medical intervention which is becoming unaffordable for many. We have set up a system where a large population have little or no access to good, nourishing food, punish them for buying cheap addictive and unhealthy food with a go-for-broke healthcare system – if you want to call it that. It’s more like sickness care.
We the people are the ones to make these choices. To find our way back to community. This is the work I do here – in writing, in teaching women how to come home to themselves because that’s the first step. What if we stopped worrying about anything – about getting ahead, about having more, about the next thing we think we need – and instead turned our attention to what we have and how we can nourish the world around us with that.
I don’t think it takes as much as one might think, and I do know that what we give comes back to us tenfold and more – when we truly give from the heart.
There’s a sudden desire in me to research my ancestry. My paternal grandmother was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She used to tell me stories about her mother “trading with the Indians” – her words. Those stories have been alive in me lately, and I want to know more. I’ve learned of the Métis-French people and want to understand that way of life which, it seems, my grandmother experienced as a young girl. I feel deeply grounded in who I am here and now, and yet there is also this sense that something is waiting to discover me here.
I think about legacy – not the traditional sense of money and property – but something more rooted in land and people. I move slower now – not older, but more intentionally, with more clarity. I trust what my body is telling me, and I know that all of this is soul alignment. There’s a quiet power in knowing how to grow food, make bread, nourish a community. Real power doesn’t have to shout. It simply exists. It is. And I am a powerful frequency that cannot be denied at this point in my life.
This is where I am in this passage of life – in my Sage years, what you might call the Crone years. I am here to help mother a new earth into being, and that begins with the recognition that mother earth and I are one body – and how I care for this body is reflected in how I care for the earth and each other. There is no separation.
The Sage Years isn’t the only passage. It’s one of eight women move through from their mid-thirties on – each one a softening rather than a loss. If you’ve read this and felt something stir, stay with that. And if you’re feeling called to explore the passage you’re in, paid subscribers receive An Introduction to Sacred Passages a guide to recognize what midlife season you’re in.
With love,
Elaine
I a wondering if it has to do with age, or the way the world is moving these days, many of us crave simplicity in our lives. But then, I wonder what we’d have to give up to achieve that simplicity. Maybe because I just finished reading the book Yesteryear, that I am thinking we’d trade off the conveniences of modern life.