The Ripening

There comes a time in a woman's life when the ways she has learned to belong begin asking to be questioned.

The identities she has inhabited.
The roles she has carried.
The approval she has mistaken for devotion.
The ways she has shaped herself around what is expected, needed or celebrated.

All of these may have served a time and a purpose. And somewhere along the way, something deeper begins asking for her allegiance.

Midlife can be such a threshold.

A passage between who we have been and who our souls are calling us to embody. What once gave our lives shape begins to loosen, while what wants to emerge has not yet fully revealed itself.

This in-between can be disorienting physically, emotionally, relationally and spiritually.

It can also be profoundly liberating.

Midlife carries the possibility of initiation.

An invitation to move

from approval toward inner authority.
from adaptation toward authenticity.
from reaction toward conscious response.
from giving our power away toward inhabiting it.
from striving to become toward becoming an attuned vessel for what wants to move through us.

A time to listen again for the inner compass and embodied wisdom beneath the noise.

To bring heart, body, mind and soul into deeper alignment.

To take greater responsibility for the lives we are creating, while releasing what was never ours to carry.

And to rediscover the creative life-force beneath years of responsibility, caregiving, achievement and becoming very good at being who we thought we needed to be.

Once a month, near the New Moon, we gather at Imaginalia Ranch to enter this threshold together.

An intimate, intentionally curated ceremonial space for women who sense that something is shifting, shedding, ripening or asking to be born.

Through council, poetry, song, somatic and creative practice, ritual, time on the land and a shared table, we make room for what is ending, what is being alchemized and what has not yet found its form.

For grief and desire.
For the unlived and the deeply lived.
For the woman we have been and the woman whose contours we are only beginning to feel.

We are here to become quiet enough to hear what is already trying to emerge.

To allow the darkness to become fertile ground.
To compost what no longer needs to be carried.
To strengthen our inner authority.
To return to the intelligence of the body.
To remember ourselves within a longer ancestral story.
To deepen intimacy with our own knowing.
To reconnect with essence beneath identity.
To free the creative life that wants to move through us.

And to nurture our capacity to let our fierce, tender, creative life move through us without abandoning our ground, or the parts of ourselves that once learned they could not belong.

There is something powerful about crossing this threshold in the company of women who have lived, loved, lost, created, questioned and gathered wisdom of their own.

To see and be seen.

To have our becoming witnessed rather than explained.

To strengthen one another without rescuing one another.

To discover a sovereignty that does not require separation, and a belonging that does not ask us to abandon ourselves.

Perhaps midlife is asking for less reinvention than revelation.

Less striving to become someone new.

More intimacy with what has always been true.

And enough inner authority to live from it.

We listen for what is underneath:

What wants to be undone?
What is ready to be composted?
Where am I being asked to reclaim authorship of my life?
What is asking to come alive?

What is mine to live now?