WUNRN
By
Leza Lowitz
from
"If Women Ruled the World"
Edited
by Sheila Ellison
Inner
Ocean Publishing, Inc.
Woman's Midlife Wisdom
WAITING
You
keep waiting for something to happen,
the
thing that lifts you out of yourself,
catapults
you into doing all the things you've put off
the
great things you're meant to do in life,
but
somehow never quite get to.
You
keep waiting for the planets to shift
the
new moon to bring news,
the
universe to align, something to give.
Meanwhile,
the piles of papers, the laundry, the dishes, the job---
it
all stacks up while you keep hoping
for
some miracle to blast down upon you,
scattering
the piles to the winds.
Sometimes
you lie in bed, terrified of your life.
Sometimes
you laugh at the privilege of waking.
But
all the while, life goes on in its messy way.
And
then you turn forty. Or fifty. Or sixty...
and
some part of you realizes you are not alone
and
you find signs of this in the animal kingdom---
when
a snake sheds its skin, its eyes glaze over,
it
slinks under a rock, not wanting to be touched,
and
when caterpillar turns to butterfly,
if
the pupa is brushed, it will die---
and
when the bird taps its beak hungrily against the egg
it's
because the thing is too small, too small,
and
it needs to break out.
And
midlife walks you into that wisdom
that
this is what transformation looks like---
the
mess of it, the tapping at the walls of your life,
the
yearning and writhing and pushing,
until
one day, one day
you
emerge from the wreck
just
as you are,
no,
even better than that
because
you know it now
both
the immense dawn
and
the dusk of the body
and
it's all still there,
glistening
and new.
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