Women are disappearing at an alarming rate and usually by the age of 45.

These women aren’t necessarily physically going missing per se, but for centuries in a patriarchal society such as ours, the incessant drive to make the wise-woman obsolete has been insatiable.

Within the zeitgeist of our recorded history we’ve quite literally fallen to our knees to pay homage to the gods of youth as currency to our social wealth, while wise-women continue to be buried by those writing the stories.

When objectifying a woman based purely on her physical appearance is no longer deemed ‘appropriate’, we’re forced to see her as something much more than an overly sexualized commodity.

Speaking to women over the years, report time and time again, when a woman enters her forties is usually the time when a sleeping giant within her wakes up and gives a long and satisfying body stretch into her wakefulness. Women say it’s a time in our lives when we embody our inner authority, washing ourselves clean from many needless insecurities carried over the years.

It’s the time in our lives when we finally own up to our self worth.

It’s the time in our lives when we know ourselves sexually and what kind of wine we like. It’s the time in our lives when we use our discernment on which battles to fight and when to unapologetically stand up for our rights. It’s the time in our lives when we’re getting really good at knowing ourselves and simply, its the time in our lives when we’re just getting really good!

Sadly however, it’s also the time when the inherent toxic masculinity festers in our society. Carried by both men and women, we’re systematically culled from our connection to the wise-women as she’s kept out of view.

How do we enter this phase of life if we don’t know what she looks like?

What happened to aging gracefully and purposefully?

In western society we continue to glorify youth while ignoring the power and beauty of a full-fledged woman. As we try to live up to the impossibly unattainable motto: stay forever young, never grow old and never die, we continue the insanity of fighting against our very nature.

I’ve been watching my friends, very conscious and intelligent women, getting swept up by Botox, fillers and spending hundreds of dollars every week on facials. Thousands are spent every year with a promise to remain wrinkle free for as long as possible, while multi-national corporations are raking in their billions.

Instead of looking behind for what we think we’ve lost why not look ahead with pride for the women we are becoming? Why are we desperately clinging to an impossible notion of youth? Instead, why not focus on fostering a mindset of health and wellbeing?

The current mindset is like a well-placed disease, systematically constructed to create fear around the process of aging, targeted specifically toward women in her thirties and beyond. It’s a true embodiment of an endemic virus living in our midst, one that with out a doubt has touched every woman at one point in her life.

Thus, the wise-woman continues to be buried. Not because we as woman want to bury her, but because we are so utterly distracted by this insidious propaganda, which holds her at bay.

What we as women really need to be doing with our invaluable and vital life-force is focus instead on preparing ourselves as the next generation of wisdom keepers within our communities. To take a closer look at the wisdom living within us as we transition from child to adolescent, adolescent to young adult, young adult to full fledged woman and the full fledged woman embarking on the process of waking up the sleeping giant within her as she prepares to become an elder.

This is the stage of life I find myself in.

This year I turned forty. Although my friends assure me I don’t look a day over thirty-one, as if I’ve won a medal and my value as a woman is still clinging to a feeble sense of worthiness, I won’t lie to you, the fear of aging has touched me as much as anyone else. When I was a kid forty seemed like a time in ones life when you’ve already bought the house, had the kids, (one of which is already in college) and managed to paint your picket fence white, several times over simply because that much time has passed in-between.

Somehow forty in 2019 is looking very different than the forty I imagined as a child. I’m still paying rent, still single and don’t have any children. I’ve traveled the globe and seen many cultures. I’ve seen businesses thrive and business fail, I lived in California for nearly a decade and recently moved back to my native home in British Columbia and witnessing myself starting over again. Ground zero. Identity so carefully crafted, then to watch it in a blink of an eye swiftly wash away. It would seem clear all this is happening because the wise-woman in me is preparing me for the next phase of my life, like purification, but it hasn’t been. I’ve been too busy focusing on my breath as the contractions of change have been shooting through me like a lightning storm.

It seems equally clear that new arrangements need to be made to make room for what it looks like for the wise-woman archetype to thrive in the 21 century in a world that is rapidly changing. She has a very different face from the one she carried a hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago for that matter.

I’ve watched the wise-woman move through me at varying stages of my life, child to full fledged woman and I’ll be damned if I stop her in her tracks just as she’s entering her rightful place simply because I’m trying to figure out how to integrate her into my life. I want to look to her, observe her as she’s informed me through these varying stages of growth. Stages that have felt like life times, full of nuance, full of death and full of new beginnings. I want to revisit her as I crack through the decades, as if I’m carving from the center of the mountain with a pickaxe, chiseling my way toward the light. I know there will be moments where I’ll be methodical, clean and organized and moments when I’ll be coming toward this process kicking and screaming, feeling the weight of claustrophobia clinging all around me. But from the moments between these precise movements into chaotic action, I know at least this much to be true. I’ll find a way to pickup my tools again and keep going. Not because I’m running late, or that I’m meeting a deadline, but because I’m listening and breathing into the silence long enough to hear the whispering of her voice. It’s from this place I keep going, because the wise-woman told me to.