Quaker Pagan Reflections

New England Fall Leaves.  Editor in Law, 2010. There is just something about the light this time of year. Of course, it helps that I live in New England, where the slanted light of autumn pours over leaves that are themselves turned gold.  There are mornings and afternoons  on my commute when it’s all I can do to watch the road.  In hurried glances, I gulp down visions: pale fields of bleaching corn,  mist that blankets meadows, and the way the sun burnishes all the leaves and the limbs of trees that hurry past my car. That beauty stirs my gratitude, but it stirs other things as well. When the blue of the hills grows soft, and the shadows in the woods are long; when crows make calligraphy against the sky, I can feel the Samhain’s tide rising within me, and as it rises, it glows. I’m not one of those Pagans who can recite for you the names of all the chakras. ...

I’ve been working on my Crone’s Wings this year, and I’m here to tell you: menopause is a nuisance. Kawanabe Kyosai. 1877 I never know, from one month to the next, whether I’m going to skip a period, spot every day for three weeks and then have a period, open the flood gates and have a super-period for three weeks in a row, or even whether this month is the end of the show. And, yeah, I have mood swings, hot flashes, and migraine headaches–my record is three in one day–along with a host of other bothersome physical changes, from suddenly having hyper-sensitive skin to developing an allergy to chocolate.  (Now that was epic!) I comfort myself with the knowledge that all this misery is what has given the human race its weirdly long lifespan. No, seriously–I don’t just mean life feels longer when I’m having menopausal symptoms.  I mean that, according to theory, the evolution of menopause and the evolution of our long lives are linked. At ...