Hey, Amy here.
I was watching a Michael Franti video the other day where he said,
"I believe there's no one that you wouldn't love if you knew their story. And perhaps the greatest gift that you can give to anybody is to listen to their story. And then to have them listen back to your story."
And so if that is the greatest gift that you can give or that you can receive, you are depriving other people when you don't share yourself and your story.
At my last plant medicine retreat in March, it was an all women's retreat, with 25 women. And on the final night the facilitator had all of the elders come to the center of the room where the altar was. She said you
are considered an elder if you are in menopause or beyond.
I had never seen myself as an elder before... I still feel very young at heart... but I am at that phase in my life so I sat in front of the altar. And there were about 8 or 10 of us there, and we just found ourselves naturally joining hands.
And the facilitator spoke to us in front of
everyone.
She said when you get to the point in your life, as women, when your body stops bleeding, you now hold a level of wisdom that nobody else has, and that you get to walk with that wisdom toward your death. And she sang some beautiful songs to us about sages and crones, and played her drum and moved us all to tears.
She presented us each with a
flower to honor us. And it was so beautiful because, for many of us, as we get older, and we start to lose the beauty of our youth, or when we have a harder time remembering things, or start to have physical ailments that come with age...
...we start to feel invisible, or less than.
And this part of the ceremony was a beautiful reminder about the
wisdom that we get to carry as we get older.
It was beautiful reframe of the way we often see ourselves as we age. And this was a women's retreat so it was about women specifically, but this goes for the men, too.
I know sometimes we think people will judge us if we share our struggles or our experiences. And the thing is that they will judge us anyway,
so we may as well shine our light and share things that might help someone in any way that we can.
And that story can be your legacy, because it's really the only truly valuable thing that you can leave behind anyway.
