On Saturday night it is Samhain. On Sunday morning, here in America, the clocks go back, and the dark arrives an hour sooner still.

Most people will spend Saturday night handing out sweets to small superheroes, and I hope they enjoy every minute of it. I have my own costume this year, though you will not find it in a shop. I am going as the one who hospices. The Queen of Death. The one who sits with what is dying and holds it in reverence. More on her later. Then I will light a candle, say some names out loud, and celebrate the new year.

Because for witches, and for a great many of us who walk the old paths, Samhain is New Year’s Eve. The wheel turns, the harvest is in, and the year begins again. In the dark. Where every good beginning starts.

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Summer’s End

A little history, for anyone meeting Samhain for the first time. It is pronounced SOW-in, by the way, which has saved many a newcomer from an awkward moment at the bonfire.

Samhain is the old Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, the darker half of the year. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the word still names the month of November. It was a time to bring the herds down from the hills, take stock of what had been gathered, light the great fires, and feast before the hungry months.

It was also, in the old stories, the night the doors stood open. The medieval Irish tales tell of the sídhe, the hollow hills where the Otherworld folk live, being open at Samhain. The dead, the fair folk, the gods, all walking a little closer to the living than usual.

Samhain was not written down in any detail until the medieval period, and historians still argue about how much of what we now say about it is ancient and how much is lovingly reconstructed. Some argue it was mostly a harvest feast. Some argue it was always a festival of the dead. The idea of Samhain as the start of the Celtic year rests partly on interpretations of the old Gaulish calendar and partly on the simple logic of the farm. Plenty of scholars find it persuasive. Some do not.

“The Witches’ New Year” is a modern name, given by modern pagans and witches who took up the Wheel of the Year in the last century and kept it turning. I love it anyway. Every tradition was new once. What matters to me is whether it still carries something true.

And for those of us who have spent our lives walking the paths of the Goddess, Samhain is not simply something we read about in books on Celtic history. It is something we enter, year after year, with our bodies, our prayers, our ceremonies, and the women who gather beside us.

I have spent decades sitting in circles with witches and priestesses, invoking the old ones, tending the sacred fires, listening to what the dark has to teach us, and watching women discover that the mysteries they have been searching for are not nearly as far away as they imagined.

And one of the things I have come to understand is that the Wheel of the Year is not simply a calendar of seasonal festivals. It is a living map of initiation, a way of participating consciously in the great cycles of birth, growth, death, dissolution and return that are moving through the earth and through our own lives.

We do not simply observe Samhain. We allow Samhain to work upon us.

I love that the old ways are being lived again, not as museum pieces, but as practices that continue to evolve in the hands of the people who gather to keep them alive.

And this does carry something true for me. The year does not begin in the bright, busy place. It begins in the soil, in the dark, where the seed lies down and nobody can see what it is doing.

I find something rather comforting about a new year that doesn’t immediately demand a new version of me. No resolutions, no grand declarations about what I intend to achieve in the next twelve months, no list of things I am going to improve about myself before January is even over.

Instead, we are invited to look at what has already ended, what we have gathered from the year that is passing, and what we might be ready to lay down before we begin again. There is no particular hurry to know what comes next, which is quite a relief in a culture that seems to want us perpetually producing, achieving, reinventing ourselves and moving on to the next thing.

I have been thinking about how little room we make for the seasons in which nothing much appears to be happening. We become restless, impatient, convinced that we ought to be doing something, when the earth itself is quite happily settling down for a long winter’s sleep.

The seed is not failing because it has not yet sprouted. It is doing what seeds do in the dark.

Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The Old Woman Wakes

In the Gaelic lands there is a goddess who takes the throne at Samhain. Her name is the Cailleach. It simply means old woman. Or as I have come to know her, Bone Woman.

She is the divine hag of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. She made the mountains, the stories say, dropping stones from her apron as she strode across the land. She brings the storms and the snow. In Scotland she is Beira, Queen of Winter, and in some tellings she shares the year with Brìghde, the bright one. Brìghde rules the light half. The Cailleach rules from Samhain to Bealtaine. In some tellings she wakes on Samhain night, takes up her staff, and taps the ground until it freezes.

I adore her. I am, after all, rather closer to her than to Brìghde these days.

Here is what I want you to notice. In these stories, our ancestors handed half the year, the hard half, the half that decided who lived to see spring, to an old woman. A crone with a staff and a wicked sense of weather.

They trusted her with the dark.

Compare that with how we treat ageing women now. Invisible in the shops. Invisible on the screen. Spoken over in meetings. Sold creams to erase the evidence that we have lived. A culture that once crowned the old woman Queen of Winter now mostly asks her to stop taking up room.

So many of the women I sit with are walking into their own dark half right now. Perimenopause, menopause, the long passage out of the bright years of fertility and into something stranger and fiercer. Most of them were taught to fear it. Nobody told them the Cailleach was waiting on the other side with a crown.

She is. Plain and simple.

And I wonder what it might do to our understanding of aging if we began to recognise this passage not simply as the gradual diminishing of the woman we once were, but as an initiation into an entirely different kind of authority.

Because the Cailleach is not trying to remain young. She is not standing at the edge of winter wishing she could have another summer, or wondering whether she is still attractive enough to be invited to the feast. She has mountains to make, storms to summon, and an entire season to preside over. I rather doubt she has much patience for our obsession with anti-ageing serums.

There is something enormously liberating about that, especially for those of us who have spent decades being measured, in one way or another, by our usefulness, our attractiveness, our capacity to produce, and our willingness to keep everybody else comfortable.

I have spent the last eleven years travelling through the long, sometimes bewildering territory of perimenopause and into menopause itself, and one of the things this passage has been teaching me, often through experiences I would not have chosen, is that the woman I am becoming is not particularly interested in going back to being the woman I was.

And yet so much of the conversation around menopause is still about how to get us back. Back to our energy, our productivity, our sex drive, our old bodies, our old selves. And while I am all for feeling well and having access to whatever support we need, I wonder whether we are missing something rather important when we treat this enormous transition as a problem to be solved rather than a passage to be lived.

I think of the women who have gone before us, the grandmothers and elders who carried the stories, who knew the medicines, who understood the rhythms of the land and the bodies of the women who lived upon it. And I think about how much we have lost by refusing to recognise the authority that comes with age, as though wisdom were some unfortunate side effect of getting older rather than one of its great possibilities.

The Cailleach is not here to be pleasing. She is here to be sovereign.

And perhaps that is one of the great invitations of this season of our lives. To stop asking whether we are still allowed to take up space, and begin to inhabit the authority that comes from having lived long enough to know something about the dark.

Perhaps the great initiation of the second half of a woman’s life is not learning how to remain in the light, but discovering that she can be trusted with the dark.

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The Word

Witch.

I notice that some of you may have flinched a little. That is not an accident. It is a memory.

Between roughly the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe tried tens of thousands of people for witchcraft. Historians today estimate somewhere between forty and sixty thousand were executed. I have often wondered how much suffering was never recorded, how many lives were ruined through accusation, imprisonment, exile and the terrible fear that spread through whole communities.

In the peak years, most of those tried and killed in many of the regions where the persecution was worst were women. Often the old ones. Often the poor ones. Often the ones who lived alone, or knew the plants, or said what they thought.

Last week I wrote about midwives, and the holy women who stand at the threshold of birth. In 1973 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argued, in a small fierce pamphlet called Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, that the witch hunts were partly a war on women healers. Later historians have complicated that story a good deal. Many accused witches were not healers at all, and many midwives worked hand in hand with the courts.

I hold both. The history is messier than the legend. And the fear underneath it, the fear of a woman who knows things about bodies and plants and the edges of life that a man with a book does not, that fear is real. It has not entirely gone away.

And perhaps this is why the word still carries such a peculiar charge, even now, centuries after the fires have gone out. Because underneath the pointed hats and broomsticks and Halloween decorations, there is a question about what happens when a woman trusts what she knows, particularly when that knowing does not fit neatly inside the structures that have been given authority over her life.

I am not suggesting that every woman accused of witchcraft was secretly a wise woman or a healer. History tells us otherwise. But I am interested in what the word has come to carry, and why so many women are choosing to reclaim it now.

And of course, the witches I know are not simply women reclaiming a name that was once used to terrify and condemn us. They are women who pray, who practise, who study, who tend the earth, who work with plants and dreams and ceremony, who gather around fires and altars and take seriously their relationship with the living world.

Some are priestesses. Some are healers, artists, activists, mothers, grandmothers, or women who have simply found their way back into a relationship with the sacred that does not require them to abandon their bodies, their instincts, or their own authority.

And there is something wonderfully ordinary about much of it. Yes, there are the ceremonies and the beautiful robes and the occasional rather spectacular headdress, but there is also the woman who remembers to bring the firewood, the one who makes the soup, and the one who stays behind afterwards to wash the cups.

I think we sometimes forget how much of the sacred is sustained by these very practical acts of devotion.

Perhaps we are tired of being frightened of our own power. Or of having to make it palatable enough that nobody feels threatened by it.

On International Women’s Day 2022, Scotland’s First Minister formally apologised to the thousands of people, mostly women, accused under the country’s old Witchcraft Act. It took centuries. Better late.

So when I say witch, I am saying the name of a woman who was punished for her knowing, and I am saying it out loud, without flinching, on her new year.

And I am also saying the name of the women I know and love, the women who are here now, gathering, remembering, practising, and making something living from the old ways.

The Other Door

The midwives stand at one door. Samhain is the other.

Alongside my work with the living, I am called to sit with the dying as a death doula, and I have come to feel birth and death as one great feminine mystery. The Mother receiving us in. The Mother receiving us home.

For most of the year our culture keeps the second door firmly shut and pretends it is a wall. At Samhain, the old ways say, it swings open a crack, and a little of the other side leaks through.

I believe that, quite literally. I feel the veil thin at this time of year the way I feel weather coming. My dreams change. The people I have lost come closer. I find myself saying their names in the car.

We are not the only ones who keep this season with the dead. In Mexico, families build their ofrendas for Día de los Muertos on the first and second of November. The Church laid All Saints and All Souls over the same days. Across very different peoples, the turning toward winter has long been a time to set a place at the table for those who have gone before.

These are other people’s traditions, and not mine to borrow. I mention them because the instinct is so widely human. When the light goes, we remember.

And remembering is a practice our motherless culture has nearly lost. We hurry the dead out of hospital rooms and out of conversation. We give ourselves a few days off work and then expect to be over it. We do not talk to our grandmothers. We certainly do not lay a plate for them.

Samhain says: talk to them. Lay the plate. Your ancestors are not finished with you, and you are not finished with them.

The Queen of Death

Which brings me back to my costume.

Every Samhain I ask what I am being called to embody for the turning of the year. This year the answer came very clearly. The one who hospices. The Queen of Death.

She does not look much like the Halloween version. No scythe, no cackle. She sits by the bed. She keeps the candle lit. She is with what is dying, in a person, in a relationship, in a way of life, in a world, and she does not rush it, fix it, or look away. She holds it in such reverence that the dying itself becomes holy.

She is the Cailleach’s sister, I think. Perhaps the Cailleach herself, on a quieter night.

And I have been thinking a great deal about the difference between allowing something to die and trying to kill it.

Because we are not terribly good at endings, are we? We either cling on long after something has ceased to have life in it, trying to revive it with increasingly desperate measures, or we become so frustrated with the whole business that we want to burn it to the ground and be done with it.

But there is another way of being with an ending, one that I have come to understand through sitting with the dying, and through the many smaller deaths of my own life.

Sometimes what is needed is neither rescue nor destruction, but a willingness to accompany something through its natural completion. To recognise that a relationship, a role, a way of working, or an identity that once gave us so much may have reached the end of its life, and that we can honour what it has been without insisting that it continue.

And this can be enormously difficult, particularly when we have invested so much of ourselves in keeping something alive, when we have built our lives around it, or when we simply cannot imagine who we might be without it.

There is a particular kind of love required for this, because it asks us to remain present when we can no longer change the outcome.

And perhaps this is where my work as a priestess and my work as a death doula meet most intimately, because so much of what I have been learning over these years is how to remain present at the threshold without imagining that I am supposed to control what happens there.

We can prepare the space, offer our prayers, anoint the body, call upon the ancestors, and bring all the love and attention we have to give. But we cannot make the mystery unfold according to our wishes.

There is a humility in that which I think is essential to priestesshood. To know that we are here to serve the mystery, not to manage it.

And perhaps this is what the Queen of Death understands. That not everything which is ending needs to be saved, and not everything which is dying needs to be hurried along.

She is so needed now. So much is dying around us. Old certainties, old institutions, old stories about who we are and what women are for. Much of it needs to go. The temptation is to cheer it into the ground, or to look away and scroll.

The Queen of Death does neither. She stays. She witnesses. She lets it die well, so that what comes next can be born clean.

That is the work of the dark half of the year. It is also, I suspect, the work of this whole long season of history we are living through.

You are welcome to borrow the costume. It fits everyone.

Keeping Samhain

You do not need a coven, a cauldron or a cloak to keep the witches’ new year. You need a candle, a little time, and a willingness to sit in the dark without reaching for your phone.

Phew. That last one is the hardest.

A few simple ways in, if you would like them.

• Light a candle and say the names. Your dead, out loud, one by one. The grandmothers. The friends who went too soon. The ones whose names you never knew, who still made you possible.

• Lay a plate. Set an extra place at supper for the ancestors. Put a little of everything on it. Eat in silence for a while, if you can bear it. Afterwards, take the plate outside and give it to the earth.

• Be the Queen of Death for one thing. Name something in your life that is dying. A habit, a story, a role, a relationship that has run its course. Write it down. Sit with it, kindly, the way you would sit with someone in their last hours. Thank it. Then let the fire have it, safely, in a candle flame or a bowl.

• Visit the Cailleach. Ring an older woman you love and ask her what winter has taught her. Then listen, properly, the way our ancestors listened to the old ones by the fire.

• Plant one seed in the dark. Before you sleep, whisper one thing you would like the new year to grow. Tell no one. Let it lie in the soil until spring.

A note, as always, on where I am speaking from. Samhain and the Wheel of the Year are one tradition among many, the one my own Celtic-rooted bones answer to. If you live in the southern hemisphere, your Samhain falls around the first of May, when your own dark half begins. If your people keep the dead in other ways, keep them in your ways.

Take what serves you and leave the rest.

Happy New Year

The light is going. Let it go.

The old woman is waking in the mountains. The doors are opening. The dead are coming close to the fire to warm their hands.

The year does not begin with a bang and a countdown. It begins with a candle in a dark room and a woman saying her grandmother’s name.

Happy new year, witches.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

If this season stirs grief that feels too heavy to carry alone, please reach out to someone you trust. Many local hospices offer free bereavement support, even if your person did not die in their care.

Sources and Further Reading

• Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)

• Reclaiming Spiral Dance, History of the Spiral Dance — https://www.reclaimingspiraldance.org/history

• Carol P. Christ, Why Women Need the Goddess (1978)

• Max Dashu, Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion (2016)

• Historic Environment Scotland, The Cailleach: Scotland’s Ice Queen

• Starhawk and M. Macha Nightmare, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997)

• Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973)

• Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996)

• Law Society of Scotland, Sturgeon Offers Formal Apology to Persecuted Witches (2022)

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Fifteen series. Since 2012. I have been more faithful to the women of Nonnatus House than to any New Year’s resolution or gym membership I have ever owned. Ha.

I remember the first time I watched it. I was transfixed. Here was a show that, episode after episode, puts a woman giving birth at the centre of the screen and keeps her there. The sweat, the swearing, the long animal work of it. And it never gets old. Fifteen series in, it still asks us to come closer to the most ordinary miracle there is, and every time I lean in.

I should confess that my fascination is not entirely innocent. I have been transfixed by midwifery for most of my life. In my early thirties I began training as a midwife, because I was so captivated by how sacred birth is, and by what it asks of a woman to walk that rite of passage. I became a doula and attended more than thirty births alongside my midwife teacher. Thirty-odd women. Thirty-odd doorways.

And somewhere in those long nights I understood that my calling was a different kind of midwifery. Soul midwifery. Helping people be born into their own lives. Helping them fully incarnate, here, in these bodies, on this planet.

So on a Sunday night I am watching my own work on the telly. With better hats.

And then last night, after fifteen years of watching these women pedal through the streets of Poplar, something struck me so plainly that I sat upright.

These women are priestesses.

Of course they are.

Not because they call themselves that, or because they perform elaborate rituals or speak the language of the Goddess, but because they have devoted their lives to standing at the thresholds of human experience, where life enters, where life leaves, and where someone needs another human being to come close enough to help.

And suddenly I understood something about why this programme has moved me so deeply for so many years.

This is a piece about that. About what a gentle BBC period drama has been quietly teaching millions of people every Sunday night, about women, about our bodies, about our place in the world. And about the Mother, who has been missing for a very long time, and who turns out to ride a bicycle.

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Photo credit: BBC / Neal Street Productions

If you have never been to Poplar

A quick introduction, for those of you who have somehow escaped it.

Call the Midwife is a BBC drama created by Heidi Thomas, adapted from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, who trained as a midwife in the East End of London in the 1950s. It began in 2012 and is now fifteen series deep, broadcast in Britain on Sunday nights and here in America on PBS.

The story begins in 1957 in Poplar, a poor, crowded, bomb-scarred neighbourhood by the docks. A young nurse, Jenny Lee, arrives at Nonnatus House, a convent of Anglican nuns who run the district’s midwifery service alongside a handful of young lay nurses and midwives. Together they cycle the streets in all weathers, delivering babies in tenements and prefabs, caring for the sick and the old, and sitting with the dying.

Each episode follows a few families through a birth and whatever crisis comes with it. The series has moved forward roughly a year at a time, and its latest series is set in 1971.

I have my own odd thread to those streets. My father’s family came from the East End, many moons ago. So when the camera sweeps across the docks and the terraces and the washing strung between the tenements, something in my blood sits up and pays attention. Some part of me recognises it as ancestral ground.

That is the plot. What it is actually about takes the rest of this piece.

The women who hold the threshold

I have spent my whole life midwifing people. Women, and men too, from one state of being into another. From one state of consciousness into the next. Through change and loss. Through illness, pain and fear. Through the long stuck places where nothing seems to move, and through death itself.

Long after I stopped attending births, the archetype of the midwife never let go of me. It is the shape of my work. If I am honest, it is the shape of my soul.

And watching the Sisters of Nonnatus House, I recognise something that I have spent decades trying to find the language for.

Because perhaps this is something we have forgotten about priestesshood. That it was never simply about robes and rituals and temples, although I am rather fond of all three. It was also about the women who knew how to tend the sacred in the midst of ordinary life. The women who could sit beside suffering without turning away, who knew when to speak and when to be silent, who understood that bringing a child into the world, washing the body of the dead, or holding the hand of someone who is frightened could all be acts of devotion.

The priestess does not make something sacred. She recognises the sacredness that is already there, and helps us remember it.

And I know that the Sisters themselves would speak of their ministry through their Christian faith, their vows, and their devotion to God. I am not suggesting that they secretly think of themselves as priestesses of the Goddess. But when I look at them through the lens of the lineages I have spent my life studying and serving, I recognise the same essential movement of the soul. A life given over to the service of something greater than oneself, expressed through the very practical business of tending human beings.

The nuns in their habits and the young nurses on their bicycles. Holy women, walking the path of devotion, whether or not anyone in Poplar would ever call it that. Women like them have always been here, through all of time, at every threshold, in every culture that has made room for them to do their work.

I could feel the whole line of them standing behind the ones on my screen.

And I wanted to share that with you.

There is some lovely timing, too. On Christmas Day, BBC One is expected to air Call the Midwife: Sisters in Arms, a three-part prequel set in the Second World War, telling how Sister Julienne, Sister Evangelina and Sister Monica Joan came to the work. The elders of the house as young women in the Blitz. Priestesses in the making.

I will be watching, with tissues.

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The saint who was not born

Here is something I did not know until I went looking.

Jennifer Worth, the real midwife whose memoirs the series grew from, gave the convent she worked with a pseudonym. She called it Nonnatus House, after Saint Raymond Nonnatus, a thirteenth-century Catalan friar who is the patron saint of midwives, childbirth and expectant mothers.

Nonnatus means “not born”. According to the traditional account of his life, his mother died in labour, and he was cut from her body after her death.

So the house that receives every child of Poplar into the world is named for a motherless boy.

I had to put the kettle on after that one.

Because there it is, my whole body of work in a single word. The wound and the medicine sharing one front door. The child who arrived without a mother becoming the guardian of every mother after him. What we did not receive becomes, sometimes, if we find our way through the grief of it, the very thing we are called to give.

I know a little about this.

I was raised by my father, and spent the first half of my life learning, clumsily, to mother myself. Then I went and trained as a midwife. The motherless girl, kneeling at the foot of other women’s beds.

There is something about that which moves me even now, because I don’t think I understood at the time how deeply those experiences were connected. I knew that I was drawn to birth, that something in me came alive in those long hours of waiting and watching and being with a woman as she crossed into motherhood, but I had not yet recognised how much of my own longing was woven into that work.

And I want to be careful here, because I don’t believe that every wound has to become a gift, or that our suffering is somehow justified by what we eventually make of it. Some things are simply painful, and some losses remain losses.

But I have come to recognise that there are times when the very place where we were not met becomes a place of extraordinary sensitivity in us, a place where we learn to recognise the longing in another person because we know its particular shape so intimately.

I did not have the language for that until a fictional convent in a very real East End handed it to me.

Comfort with teeth

People who have never watched it think they know what it is. Wimples. Bicycles. Knitting. A great deal of tea.

All present and correct.

And underneath the tea cosy, the show has spent fifteen years telling the truth about women’s lives. Backstreet abortion when abortion was a crime. The thalidomide babies. Female genital cutting. Women beaten at home with nowhere to go. The racism that met Lucille, the show’s first West Indian midwife, on doorsteps she had come to help. Poverty so ordinary nobody on screen thinks to call it poverty.

In 2019 the Guardian’s Sarah Hughes called it one of the most subversive programmes on British television, precisely because Heidi Thomas and her writers slide the hard stories in among the babies and trust the audience to be grown-ups about it.

The cosiness is the delivery system. Plain and simple.

And I want to say, gently, that this is a very old feminine technology. The women’s mysteries have always travelled in disguise. In lullabies and recipes. In stitches and songs passed hand to hand. In the kitchen, where the men were not paying attention.

You wrap the medicine in something warm, and you hand it over, and by the time anyone notices what has been passed between you, it is already in the blood.

Call the Midwife does this on the BBC at eight o’clock on a Sunday.

That is quite something.

The Mother on a bicycle

The series opens in 1957, nine years after the National Health Service was born. Fifteen series later we are in 1971. Watched end to end, it is a slow, patient record of something I think we have barely begun to reckon with: what happened to women’s relationship with birth as it moved increasingly out of the home and into the hospital.

You can see it happen. Births move from the kitchen table to the maternity ward. Gas and air arrives, then the drip, the monitors, the consultants with their clipboards.

Some of it is plainly good. Fewer women die. Fewer babies die. I would not hand back a single one of those lives for all the romance in the world.

And something else goes quiet in the process.

Jennifer Worth wrote that in the late 1950s her team had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on their books, and by 1963 it had fallen to four or five. Birth was leaving home. It was leaving the hands of women who knew the family, the stairs, the grandmother in the back room. It was becoming a procedure.

And I think we are still trying to understand what was gained and what was lost in that enormous transition, because the advances in medicine were real and necessary, but so was the gradual disappearance of something that had been woven into women’s lives for centuries.

The intimate, relational, deeply human experience of being accompanied through a rite of passage by someone who knew you, who knew your family, and who understood that what was happening to you was more than a medical event.

This is where the show does its most radical work, and I am not sure it gets nearly enough credit for it.

The nuns are never absorbed. The NHS pays for the service, the forms multiply, the hospital grows, and still the Sisters of Nonnatus House keep their ministry. They pray the offices. They sit with the dying as well as the labouring. They take the woman nobody else will take.

Their care is folded into the welfare state without ever being flattened by it, and the show keeps putting that side by side with the clinic, week after week, and letting us feel the difference.

It is wild, really. A religious order of women running a midwifery practice inside a national health system, on their own terms, with their own rhythm, answerable to something older than the Ministry.

In the lineages I work inside, the priestess and the midwife were never far apart. Both stood at the threshold. Both knew that birth and death are the same doorway walked in different directions.

I feel this in my own bones. Alongside the birth work, I am called to sit with the dying as a death doula, and the two gateways have never felt separate to me. They feel like one feminine mystery. The Mother receiving us in, and the Mother receiving us home.

The Sisters of Nonnatus House understand this without needing to say it. The same hands that catch the newborn in the morning wash the old woman’s body in the evening.

Nonnatus House is a temple. It just happens to have a telephone in the hall and a rota pinned to the kitchen wall.

And this is how the Mother comes back. As a practice. As a woman who gets up at three in the morning, pulls on her coat, and pedals through the rain to a stranger’s door because a stranger’s daughter is in trouble.

She comes back as a rota. As a house full of women who have decided, together, that nobody in this postcode will labour alone.

Watch the house itself. Sister Julienne holding the centre with that quiet, unshowy authority of the good abbess. Sister Monica Joan, the crone and the oracle, quoting poetry, reading the stars, and stealing the cake. Nurse Crane with her whistle and her bark and her enormous heart. The young nurses arriving green and leaving initiated.

Every archetype of the feminine sat around one kitchen table, holding one another up.

And at the close of every episode, the voice of the older Jenny, played by Vanessa Redgrave, speaking back across fifty years. The grandmother’s voice. The lineage voice. Telling us what it all meant.

I have come to think of those closing words as a kind of evening prayer.

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What we lost at the bedside

We all need to be midwifed in this life. Into our bodies, into our lives, and out of them again at the end. For much of human history, women have played an intimate part in tending these passages, often in their own homes and communities, surrounded by people who knew them.

And then, over a relatively short period of time, much of that work moved into the hands of institutions.

In Britain, the Midwives Act of 1902 brought formal training and registration into the profession, helping to establish standards that would eventually shape the work of Jenny Lee and her colleagues. There were important reasons for this, not least the appalling rates of maternal and infant mortality.

But the new regulations also changed who was permitted to attend births, and the handywoman, the neighbour who had caught half the babies on the street, found herself increasingly excluded from work that had once been part of the fabric of community life.

In America the story was even more complicated, and often deeply entangled with racism and class. Doctors building the new profession of obstetrics campaigned against midwives as ignorant, dirty and dangerous. Immigrant midwives in the cities and Black granny midwives in the South, who had attended generations of women in their communities, were regulated, policed and pushed out.

By 1980, midwives attended just over one in every hundred American births.

And for a while the hospital itself could be a frightening place to give birth. In the early twentieth century, women were offered “twilight sleep”, a combination of morphine and scopolamine that promised relief from the memory of labour, while often leaving women disoriented, restrained, and profoundly disconnected from what was happening to their own bodies.

Many women campaigned for it. The promise was freedom from pain. What a great many of them got was absence from their own births.

I want to be careful here.

Modern obstetrics has saved more mothers and babies than any of us could count, and some of you, and some of your children, are alive because of it. I am grateful for every one of those lives.

What I grieve is everything we threw out with the bathwater. The woman who knew your family. Your own bed. Time. Reverence. The sense that birth was something a woman was doing, rather than simply something being done to her.

And we did something similar to death.

Dying moved out of the front room and onto the ward, among machines, too often alone. It took people like Cicely Saunders, a nurse turned doctor who opened St Christopher’s Hospice in London in 1967, right in the middle of Call the Midwife’s era, to help restore the understanding that dying people need far more than medical management. They need comfort, dignity, companionship, and the presence of people who are not afraid to stay.

The death doulas, my own beloved companions on that path, are part of that same homecoming.

See the pattern.

Both great gateways increasingly handed to institutions, and many of the women who had traditionally stood at them sent home.

And when nobody holds the threshold, the person crossing it can so easily become a case.

This is what I find so moving about Nonnatus House. Right in the middle of that great handing-over, a house of women keeps the door open. They carry the old knowing into the new system, alongside the medicine and the training and the new possibilities, and refuse to let go of the humanity at the centre of it all.

And there are signs of a return. In 2020, midwives attended almost one in eight American births.

The Mother has a long memory.

How it sees us

The camera in Call the Midwife looks at women’s bodies the way a midwife does. Steadily. Without flinching, and without leering.

We see the blood. The milk that will not come. The cracked nipples, the stitches, the swollen ankles, the piles nobody talks about, the woman on all fours making sounds she did not know she had in her.

Things television has spent most of its life either hiding or sexualising are simply shown, cared for, and taken seriously. The body is allowed to be a body.

Phew. Do you know how rare that is?

And the heroism is ours. Most drama locates courage in the detective, the soldier, the surgeon, the man with the gun. Here, the life-and-death stakes are a breech baby in a tenement with no hot water, and the hero is a twenty-three-year-old nurse with steady hands and a frightened mother gripping her wrist.

The show has quietly insisted, for fifteen years, that this is the most dramatic thing a human being can do.

No woman is beyond the reach of the house. The married and the unmarried. The sex worker. The teenager hiding her belly. The grandmother of eleven. The woman who wanted the baby and the woman who did not.

Every one of them is attended. Every one of them is worth a bicycle ride in the rain.

That, my loves, is what it looks like when a culture treats women as sacred.

It is very practical. It smells of carbolic soap.

I want to say something about the men too, because the show does. Dr Turner, worn out and devoted. Fred the handyman, endlessly useful and endlessly kind. Husbands pacing the landing, terrified and tender. Fathers who fail, and fathers who show up.

Call the Midwife has never pretended that bringing the Mother home means sending the men away. The good men in Poplar are the ones who make room for the women’s work and then stand guard at the door.

We cannot call the Mother home without calling the Father home too.

A word, as always, on the language I am using. I write of women and men, Mother and Father, because the cultural wound has been carved along that line, and because the traditions I work inside are polarity cosmologies. They are a few traditions among many. Plenty of cosmologies do not run on polarity, and plenty of humans do not live inside these poles.

This is one way of describing the sacred. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

Motherless, and its answer

Some of you will remember where Motherless began. At my kitchen table, reading about a website where men traded images of their sleeping, drugged wives. A woman’s body at its most unguarded, turned into content.

I wrote then that we are living in a motherless world, ten thousand years severed from the Great Mother, and that this is what her absence looks like.

I have been thinking about that piece every Sunday since.

Because Call the Midwife shows us the same body. A woman at her most unguarded. Legs open, bleeding, frightened, alone in a cold room at three in the morning, utterly unable to protect herself.

And then the knock at the door.

And the person on the step is another woman, who has come to keep her safe.

Same body. Same vulnerability. Two entirely different worlds.

And the difference is everything.

In one world, her vulnerability is something to exploit. In the other, it is a summons to love.

That is the whole argument, really.

The return of the Mother sounds abstract when we say it in temple. It is not abstract in Poplar. It is the answer to a very plain question.

When a woman cannot protect herself, who comes? And what do they do with her body when they get there?

In a motherless world, her vulnerability is an opportunity.

In a mothered world, it is holy ground, and everyone takes their shoes off.

Call the Midwife has been showing millions of people, every week for fifteen years, what a mothered world looks like. An extraordinary number of people sitting on their sofas on a Sunday night, quietly rehearsing what it looks like to keep a woman safe.

I find great hope in that.

I think the culture knows what it is missing.

I think that is why we cry.

Becoming the house

So what do we do with this, apart from putting the kettle on and reaching for the tissues?

I think we become Nonnatus House for one another. Not as a metaphor. As a practice.

Ask yourself who your Sister Monica Joan is, the elder woman whose strange wisdom you have been too busy to sit with. Ask who you would cycle to at three in the morning, and who would cycle to you.

Ask which woman in your life is labouring alone right now, with a diagnosis, a divorce, a dying parent, the long hot passage of menopause, and has not yet heard the knock at the door.

Then go and knock.

And perhaps there is another question here, one that I suspect might be rather more uncomfortable for some of us.

Who would you allow to come to you?

Because so many of us have become extraordinarily good at being the midwife. We know how to show up, how to hold, how to tend, how to carry the black bag through the rain, and I wonder how many of us would know what to do if someone arrived on our own doorstep and said, right then, let’s have a look at you.

Would we let them in?

Would we allow ourselves to be the one who needs tending, who needs feeding, who needs someone to sit beside us while we cry or rage or simply admit that we are tired and have absolutely no idea what to do next?

I ask because I know this one rather well myself.

And perhaps becoming a mothered world means learning both sides of this exchange. Learning how to come when we are called, and learning how to open the door when someone comes for us.

And if you were unmothered, as so many of us were, remember the saint the house was named for. The one who came into the world with no mother at all, and became the guardian of every mother after him.

Your story does not end at the wound. It is very often where the midwifery begins.

Call the midwife.

Then become one.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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Sources

• The Real Poplar Nurse Behind Call The Midwife — Londonist

• Nun the wiser: how Call the Midwife secretly became TV’s most subversive show — Sarah Hughes, The Guardian, 2019

• A Brief History of Midwifery in America — Oregon Health & Science University

• Call the Midwife prequel series, film planned — Televisual (covers production of series 15 and the prequel)

• Saint Raymond Nonnatus — Vatican City State

• Raymond Nonnatus — Wikipedia

• Call the Midwife (book) — Wikipedia

• Call the Midwife: Season 15 — PBS (official programme information)

• Scopolamine-Morphine Narcosis in Childbirth — The Hospital, 1919, via PubMed

• Doctors and Nurses: Midwives Roll and the Midwives Act 1902 — The National Archives

• The Satisfactory Midwife Bag: Midwifery Regulation in South Carolina, Past and Present Considerations — Alicia D. Bonaparte, Social Science History, Cambridge University Press

• How Call the Midwife smuggled radical social issues into Britain’s living rooms — Erica Wagner, New Statesman, 2018

• Call the Midwife: Sisters in Arms — Filming Begins on Prequel Series — TV Insider, republished by Yardbarker

My loves - This piece touches on sexual violence. If today is not the day for it, that is a perfectly good answer. It will keep.

What the heck is The Cornell 57?

A client had mentioned it in passing during a session, and I thought, what on earth is that? A graduating class? A piece of legislation? A basketball score?

So as soon as I was complete with her session, I picked up my phone to find out, which is how a surprising number of my worst evenings begin. And down I went. One article, then another, then the lawsuit, then the statements, then the statements about the statements. The proverbial rabbit hole, all the way to the bottom.

The dread arrived early. Somewhere around the second headline. And underneath the dread, something wearier and, if I am honest, worse. That flat little voice every woman I know will recognise.

Here we go again.

By the time I came up for air I knew a whole lot more than I really wanted to. And one detail had lodged itself in me and would not shift. It was a time stamp.

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1:42 a.m.

At 1:42 on a Sunday morning in October 2024, according to a lawsuit filed in New York last month, a young man inside the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell sent a message to a Snapchat group called Chi Phi Actives. The gist of it was that there was a woman upstairs, and she was going free. I will spare you his exact words.

Fifty-seven young men were in that group.

Some time later, according to footage of the chat obtained by CBS, one of them asked whether the shop was still open.

Somebody said yes.

I read that twice. Then I made a cup of tea I did not want, which is what Englishwomen do instead of screaming.

What I do not know

Quite a lot, as it happens. The young woman at the heart of this, Jane Doe in the court papers, was twenty. She alleges she was drugged and assaulted by several men over several hours. The men who have spoken through lawyers deny it. The district attorney declined to prosecute in 2024, and has now reopened the case for a grand jury.

I spent fifteen years as a psychotherapist, and here is what those rooms taught me. Many people never speak about what happened to them at all. Some because they cannot remember it, not properly, not in any order that would satisfy a person with a notepad. Some because the shame is so heavy that saying it out loud feels like it might kill them. And the ones who do speak often tell it in pieces, over years, with the hardest part saved until last.

I hold all of that. And I also know I am not the court. There is a court. Let it do its work.

But nobody is disputing the group chat. The prosecutor called it disgusting. A lawyer for one of the accused called it ugly. And the chat is not a legal question. Consent is a legal question. Conscience is not.

Fifty-seven phones

I keep picturing them. Face down on a sticky table. Lit up on a pillow. Buzzing in a coat pocket on the walk home. Some of those young men were asleep, some were drunk, and some, I would like to believe, read it and felt their stomach drop and did nothing, because they were nineteen and did not know what one does.

Nineteen is not an age famous for its judgement. I was nineteen once. I would not have trusted myself with a houseplant.

So I am not asking for fifty-seven awake young men. I am asking for one. One reply. Who is she. Is she alright. One boy getting up off a sofa and climbing a flight of stairs to look.

Which brings me to the question I find far harder than outrage.

Why?

What lives underneath

I don’t think these boys are monsters, I really don’t, and I find myself leaning into my own heart to really understand... Why would an ordinary boy, with a mother and sisters and an essay due on Tuesday, type “shop still open“ into his phone at two in the morning? And why would that message simply sit there, among fifty-seven, like a question about pizza?

So I sit with some of the research that my contemporaries have dedicated their lives to...

In 1990 the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday published Fraternity Gang Rape. What she found inside those houses was not monsters. It was insecure boys, bonding with each other through what they called getting sex. The real relationship was between the brothers. The young woman became the stage on which they performed their manhood for one another. Behaviour, as one reviewer put it, that very few of them would ever commit alone.

Here is what I think the chat reveals.

In the boy. Two-thirds of young American men say no one really knows them. A boy who is known by no one will do almost anything to be known by someone. He will laugh at the joke. He will stay quiet when every cell in his body says this is wrong. For a lonely boy, belonging outranks conscience.

In the brotherhood. A large review published in 2022 found that what best predicted a college man committing sexual violence was not what he believed about women. It was what he believed his friends approved of. And young men consistently overestimate how much other men approve of aggression, and underestimate how uncomfortable their friends really are. Psychologists call it pluralistic ignorance. I call it a group chat. Fifty-seven young men, quite possibly a good number of them privately appalled, each one convinced he was the only one.

In the initiation. Many of these houses initiate boys through humiliation, and fraternity men are themselves at higher risk of unwanted sexual contact. Any trauma therapist will tell you that what is done to us, unhealed, has a way of being done through us.

In the lineage. Earlier this year I wrote about the boys we are losing. Not lost because they hate, but because they are starving. A fraternity offers everything those boys are hungry for. A house, a brotherhood, a vow. Every piece of the ancient men’s lodge, except the elders. Boys initiating boys into a manhood none of them has been given.

So here is the wound, as plainly as I can name it. These are boys who were never told they were already enough. They went looking for a house that would tell them, and found one that would only say it on condition. Laugh at the joke. Do not be the one who makes it weird. Never be the one who goes upstairs.

None of that excuses a single thing. Understanding is not excusing. But you cannot heal a wound you refuse to look at, and you cannot bring a boy home if you have already decided he was never a boy.

The Mother underneath it all

Shop.

Patriarchy, and the misogyny it runs on, has been treating living bodies as a shop for a very long time. The bodies of women. The bodies of girls, younger and younger now. And the body of the Earth herself, her forests and rivers, her soil and seas. A whole civilisation built on taking what it wants from her without asking, and calling it progress.

I do not believe you can raise a culture on extraction and expect its sons to learn reverence somewhere along the way. The contempt for the feminine that turns up in a group chat at 1:42 in the morning is the same gesture that strips a mountain. One gesture, in different clothes. These boys did not invent it. They inherited it.

In my tradition we call this the exile of the Mother. It is one tradition among many, and you do not need it to feel what I am pointing at. A culture that does not honour the body of the Earth will struggle to honour the body of a woman, and a boy taught to honour neither will struggle, in the end, to honour his own.

The old reflex, my reflex for many years, is to meet all this with judgement. Judgement feels like power. It changes almost nothing. It just moves the shame from one body to another, and shame is precisely what built that house.

So I am trying something harder. I am trying to hold all of it in love. Not a soft love that calls it a joke. A grandmother’s love, fierce enough to name the harm without flinching, refuse every bit of it, and still keep a hand held out to the boy. That kind of love is the opposite of extraction. It does not take. It stays.

And I think that is how we open a new way. Not with shame. With belonging. The old initiations did not only teach boys strength. They taught them where they belonged. To the land, the ancestors, the village and the river. A boy who knows in his body that he belongs to the Earth does not need fifty-seven brothers on a phone to tell him he exists.

The Mothers

I keep thinking about the mothers. Hers first. I cannot imagine what this has been for her. It’s heartbreaking.

And then theirs. Somewhere, fifty-seven women have read the words Chi Phi Actives and felt the floor tilt. Some know exactly what their son did with that message. Some are too frightened to ask. I am not writing to shame them. This culture has a long and grubby habit of blaming mothers for everything their sons do. But I am writing because a mother still has a voice in her son’s life that nobody else has. Ask him what he saw, and what he did, and what he wishes he had done. He will carry that night either way. It matters enormously whether he carries it alone.

What we do now

Here we go again is a feeling, one that I am sure I am sharing with many of you reading this. And one way to deal with our feelings is yes to feel them, but also to get informed, to take an action. Love is action…So here is some of what is available to us, my loves.

• Have the 1:42 conversation. With your son, grandson, nephew, student, the lads on the team you coach. Before university. In the car, where nobody has to look at anybody. Tell him three plain things. Say something in the chat, where everyone can see it: Not ok. Who is she. Go and look, or send the one sober friend you trust. And if it is wrong, leave, and say why.

• Take them outside. Walk, camp, garden, swim in cold rivers, sit around real fires instead of digital ones. Reverence for the Earth and reverence for a woman’s body are learned in the same place.

• Bring the elders back. Fathers, uncles, coaches, alumni. The boys are initiating each other because we left them to it. Go back in. The organisations I named in The Boys We Are Losing are still doing this work: Boys to Men Mentoring, Rite of Passage Journeys, and The ManKind Project for the older men.

• Get bystander training where boys gather. It’s On Us runs student-led chapters teaching consent and bystander intervention, with a particular focus on young men. Coaching Boys Into Men trains coaches to talk to athletes about respect. If your son’s school or team has nothing like this, ask why not.

• Stand with student survivors. Know Your IX supports students fighting sexual violence at school. Their research found nearly four in ten student survivors who report end up leaving their studies. She is one of them.

• Keep watching Ithaca. A grand jury is coming, and the attorney general is reviewing Cornell’s response. Institutions behave differently when they know they are being watched. And honour the student reporters at the Cornell Daily Sun, who would not let this go.

Stay awake

I did put the phone down eventually that evening. It took a while.

The boys can still come home. I believe that with my whole body. They can grow through this, they can learn how to honor themselves and everyone else. They can make amends and awaken through the experience. But somebody has to be awake to go and get them.

Somewhere tonight a phone is going to light up.

Stay awake.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

If this has stirred something, please be gentle with yourself. In the US, RAINN offers free, confidential support day and night on 800-656-4673 or at online.rainn.org. In the UK, Rape Crisis England and Wales runs a 24/7 support line on 0808 500 2222. However long ago it was, and whatever you did or did not say at the time, it was not your fault. x

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One clip led to another the way they do, and at some point I noticed I had been in the same position for over an hour, my tea gone cold beside me. I was transfixed.

Dolly at the Opry. Dolly playing five instruments. Dolly telling the story about the town tramp again, the woman with the piled-up hair and the red lipstick and the tight skirts who scandalised Sevierville, and how little Dolly looked at her and thought, that is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, that is what I am going to be. Dolly saying, with an entirely straight face, that it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.

And then, because the internet is what the internet is, the other piece of news arriving underneath. Tim Curry, gone the same day.

Honestly, it is no surprise.

Both of them born in 1946. Both eighty. The two most magnificently overdressed people of their generation going over the rainbow bridge together on the twenty-fifth of August, as though they had arranged it between them months ago and told absolutely nobody.

I laughed out loud. Then I cried.

Because both of them held something powerful for me, and probably for you too…

They stood as the film stars and the musicians and the gloriously outrageous ones. They held the archetypal ground in public. Not ground that belonged to them. It belongs to all of us, and most of us hold it. I work everyday supporting women to step into their mythic lives, and their greater than imagined selves. But there are those who are out there in the public eye, and they agree to hold it where it can be seen. In costume. Under lights. At scale. With everybody watching, and judging and having an opinion about who they are.

That takes daring. I mean real courageous daring. A kind of self sacrifice that I imagine also comes along with the karma of fame.

And because they are willing to be looked at, the rest of us get to feel things we would otherwise have no permission to feel. She held the outrageous, unapologetic, wildly alive woman out where I could see her, for fifty years, until I and millions of others might actually believe that our quirky eccentricity was also welcome!

That is a service, performed in rhinestones!

I have felt kin to that woman for most of my adult life. And I know I am far from being alone in that. And I have been sitting with why…

So Here’s the Thing…

It is six days now since she left this mortal coil. And I have been watching all of the Dolly memes and clips pass through my Ig feed.

And what is amazing is that I have not found a single person saying a bad word about her.

And that really quite remarkable, don’t you think? We live in a culture that can viciously turn on anyone inside forty-eight hours. There is a whole industry devoted to tearing those who stand out down, to giving the next piece of gossip about them, to demeaning and undermining… There always seems to be someone who is ready to step out and start the thread that begins nobody wants to talk about and proceeds to explain why the beloved was in fact rotten all along. It seemingly arrives without fail. It is merciless and it arrives for saints and it arrives for children’s authors and it arrives, usually, before the flowers have wilted.

And it has not arrived for her. And I don’t think that means that she was perfect in any way of course she had a shadow - parts that were ill tempered or sometimes impatient of mean spirited… bit what it does mean is that she somehow didn’t divide the field.

The White House lowered the flags. The drag queens went to Dollywood in full sparkle the day after and were photographed weeping in the queue. Country radio played her all week and so did stations that have never played a country record in their lives. The Empire State Building went pink. Nashville is renaming the airport. Tennessee legislators who agree on nothing at all agreed on this.

Left, right, church, bar, city, holler. Nobody is arguing.

I have been in this work a long time and I cannot think of another public woman of whom that is true. Not one.

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How she managed it

Here is what I keep coming back to. She did not achieve that by being bland.

Blandness is the usual route to universal approval, and it was never part of her script. Because she was one of the most audacious human beings who has ever lived. The hair. The nails. The heels she could barely walk in. The whole cheerful preposterous architecture of her, built on purpose, at cost, in a business that punished women for far less.

She was controversial in the fact that she was totally herself and did not dim herself down or make herself smaller to fit.

That is a different thing entirely, and it is much harder.

The truth is that everybody wanted her. Both sides wanted her badly, the way you want a flag. And she would not be picked up and carried. She said, in effect and repeatedly, that she had people she loved on every side of every line and she was not going to trade any of them for the applause and comfort of the others.

Look at what Dolly actually did when it counted…

Because look at what she actually did when it counted.

In 1974 she said no to Elvis. Colonel Tom Parker wanted half the publishing on I Will Always Love You as the price of the King recording it, and she wanted that more than she had ever wanted anything, and she said no and went home and cried all night. Twenty years later Whitney Houston sang it, and the money arrived in quantities nobody had planned for.

And Dolly took a large part of that money and bought a commercial property in what was then the Black part of Nashville. She did not announce it. She did not attach her name to it or hold a ribbon-cutting or write a single word about racial equity. Years later, when Andy Cohen asked her about it on television, all she said was that she had thought at the time, this is the house that Whitney built.

Sit with the shape of that. She could not give Whitney back what the business had already taken from her. So she took the money that had come out of a Black woman’s voice and put it into the ground of a Black neighbourhood, quietly, and left it there.

Then at seventy-eight she turned up on Cowboy Carter, a record made to argue that country music was Black long before it was white, at a moment when Nashville was distinctly unsure how it felt about that. She issued no statement. She simply showed up and sang, which in that town was the statement.

And when a reporter asked her in 2020 whether Black lives mattered, what she actually said was, of course Black lives matter, do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter.

That is the whole distinction, IMHO, and almost nobody manages it. She would not participate in the sorting. She would not agree that the person who disagreed with her had thereby stopped being a person. And because she held that line for sixty years without one lapse that anybody has been able to find, she ended up being the only thing left in that country that everybody could still stand in the same room around.

Ha. A woman in a rhinestone jumpsuit, holding the middle of a broken nation, on her own, for decades.

What I mean by divine human

She was a Pentecostal girl from a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River who believed in God plainly and said so, and never once needed a framework. What she had instead was a decision, made very early, about who she was going to be, and then sixty years of not deviating from it.

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

Nine words. Rather better put than most of us manage in nine hundred.

I know that can sound a bit lofty written down. I can hear it myself. What I mean is entirely ordinary. I mean that a human being who is fully, unembarrassedly, unrelentingly herself, all the way down, with nothing held back and nothing performed for cover, starts after a while to do something to the people around her that is difficult to account for in ordinary terms.

People wept in a theme park queue this week for a woman they had never met. That is not celebrity. Celebrity does not do that. Something else was moving through her, and it was moving through her because she got out of the way of it, and she got out of the way of it by never once pretending to be other than she was.

Divine human seems about right. A woman, fully. And in the fullness, the other thing.

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She held it all in one body

This is the part that undoes me.

She stood for unity in a culture that insists on relenting polarity and disagreement and she did it without a single word of theory.

Gospel and glitter. The cabin and the Dolly empire. The most exaggerated femininity in America wrapped around total sovereignty. She stood filled with three thousand songs, her own publishing house, a park, a foundation, and a mind like a steel trap.

Dolly embodied the sacred and profane in the same outfit, with no apparent tension between them, because she had never accepted that there was supposed to be one.

She entered a drag contest as herself once and lost. She told that story for fifty years, delighted.

And underneath all of it, the sparkle and the twinkle and the frankly heroic quantity of makeup, there was a living, walking heart of human kindness, dressed up as a joke so that people would let her get close enough to use it.

Three hundred and five million books through the post to children, because her father could not read. A thousand dollars a month to every family that lost a home when the fires came through the Smokies, for as long as it took. A million to Vanderbilt because a friend mentioned the research, which turned out to be the Moderna vaccine, about which she was faintly embarrassed. Five hundred dollars to every child in her county who stayed in school, until the dropout rate went from thirty-five per cent to six.

She made herself into an archetype and then filled it with a real woman. Most of us manage one or the other.

And she did it with no map, my loves. That is the thing I keep having to sit back down about. There was nobody ahead of her. No woman in that business had built her own park, run her own foundation, walked away from the biggest show in the genre with nothing lined up, and been right. She made her own way in the world, on her own terms, from nothing, in an industry designed to ensure that she could not succeed on her own terms…

What she leaves

She used to say that if you want the rainbow you have to put up with the rain.

Which is the sort of thing that gets embroidered onto a cushion and stops meaning anything. Except that she meant it. She had the rain. The poverty, the mockery, the decades of being underestimated by men who thought the hair was the whole story. And she declined, throughout, to become hard. That is the discipline. That is the actual practice. Everything else was costume.

She was who she was. A woman unto herself. And in that, she was true.

Rest well, sister. Go and find Carl. And save a dance for Tim.

In love and devotion

Elane Kalila

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Today it is the Code of the Edge.

That the not-knowing is also the fertile void. A creative space, and the place the next inspiration of creation actually comes from. That the edge, where one world ends and the next has not begun, is the most alive ground on Earth. And that what is calling you from the other side of it is wilder and more beautiful than anything the known can hold.

And here is the knot tied over it. That safety lives in the known.

I hear that one in myself, and it does not sound like fear at all. It sounds like good sense. It sounds like a woman being sensible about her life. You already know how to do this. Do the thing that worked last time. Work a little harder at it. Make more of it.

And underneath, much quieter, the one that is actually running the show. If you cannot see the path, you are lost.

I have believed that voice for most of my life, my loves. I am only now beginning to suspect it has that last part backwards.

You are not lost.

You are early.

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Returning

I have been quiet here. Not because nothing was happening, but because something has been percolating that I have had no words for at all. A sea of feelings. Half-caught images. And mostly, if I am honest, emptiness.

This is the tenth piece I have written since I came home. I have published none of them, because only now am I inching closer to being able to speak from this new place within me.

So here I am, returning to you from a full month on pilgrimage.

This is what I have to bring back.

A Pilgrimage Is Where Your Soul Becomes More Fully Embodied

Here is what I have remembered about the true nature of a pilgrimage.

It is not a holiday. A pilgrimage is an active spiritual practice. It is a practice where you are called to let go of the habits and routines that clutter your everyday life, and to unknit yourself from the known.

In truth, what you are doing is dislodging yourself on purpose.

Every tradition that walks its people somewhere knows this. You take the body a long way from its routines and its comforts and its usual rooms, and you keep going, and the routines fall off. Not because you renounced them nobly. Because they cannot survive the distance. What is left is a good deal barer than what set out, and a month of it does that thoroughly.

You do not go to acquire anything. You go to be emptied out.

And in that emptying, something else becomes possible, which is the actual point. The soul comes further into your body. You begin to feel the edges of your own aliveness, in your heart and in the soles of your feet. You become more embodied as a soul. More present. More here.

And what I have remembered in this last month is that the emptying is the point.

And what is real is that you are changed by a pilgrimage. Genuinely changed, in ways you did not choose and cannot undo. And then you come home to a life that was built by the woman you were before you left.

That is where I have been these last weeks. Standing in my own kitchen, almost breathless, looking straight at the edge of what is next in my life and having absolutely no words for it. I have been rearranged from the inside out.

That is the beauty of it, and it is also the whole challenge of it, and I do not think you get one without the other.

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On the Beach at Iona

It is my fifty-eighth birthday and I am sitting on a beach on Iona, and my heart has cracked open.

It is not grief that my tears are bearing, but beauty, and awe, and wonder, and something I can only call freedom, arriving all at once while I am simply sitting on stones looking at the impossibly turquoise water.

And underneath it there is a remembrance. An unmistakable sense of having been brought here before, to the edge of exactly this much beauty.

I do not know what to do with that, so I sit with it a long time and let the tide come in over my feet.

Iona is a small island off the west of Mull, in the Hebrides. The Celts spoke of thin places, where the veil between the worlds goes permeable, and this is among the most loved of them.

In ancient history it was almost certainly Druid holy ground, where they came to bury their kings and to initiate them into kinghood. You feel the otherworldliness of it as you come off the short ferry from Mull. Iona is spoken of as the place where heaven meets earth, and where the veil is gossamer thin.

The Abbey is a heart-temple, saturated with fifteen centuries of prayer. But it was the soft rose granite ruins of the Nunnery that undid me, because it holds the memory of women’s devotion and leadership and hidden wisdom, and it is a ruin.

There is a Sheela-na-Gig on those walls. A squatting female figure, worn almost to nothing by weather and centuries, and still there. Which is the entire history of the feminine on that island in a single carving. Columba is said to have sent the women away, over to the neighbouring Eilean nam Ban, the Isle of Women.

Exiled. And enduring anyway.

West of where I am sitting there is nothing at all until Labrador.

The Isle That Dreamed of the Daughter of God

There is a prophecy attached to this island. Around 1900 the Celtic Revival writer William Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod, called Iona the Mecca of the Gael and recorded an old prophecy that Christ would come again there. And then a second, obscurer one, that this second coming would be feminine. The Divine Spirit born again through a woman. The Daughter of God. Little Iona as a Gaelic Bethlehem.

That is a mystical creation of around 1900 rather than an ancient text, and the claims that Christ or the Magdalene ever set foot here live on in the imagination. But close by on Mull, in an old church at Dervaig, there is a beautiful stained glass window of Yeshua and Magdalene, and she appears in it to be clearly pregnant.

Whatever we make of all that, what I can speak to from my own heart and body is the magic of this part of the world.

Because here is what happened, sitting on the stones in the Nunnery. I closed my eyes and let my mind become still, and with my inner vision I could see soaring columns of rose gold light. As though I were seeing the energetic architecture of the place, infused with an extraordinary beauty and tenderness. I could feel my heart soften and open. And when I opened my eyes there in front of me were pink roses, growing wild, in the middle of what was once a women’s order that opened its doors to any woman in need, whatever her station in life.

And I could feel the current that names this island as a place where the daughters of the Goddess have always returned.

And that I am among them.

That, incidentally, is what it is to stand at an edge. You face the unknown. You are asked to be somewhere true before you can prove that it is true, and something in you either says yes to that, or spends the rest of its life waiting for a certainty that is not coming.

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The Comfort of the Known

Now here is what the emptying revealed, and it is the question that had me on that beach for hours.

We become extraordinarily busy with what we already know.

Think how much of our very competent lives are spent this way. Doing the thing we are good at. Running the offer that worked last year. Answering the question we have answered before, in the words we already found for it, which are fine words, and true words, and last year’s.

We become habitual in the known. And the known is comfortable precisely because it asks nothing of us.

Here is the cost, which I only saw with the tide washing over my feet. When we are that busy with what we know, we cannot see past it. Not will not. Cannot. The known fills the whole frame, and whatever is standing just beyond it, waiting, gets no light at all.

This, incidentally, is where the wordlessness came from. The words I could reach for were the words of the woman I was before this pilgrimage.

And underneath the wordlessness, something is pulling. I cannot name it yet, and I have stopped trying to. All I can tell you is its direction, which is away from everything I already know how to do well.

Something in me is calling for more wildness and more beauty than the known can hold.

The Edge Effect

There is a word in ecology for the place where two worlds meet. An ecotone. The margin between forest and grassland, between river and bank, between ocean and shore. And what ecologists find there is called the edge effect. The ecotone holds more life than either of the worlds it sits between, because you get the creatures of the first, and of the second, and then a third category on top. The ones that live nowhere else. Species that exist only in the margin.

That went through me like a bell, sitting where the Atlantic was ceremonially washing my feet clean.

The most biodiverse place in any landscape is the strip belonging to neither side. It changes constantly, and from a distance it looks like nothing much at all. Which is exactly what a threshold in a life feels like from the inside, and exactly what it looks like from the outside to everybody wondering when you will get on with it.

The margin is not the empty place. It is where the new species come from.

Her

And of course, I find myself turning to her. Because the Magdalene is the patron of the emptied out, and she is the pilgrim before any of us.

The old Provençal traditions, gathered up in the Golden Legend, hold that after everything she went through she was put out to sea, in a boat with no rudder or sail. She was set adrift by people who wanted her gone and left to whatever the water decided. She washed up on a foreign shore, at the edge of a world she had not chosen, with nothing at all in her hands.

I hold this deep soul story close to my heart, knowing that it holds seeds for us all. That there are times in our lives when we need to empty out and allow ourselves to drift on the current. And to land somewhere we never anticipated landing.

There is another moment of hers I keep returning to, because it is the same edge in a different garden.

She goes to the tomb in the dark, before the morning, carrying oils to tend a body. Which is to say she goes expecting nothing at all except grief and the work of the ending. She has no idea a resurrection is available.

She stands at that threshold in the dark, not knowing.

And it is her it opens for.

And there is a very necessary emptying out that has to happen before the next thing can arrive.

Now, I thought that over these last few years I had been emptied almost entirely through my menopause gateway. But it turns out there was more emptying to do, and where it has left me is cast ashore on a new land that I am unfamiliar with.

And although I am a bit disoriented, I am also somehow washed clean. It is as though I can see the old habits and the old schtick so very clearly, and I am not willing to go back. Or perhaps, more accurately, I am not able to.

And perhaps that is the whole point of a pilgrimage.

Now, You

So let me ask you what I have been asking myself.

Where have you become habitual in the known? What are you very good at, that you keep doing partly because you are very good at it, and partly because doing it means you never have to stand in the open and find out what is next?

And the harder one. Where are you carrying on doing the thing that you know in your heart you do not want to do any more? What are you managing, arranging, keeping just slightly in hand, because underneath it you do not entirely trust that you will be held if you let go?

Do not answer that quickly. I have been at it all season. Some of it is very old in me, and I suspect in you. In my family love was tied to doing things well. Love was productivity. A child who learns that does not simply grow up hardworking. She grows up unable to go fallow, because fallow feels exactly like falling.

The Practice

There is a practice people do on Iona, at the bay where the women of the sacred isle would come ashore with their hearts filled with prayers. It called to me and so I offer it to you wherever you are.

You find two stones.

The first is what you are ready to put down. Hold it long enough to be honest about what it actually is, then throw it into the sea and watch it go.

The second is what is coming. You will almost certainly not be able to name it, and that is rather the point. Hold it anyway, let it be the unnamed thing, and put it in your pocket.

If you are nowhere near the sea this works perfectly well with a stone from the garden, and I am not being flippant. It is about the enactment of a ritual that your body understands because it is the oldest way that we pray.

And then, and this is the part I find hardest, do not follow it with a plan. Stand in the not-knowing on purpose. Resist the urge to fill an ending with an immediate beginning, because the ground needs the empty season, and so do you, and so does whatever is trying to arrive.

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Down First, Then Up

You do not have to go to a Hebridean island for any of this. Pilgrimage is a practice, not simply an activity, and it begins the moment you deliberately dislodge yourself from the comfort of what you already know.

But you do have to actually go. That is the part I cannot soften. Something has to be left behind, or nothing empties, and if nothing empties there is no room for what is coming.

So let the known loosen its grip. Listen to the air for what is being called forward, and let it stay unnamed a while longer than is comfortable. Because whatever is out there past the edge of what you already know how to do is wilder than that, and more beautiful than that. That is the only reason it would be worth the crossing.

And you are held. I say that while still learning it in my own nervous system, because I know that I am sharing this with you from within the journey, not from some distant vantage point where I have everything tied up in a bow and resolved. What’s the fun in that!!

Is it resolved? Not remotely. I will wander back and forth across the edge, and I will catch myself, and breathe and remember that I don’t know whoI am right now - or what is next. That something cracked open on that beach, and I am not going to hurry it into an answer.

And if you are standing in your own not-knowing as you read this, wondering when you will finally get on with it, I will say again what I said at the beginning.

You are not lost.

You are early.

Down first, my loves. Then up. She has never taught it any other way.

I see. I hear. I speak. I am here now.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

If this is your work too

I am teaching The Magdalene Frequency with The Shift Network, and we began on Monday 18th August. It is not too late to join us.

This is where we go into it properly. What love actually is, past the feeling. The fearless inventory of self, held not through the judging God eye we were handed, but through the eye of the heart. The nous and the middle way. Anointing, sovereignty, and the daily refinement of recognising when we are in the frequency of love and when we are not. All taught from the glorious edge of my unbecoming and becoming…which is the whale point!

Come and sit with us.

Join The Magdalene Frequency →

Tell me in the comments where you are standing at your own edge, and what you are not yet able to name. I am reading, and I am right there with you.

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The Thing I Keep Circling

It is the stage.

There. I have been circling that one sentence for a year, and now that it is written down my whole body is shuddering a little, and part of me wants to take it straight back. I am not going to.

Let me go back a bit.

Last week, on the Magdalene’s feast day, I wrote about the edge of my worth. Except it was never only mine I was circling. It was ours. That old wound in women that is somehow still healing, all these centuries on. The one that told the women in my line, the washerwomen and the housemaids, to know their place and stay quietly inside it. The Magdalene got the same treatment, only writ enormous. The apostle to the apostles, turned into a whore with a single sermon. Make a woman small enough to fit a scullery, or small enough to fit a patriarchal Church. It is the same move. Whichever one you happen to run.

And underneath all of that, for me, there was the girl I was at thirteen, who wanted to step onto the stage so badly, and had already understood that wanting, for a girl like her, was a way to get hurt. I wrote all the way around her last week, but I never quite spoke to the depth that she holds. Which is, that I have wanted to act, to perform, to be up there, since I was a very small child. I have wanted it my whole life. I am nearly sixty, and underneath everything, I still feel a tad bit unrequited in my deepest desire. Which is why I am writing this to you..

I wonder if you have one of those too. A desire you have been courting almost silently, for a very long time. Keep it in your mind as you read, if you do. This is as much about yours as it is about mine.

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My First Love

Back in my twenties I was spellbound by theatre. Drawn, hard, to what came over me the moment I stepped inside one. The hush of it. The performance as a kind of shamanic ritual, the way it takes hold of a whole room and moves something through it and heals. I had no words for it then. I only knew it felt the way I had always thought church was meant to feel and somehow never did. The sacred, kept in the body. Present. Alive. Unashamed of itself.

The church I was raised in had taken all of that out and handed me the bones. The theatre had defiantly held on to it. And though I could not have told you this at thirteen, I think what I was truly in love with, before I had her name for it, was the Magdalene’s own way. The embodied sacred. The very thing the patriarchal Church had to turn a woman into a whore in order to bury.

But there is another side to this, and I will not pretty it up. I was painfully self-conscious in those days, and painfully anxious, and the anxiety was sitting on top of a deep wound of not-enoughness and an early childhood abandonment I had no words for yet. I was, plainly, badly wounded. And so it was the auditions that did me in.

You walk in, you hand a room full of strangers the pen, and they write down what you are worth, over and over, and if you were raised the way I was, every no just confirms the low nagging suspicion that you are out of your depth and will never be good enough. One day I saw something, clear as anything, in my mind’s eye. I saw myself worn down by the rejection, taking to drink, maybe worse, quietly ruined by it. I do not think I was being dramatic. I think I was seeing the actual road ahead, and I knew I did not yet have the ego strength to walk it and come out whole. So I left. Told myself it was the sensible choice. It was fear, mostly. I can see that now.

But here is what took me thirty years to understand. It was never really the applause, or even being chosen. That part I could take or leave. It was the other thing. Standing up, letting something true come through me, watching it land in a room full of people. Sacred theatre, if you need a name for it. A place where meaning drops into the body, where we are changed by the ritual of a live encounter with the mythic parts of ourselves. That is what I have been in love with the whole time. It is what led me onto the path of the priestess, and I have spent the last twenty years curating sacred theatre, ceremony, ritual.

And yet. Something has still been tugging.

Then This Week Happened

I could have gone on circling it forever. Then this week the sky did something a bit audacious!

Here is how I hold astrology, so you know where I am standing. I don’t see it as fate. It does not reach down and decide anything for you. I see it as a mirror. It shows you the moment you are actually in more clearly than you can ever see it from inside it, and it has a way of marking the moments that count, the ones where you get to choose something, and choose it awake instead of half asleep. Take what is useful in that. Leave the rest.

Last night. The Sun and Jupiter met in Leo, right on top of each other. The old astrologers called it a cazimi. A planet burned clean in the very heart of the sun, at full strength. In Leo. Heart, creativity, being seen. Not what you would call a subtle message. Step up. Take the seat. Stop making yourself small so the room stays comfortable.

Which would have been a lovely day, if that were all of it.

It wasn’t. The same night the moon came full in Aquarius, sitting right on top of Pluto. Who runs the underworld. So one half of the sky was shouting rise up and shine, and the other half was hauling up every last thing you have buried about your own power, and every reason you are afraid of it.

Both. The same night.

And it is all still up, by the way. That is the thing about a full moon on Pluto. It does the digging, and then it leaves the spoil heaped on the surface for you to deal with in the cold light of morning. Which is more or less where I am writing this from. The morning after.

I have been sitting with it since, because that is the whole thing, really. You do not get the one without the other. I went looking for a way round it, some version where you get the shine and skip the going-down. There isn’t one. I checked.

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What I Actually Know About This

I know this part from the inside, not from any book. Thirty years of my own going down, and of sitting with other women while they went down too.

I have tried to skip it, more than once. I have reached for the big bright visible thing with nothing underneath to hold it, and felt it wobble, because there was only air under me and no ground. And I have bolted the other way just as often, scrambled back into the small safe shape at the first gust of ridicule and called the retreat humility. I know both of those from the inside.

What waits down there, when I finally go, is almost always something quite ordinary. For me it is two rooms. The audition, with its pen and its strangers. And the scullery my grandmothers cleaned. The old not-enoughness, wearing whatever face it needs to wear that day.

The dark is not the thing standing in the way of the calling. It is the floor the calling stands on. I don’t think I properly understood that until this week, writing it down.

Her

And then, of course, her.

The Magdalene is the one figure I know of who faces both ways at once. We remember the bright one, on the rare occasions we let her be anything at all. The apostle. The teacher. The one who carried it out into the world. Fine. All true.

But she came by it underground. She stayed at the cross when it was unbearable and everyone else had run. She went to the tomb in the dark, before the morning. The old lineages keep her shadow names too. The Death Maiden. The Myrrhbearer, with her jar of oil for the dead.

She went all the way down. That is the only reason she was the first one there when it started to rise. The only reason they trusted her to carry it back.

And she did all of it as a woman who flatly refused to be made small. Which is the part the whore story was invented to make us forget.

She had her own money, and she spent it as she pleased. It is right there in Luke, the women who bankrolled the whole travelling ministry out of their own purses, her name at the head of the list. She was also, and I will say this plainly because I have come to believe it, the woman who broke open a jar of pure spikenard, a full year’s wages of it, and poured every last drop of it over Yeshua in a room full of muttering men, and would not apologise for the extravagance of her love. The gospels give that woman the name Mary of Bethany. I stand with the older tradition that holds Mary of Bethany and the Magdalene to be one and the same woman. The lie was never that her names were joined. The lie was the one they folded in alongside them, that she was a whore. Take that back out, and what you are left with is a woman refusing to shrink her love down to a size that would keep the men in the room comfortable.

And in the gospel that carries her own name, the one they kept out of the book, there is a scene I turn over and over. The men are frightened and scattered after his death, and it is Mary who steadies them, Mary who has understood what he taught, Mary who speaks. And Peter cannot bear it. Would he really have spoken to a woman, he says, ahead of us. Did he love her more than us. She does not crumble, and she does not leave the room. She holds her ground, and in the end it is Levi who turns on Peter. If the Saviour made her worthy, who are you to say she is not.

Too much, and never enough. She was handed the very same code as the rest of us. She simply declined it, to their faces.

Down, then up. She did, in a body two thousand years ago, the exact thing the sky asked of the rest of us last night.

And here is the part I have only just let myself feel, and I am half frightened to write it down. The thing I am being called back to, the stage, the sacred theatre, a true thing coming through a living body and landing in a room, that is her work. It was always her work. She did not carry what she carried from behind a lectern, at a safe and tidy distance. She transmitted it. In the flesh. In the anointing, in the encounter, in the room. That is the priestess’s stage, and it is the oldest stage there is. It is the one I walked off nearly forty years ago. And it is the one, I am now fairly sure, that has been calling me back the whole time. In her voice.

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So, My Week

This week it stopped being theory. I had a sensible new programme half-planned, the kind of thing I can build in my sleep, and mid-week it went dead in my hands. What rose up in its place frightened me, which is usually how I know it is the real one. Eek.

Finish the book proposal I have been avoiding for months. Keep writing the book. Get myself back onto a stage. Not curating it this time. On it.

Is it done? No. I will probably reach for the smaller shape again by Friday. But it is in the ground now.

Now, You

I keep thinking it cannot only be me. That I am not the one woman on earth walking around with a dream she put down thirty years ago and told herself she had outgrown.

So let me ask you the thing I have been asking myself all week. What did you want, before you were taught to want less? What was your stage? The painting, the singing, the company you were going to build, the book, the wild unreasonable thing you loved before someone made it quietly clear that girls like us did not get to have it. Where did you set it down. And if you are honest, do you already know that it is still in you, still tugging, still waiting to be picked back up.

Here is what I want you to hear from me this morning, with the moon barely set. It is not too late. It was never too late. The dream did not expire because you got frightened, or sensible, or busy keeping everyone else alive. It has been waiting for you to be ready. And you are readier now, at this age, in this body, with these years behind you, than you have ever been in your life. You have the depth for it now. You have almost nothing left to prove to anybody.

So this is the call, my loves, and I do mean it as a call. Go and find the thing. Say it out loud, the want you were raised not to admit to. That is the Sun and Jupiter in Leo, on your side, and not going anywhere for a year.

Then go down after whatever has been lying underneath the fear of it. The old shame. The voice that said don’t shine. The people who needed you smaller than you were. Sit with all of it. That was the work of last night’s full moon on Pluto, and it did not come to punish you. It came to pour the floor you will be standing on when you finally get up.

Because the seat is real. It is yours. It just happens to sit right on top of the underworld. They always do.

This is what an initiation actually is, once you take the candles and the incense off it. A night when the life you have been living and the one you have not yet dared stand side by side, close enough to touch, and you are asked, quietly, to choose. We are standing in one right now, you and I. She has a way of turning up on nights like last night, to be the witness while we choose.

Do not let this be one more life where you almost. Go all the way to your own edge and live from there. It is the only place worth living from, and I have come to believe it is the whole reason she keeps calling us back.

Down first, my loves. Then up.

I see. I hear. I speak. I am here now.

And this week, Goddess help me, I am planting mine. Tell me, in the comments or just quietly to yourself, what you are finally ready to plant. She is listening. So am I.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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Today, the 22nd of July, is the feast day of Mary Magdalene. And what was done to her was done, in smaller ways, to most of us.

She was, by the oldest accounts, extraordinary. A woman of her own means, who helped fund the entire ministry out of her own purse. She stood at the foot of the cross when nearly every man had fled. She was the first to reach the empty tomb, the first to meet the risen Christ, and the one he sent to carry the news to the others, which is why the early Church gave her a title they gave no other woman. Apostola Apostolorum. The apostle to the apostles. In the gospel that bears her name, she is the disciple who understood what the men could not, the initiate who received the teaching directly, in her own body, and was trusted to carry it.

And then, in the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great stood up in Rome and called her a prostitute.

There is nothing in scripture that says any such thing. It was a smear campaign. A piece of wild gossip that happened to be useful, and it held for fourteen hundred years. The apostle of the apostles became the penitent whore. The teacher became the cautionary tale. The most important woman in the entire story was vehemently, and rather conveniently, reduced, shamed and cast out.

That is not a clerical error, my loves. That is the oldest move there is. When a woman carries real power and real worth, you rarely argue with her directly. You diminish her. You rename her. You hand her a smaller story, and then you train her to be grateful that it fits.

Artwork by https://www.linzyarnott.com/

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The Same Wound, in My Own Blood

I know this move intimately, because a gentler version of it runs in my own line, and I have only lately understood how deep it goes.

I come from generations of servant women. Washerwomen. Housemaids. Women in service, some of them indentured, to the landed gentry of England. Women whose whole survival depended on knowing their place and never once reaching above their station. Do not want more than this. Do not imagine a bigger life than the one you were born into. That teaching goes down through the blood, mother to daughter, a careful dimming passed hand to hand across the centuries.

It is the same diminishing, only domestic. Gregory did it to the Magdalene with a sermon. History did it to my grandmothers with a class. Both did it for the one reason it is ever done. A woman who knows her own worth is very hard to command.

They did not need to burn all of us. For most of us, it was enough to convince us that we were small.

The Edge of My Own Worth

Which brings me to the awkward part, on her feast day.

I am nearly sixty. I have carried this work for thirty years, fifteen as a psychotherapist and fifteen as a teacher and priestess of this very lineage. And I have still been standing at the edge of my own worth, not quite daring to cross it.

There is a fuller, wilder, more visible version of what I am here to do. I can feel it pulling at me, insistent, and it frightens the life out of me. Because every single time I reach for it, some ancient and faithful part of me reaches instead for the smaller, safer, more predictable shape. The washerwoman’s caution. The Magdalene’s diminishing. The old voice that asks, in a tone so reasonable it sounds almost like wisdom, who do you think you are.

Who am I to want to stand fully in this. To take up that much room. To call myself teacher, priestess, initiate, out loud, in front of everyone. To reach, so visibly, above the place I was assigned.

That is the question. And the Magdalene, if we let her, is the answer to it.

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What Her Power Actually Is

Because this is the part we so often get wrong. We imagine that claiming our power means growing hard. Grasping. Loud in the way frightened men are loud. It does not, and she never was.

Her power was of an altogether different order. She was an alchemist, and her elixir was love. She was an initiatrix, the one who anointed, who awakened, who looked at another soul and called its divinity up out of hiding. In the East they remember her as a Myrrhbearer, one who carries the sacred oils to tend both the living and the dead. Her power was the power to see, and to be seen, and to look away from neither. To love so fiercely she could stay present to all of it, the cross, the tomb, the unbearable, when every man there had run. To carry a truth in her own blood and breath and bone, and to speak it out loud without asking anyone’s permission. I see. I hear. I speak.

That is the power we were stripped of. Not domination. Sovereignty. The unshakeable knowing of your own worth, felt from the inside, that no pope and no master and no frightened man can reach in and rename. The power to want, and to reach, and to birth something luminous into the world through the sheer force of your presence, and to call it holy, because it is.

And yes, her power was erotic, in the true and enormous meaning of that word. Not performance. Life force. The current that pours through a woman who is all the way home in her own body, all the way alive, and no longer apologising for either. They had to call her a whore precisely because they could not bear how much life she carried, and how little of it she owed them.

I can hear how all of that reads, written down in daylight. A bit much. I mean every word of it anyway, in the most ordinary and embodied way I know how.

The Shadow I Had to Face

One thing caught me clean off guard, and I would rather own it than write around it.

For a long while, my own version of stepping up was to say, I do not need the light on me, I only want to shine it onto others. To help other women rise. And that is beautiful, and it is genuinely true. But coming from a line of servants, I have had to ask myself a harder question. Is that the healed woman speaking, or is it the servant’s oldest reflex in more spiritual robes? The light deflected off myself, one more time. Still not quite permitted to want it for me.

The Magdalene settles it. She did not empty herself in service. She stood equal. She claimed her own light first, wholly, without apology, and it was out of that overflowing fullness that she anointed anyone at all. There is the difference, and it is everything. The servant gives because she is not allowed to keep. The sovereign woman gives because she is brimming over. I am learning, at last, to fill first. To claim the light as mine, and then to turn it outward. Both. No longer one at the cost of the other.

To Be a Modern Magdalene

So this is what I have come to believe it means to be a modern Magdalene. It has nothing to do with costume, or claiming a title, or calling yourself special. It is quieter, and far more demanding, than that.

It is refusing the diminishing. Every single place the world made you small and taught you to be grateful for it, you go back, and you take your true size again.

It is knowing your worth from the inside, in the one place no one can reach in and rewrite it.

It is wanting, out loud. Reaching above the station you were handed. Being, without apology, too much for anyone who needs you small.

It is standing present to all of it, the beauty and the wreckage both, and staying in love anyway. That was the one power they were never able to take from her. It is the one this breaking world most needs from us now.

And here is the grace note, on her day. It took fourteen hundred years, but even Rome came back around. In 1969 the Church quietly untangled the lie, and in 2016 a pope raised her feast to the same rank as the male apostles, and named her again, in the old and rightful words, the apostle to the apostles. The truth outlasted the smear. It nearly always does.

We are the daughters of the women they could not burn, and the granddaughters of the women they could only silence. Their prayers are in our mouths. And today, on her feast day, I can feel the whole long line of them, the priestesses and the washerwomen both, leaning in to see what we will finally dare to want.

I am not done being frightened, my loves. I catch myself reaching for the smaller shape most weeks, and I daresay I will again next Tuesday. But I am done letting the fear cast the deciding vote. And I suspect, if you have read this far, you are getting there too.

So say her words with me, if you fancy it. I see. I hear. I speak. I am here now.

I am not going back to pretending I am smaller than I was made. Not on her watch. Not on mine.

So my rally cry for us all - is stop dimming ourselves, but more than that- to risk stepping into our own edges. The edges that would call us to heal these last vestiges of our own self worth, for this is a wound that is the most ancient one we carry. And my loves it isn’t even ours! It is the one that was given to us across many generations of women who have had to hide their power.

I am done with that. And Magdalene is here to offer her true story to us… on this day and every day that we call to her.

In love and devotion, Elayne Kalila

I am so blessed to be partnering the with Shift Network on my next Magdalene course. It begins in August and I would be delighted to walk beside you.
If you feel called to check it out here is the link.

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Feeding the Dogs

It rarely arrives the way you expect. Not with a thunderclap, but with something small.

I was standing in the kitchen, feeding the dogs, when my phone pinged. A client, asking to move her session to another time. An ordinary request. And my default, thirty years deep, was already forming the word before I had even finished reading. Yes. Of course. Yes.

Except the time she wanted would tip an already full day into an overfull one. One more thing squeezed into a diary with no room left in it. And still, some old and faithful part of me was reaching for the yes, because saying yes is simply what I do, and because somewhere long ago I had decided that my whole livelihood depended on my always being available. On my never being the one to say no.

And then I felt it. A clench, low and hot, somewhere deep down inside, that after all these years of this work I can name in a heartbeat. Stress. The body speaking before the mind has caught up. And then, underneath the clench, lower still, down in the deep animal dark of the womb, something else stirred. Older than the stress and potent and utterly without doubt. It did not plead. It did not explain itself. It rose up through me like heat coming off a road and it said, no. I cannot do this. However much I once wanted to. This does not feed me any more. Remember.

I looked at the phone. I typed, sorry, no can do. And I put it down.

That was all. Four words. And yet what had just moved through me overrode decades of conditioning. Decades of yes. The yes I genuinely believed my living depended on. Or so I had always thought.

I have spent fifteen years as a psychotherapist, and fifteen more as a spiritual mentor, and in both I have sat with women in this exact passage. I have watched that small, startling no arrive a thousand times, in them, and that afternoon by the dog bowls, in myself. It is not a symptom. It is not you turning difficult, though you will almost certainly be told that it is. It is the first word spoken aloud by a part of you that has been silent for a very long time.

Something is waking. And I suspect you already know it, my loves.

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What Is Actually Waking

Here is what I have come to understand, in the consulting room and in my own body both.

Underneath everything you were ever trained to be, there is a wisdom in you that was never lost. Only buried, and buried alive. A wild, instinctual, blood-and-marrow knowing, older than your manners, older than your conditioning, older than the good girl they built on top of her. She has a body, this knowing. She lives in the womb, and the hips, and the low animal belly, in all the parts of you that were never once fooled. And this peri/menopausal passage, the one your body is in right now, is when she claws her way back up to the surface and opens her eyes.

There is a reason it happens now, in the body, and not only in the soul. For most of our adult lives, the hormonal weather tuned us toward tending. Toward soothing, keeping the peace, reading the room for everyone else’s comfort long before our own. As that weather changes, the tuning changes with it, and the old accommodation grows harder and harder to sustain.

Most of the women I sit with experience this as something going badly wrong with them. It is the opposite. It is a nervous system that is finally, after decades of vigilance, allowed to stop performing everyone else’s safety and start telling the truth.

And the truth, it turns out, has been waiting. Because this peri/menopausal passage carries a second gift, wilder and fiercer than the first. For the first time, you feel the edge of your own life. Your finitude. Your mortality, plain as a hand laid on your shoulder. And it burns the nonsense clean off you, the way heat renders fat off a flame.

What is left, when it has finished, is appetite. Real, unhidden, no-longer-apologising appetite. You stop pouring yourself out for everyone else, and you begin, at last, to want, out loud. You start asking the questions you were always far too busy and far too well-behaved for. What makes me feel alive in my own skin. What do I actually hunger for. Where has my pleasure been all these years, and who on earth taught me to ration it. What do I want, now that I can feel the whole sweet finite shape of my one and only life.

That is the wild knowing. The primal wisdom, catching light again in the body like a banked fire that has finally found air, and at long last making itself known. The woman it makes is not some diminished, faded thing. She is riper than she has ever been. Fuller. Warmer. Bloodier and braver and more herself than the world ever once gave her permission to be.

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Why Nobody Told You

Here is the part that makes me still feel the heat of my own anger my loves, and I think you may feel it with me…

Nobody told you any of this. No one sat you down at forty-five and said, a great initiation is coming, and here is the map. Every culture that ever knew how to love its women marked this threshold. Ours took it, scraped the meaning out of it, and handed it back as a list of symptoms and a gentle nudge toward the exit.

And we did not only lose a ritual. We lost the elders. Because the entire point of a maven is that she has walked through the fire and then turns around to light the path for the women coming up behind her, and a culture that spends decades convincing its midlife women that they are declining, fading, and past it has quietly switched off its own wisest generation at the precise moment it needs them most.

That is not a rite of passage. That is an abandonment. And we have been calling it normal.

The Turn

There is a shape to this peri/menopausal crossing, and it is worth knowing.

The whole of our mothering years is one long act of tending. Giving, holding, nesting, pouring our light into everyone but ourselves. This threshold is the turn. The moment a woman stops handing her life force away and gathers it, at last, back toward herself. It can feel like selfishness, if you were raised the way most of us were. It is not. It is the most natural correction of a whole life.

And it asks of you the one thing you were trained, somewhere back around thirteen, never to do. To take up room. To stop dimming. To be seen, exactly as you are.

Not That Kind of Radiance

Now let me be clear about what I mean by being seen, because the culture has already sold us the cheap version.

The cheap version is vanity. Performance. Being seen for a curated, filtered, surgically smoothed edition of yourself, and calling it confidence. The culture would love for you to hear “step into your radiance” and reach for the syringe. That is not radiance. That is the old dimming in a brighter dress.

The radiance I mean is the exact opposite. It is the light of a woman who has stopped performing entirely. Whose face has lines in it, and lets them show, because every one of them is hers. It is not a surface, and it is not for sale, and it is certainly not on offer to the twenty-year-old, whatever the adverts insist. You have to have earned it, down in the dark, over years.

Because the radiance I mean is simply this. It is your wild knowing, with the lights finally switched on.

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As Above, So Below

I hold astrology the way I hold all the deep old maps. Not as fate. Not as fortune-telling. As an archetypal mirror, as above, so below. The great players moving across the sky are the same players moving through us, only writ enormous, and when I read the heavens I am reading the pattern of the very moment we are all standing inside.

And the pattern this week is almost too on the nose to bear.

On the 30th of June, Jupiter, the vast archetype of expansion and blessing, moved into Leo, for the first time in twelve years, and there it stays for thirteen months. For the last year it sat in Cancer. The nest. The mother. The tending of everyone else. This week it crossed up out of the nest and into Leo, the sign of the Sun. Radiance. The heart. The courage to be seen.

Which is the maven’s exact passage, written vast across the stars. The same archetypal turn your body is making right now, up out of the tending and into the radiance, is being made overhead by the largest and most generous force in the sky. What is stirring in you is stirring in the heavens. As above, so below. And the heavens have gone and parked the planet of expansion in the house of the heart, and left the lights blazing for a whole year.

You do not have to read the sky the way I do to feel it. But I read it this way, and it is telling me precisely what my body already knew. These are the archetypal forces most alive in us now. Expansion. Radiance. The heart, thrown wide open. This is the season to come up out of hiding.

An Invitation

On Wednesday July 8th, I am opening the door to a free live gathering called Wild Knowing, where I lay out the whole map of this passage, its seven gateways, and help you find exactly where you are standing on it right now. It is the thing I wish to God someone had handed me, years ago, when I was down on my own floor with no idea what had hold of me.

Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife

🌑 Wednesday, 8 July · on Zoom · [12noon PT] · replay available

→ Reserve your place: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/wild-knowing/

And if this is not your passage, if you are a man, or simply not standing at this threshold, send it to a woman you love. She may be somewhere in her own ordinary afternoon right now, phone in hand, frightened of her own no.

Let Them Look

You were never too much. You were told to be less, by people who could not hold your light.

That is over now.

Your radiance was never vanity, and it was never a decline. It is your wild knowing, awake at last, blood-warm and unafraid, and no longer willing to hide.

Step out of the wings. Let them look.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

P.S. For the women who want to walk the whole passage, and not only glimpse the map, I open my nine-month journey, Metamorphosis, in August. But that is for another day. Come to Tuesday first.

A gentle note. This passage can stir up deep and difficult things, and there is no courage lost in reaching for real support. A good doctor, a trained therapist, or a circle of women who are going through what you are is priceless.

Before we begin: I'm holding a free live gathering, Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. The first session, Primal Awakening, maps peri/menopause as a rite of passage, not a thing to Google at 3am with an ice pack on your neck. [Save your seat here →]

I have spent my whole life trying to get out from under my mother’s illness.

She was so ill, for so long, that she could not raise me. I grew up under the long shadow of it, in a house that held the void of her presence as well as sickness, carrying a terror I had no words for. It is the terror of a kid who learns very early that the person she loves most is suffering, and might be taken at any moment, and that there is nothing, nothing at all, she can do about it.

I tried to outrun it. Of course I did. That is what you do. But the running did not work. It never does. By my twenties I was having panic attacks, the kind that fold you in half in the supermarket and convince you that you are dying by the tinned tomatoes. I cracked, more than once.

So I did the only other thing I could think of. If I could not outrun the terror, I would turn around and walk straight at it, and make it my life’s work.

I trained as a therapist. I made trauma my whole study, in the early days, when we were only just beginning to understand that you did not have to have come back from a war to be carrying one. I dived as far as the understanding went, and then further. I sat with the abandonment, the mother too ill to hold me. I sat with the emotional neglect and rage of that house. I worked it, and worked it, and a great deal of it I genuinely healed.

I had, as they say, done the work. I had built an entire life out of doing the work.

So you can imagine my position, in my mid-forties, when perimenopause arrived and my own body began, for the first time in years, to let me down. And something came up the stairs in the dark and sat down on the end of my bed.

The terror.

Not a memory of it. The thing itself, live, as though no time had passed. My heart going like a trapped bird. My whole nervous system standing to attention at three in the morning, certain that something was terribly, irreversibly wrong with me.

And I lay there and thought the most frightening thought I have ever had.

I thought: it has all come to nothing. The therapy, the spiritual training, the whole life’s work. The thing I had given my life to mastering had got up and walked back into the room, and I was as helpless before it as I had been at five years old.

I had it completely wrong. But it took me a while to see how.

I would love to have you join me for: Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. The first session, Primal Awakening, maps peri/menopause as a rite of passage and gives you back a story of this part of your life that is empowering and filled with miracles. [Save your seat here →]

What Actually Came for Me

What had come back was not what I thought.

It was not the abandonment. I had met the abandonment. It was not the emotional turbulence of my childhood home. I had met that too, named it, felt it, set it down with the help of people far wiser than me.

And it was not even that the fear underneath it all was new to me. This is the part I most need to have you get, in case you are sitting there certain that you, at least, have already dealt with yours.

With utmost clarity what I can tell you now, is that the deepest fear I carried, was the fear of becoming her, becoming my mun. Of ending up in the bed. Of inheriting the suffering I watched her live inside for her whole life. And I had touched that fear before. I had named it out loud, in therapy rooms, for years, as a client and, heaven knows, as a clinician. I thought I had met it.

But I had not met the fear, not really, not like this. Not the way it came for me at perimenopause.

What came then was the same fear, stripped of every comfort and cushion and clever coping I had ever built around it. It came at a depth I did not know was there. Sheer, total, blood-and-bone terror, the kind that does not negotiate and could not care in the slightest how many books you have read about it. I had studied this exact terror for a living. And nothing, nothing, could have prepared me for meeting it in the full.

That is the thing about this peri/menopausal passage that I cannot say loudly enough. You can have done years of real and honest deep work, and still be taken somewhere by it that no work could have readied you for. Because the depth that opens here was simply not available to you before. Something had been keeping the very floor of it out of reach your whole life. And I want to share with you what has now become clear tome, in the hopes that it might help you or someone that you know.

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And Then I Found Out Why

So what was it, this something that had been holding the very floor of my deepest fear out of reach my entire life?

The answer came to me in two parts. One I had carried all along, in my body. The other I had to be shown.

The part I had carried all along, I had known in my body and my heart for years, the way I have come to know most true things, long before I could prove a word of it. My body was not betraying me. My body was finishing something it had begun a very long time ago. The terror had not come back because my healing had failed. It had come because, for the first time in my life, there was nothing left to hold the floor of it down.

That was the knowing. Then came the second part. The science. And it did not argue with the knowing. It corroborated it. It handed my body’s quiet certainty a second witness, a language the knowing could finally be spoken in.

It was the oestrogen.

Deep in the brain sits the amygdala, the small structure whose whole job is to scan for threat. Your smoke alarm. And for most of your life, oestrogen has been resting a quiet hand on it, steadying it, softening it. You never knew. You never had to. It had been doing a great deal of unpaid emotional labour on your behalf for thirty years. Quietly. Without thanks. Rather on brand, when you think about it.

And there is a second piece. Rebecca Thurston, at Pittsburgh, has shown that in women who carry trauma, the nervous system’s brake, the part meant to bring you home to calm after a fright, is worn thin. The body cannot come down so easily once it has spiked. So the alarm is louder, and the brake is weaker, at the precise moment the chemical that managed both is walking out of the door.

For thirty years that chemistry had not only steadied the alarm. It had held the very floor of my deepest fear out of reach, beneath even my best work. And now, in perimenopause, the oestrogen was falling away, and the floor it had held down simply, quietly, dropped open. And I fell all the way to the bottom of a thing I had only ever stood at the top of.

I was not becoming my mother.

I was being dismantled, all the way down.

And, my love, if some version of this is happening to you, then so are you. And I am here with you. You are not alone.

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What Almost No One Is Telling Women

This is not rare. It is one of the most common and least spoken things in the whole peri/menopausal passage, and it was only named properly in 2023, in the journal Menopause, by the Grady Trauma Project team at Emory. We had known for twenty years that trauma makes the physical passage harder. Two thousand and twenty-three before anyone turned it around and said out loud that the peri/menopausal passage also wakes the trauma.

And, here’s the kicker, it happens even to women who did the work. Who healed everything they could reach, and felt genuinely free. And then perimenopause arrives and the old wounds come back at a depth they were never met at before, and every one of them is convinced, as I was, that it means that somehow we didnt do enough…

But that is not really the truth. What we all did reached as far as anything could reach while the chemistry was still holding the floor down. This depth was simply not available to you before. Now it is. That is not collapse. That is the next gate.

A word of honesty, because I would rather be honest than have everything all tidy.

You might think the answer is simply to put the oestrogen back. For many women hormone support genuinely helps, and it is worth a real conversation with a good doctor. But a second study, from the same Emory team in late 2025, found that in women with trauma histories, extra oestrogen did not calm the fear the way it did in women without it. So if the quiet does not come on schedule, do not pick up the cruellest stick available and beat yourself with it, love. You are not behind. You are not failing the initiation. You are walking a longer road, and the length of it is only the measure of how much you carried, and how young you were when they handed it to you. And guess what I am walking it with you , even now.

What They Call Her Instead

I have walked you down through Inanna’s gates in this series, where everything you came in wearing is stripped from you, one threshold at a time. This is the gate behind the gate. This is what the stripping was always for. To bring you down to the thing you buried deepest, so it can finally be carried back up into the light and set down.

Now here is what the culture calls it instead.

It calls us mad.

It always has. A woman of forty-four whose oldest terror floods back is told she is anxious. Hormonal. Depressed. Difficult. Too sensitive. Too much. She is handed a prescription to take the edge off the very thing clawing its way up, after thirty years, to finally be healed. They called it hysteria once. They built asylums for it. The vocabulary is tidier now, but the instinct has not shifted an inch. See the woman come undone. Name the undoing a malfunction. Medicate the messenger. Send her home with no deeper support.

And a word I will not leave out. Black women and Native women carry trauma at far higher rates, which makes them among the hardest hit by this collision, and the least likely to be seen in it. If that is you, what you feel is not weakness and it is not too much. You deserve the most tender holding in the room, and you have most often been given the least.

The undoing is not the malfunction. The undoing is the healing, arriving at last, in the only form it had left.

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What Helps, and Why You Cannot Do It Alone

So what do you do with this, when it comes.

The first thing, gentler and more powerful than it sounds, is understanding. Knowing this is real, that it has a name and a mechanism, that it is not a verdict on you. The body settles the instant the story changes from something is wrong with me to this is a known thing, and it is not just me.

Beyond that the supports are specific. Trauma-focused therapy, and because the deepest of this lives below language, the approaches that reach the body, EMDR among them, matter enormously.Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia for the sleep, asked for by name. And the plain, underrated work of bringing the body down before bed. None of it is nothing.

But here is the humbling truth, and I give it to you because it is important we look at it…

I had spent my whole life understanding trauma. I could have lectured on exactly what was happening to me from my own sickbed. And when the floor dropped, the depth of it was still beyond anything I could have prepared for, and I still could not hold myself through it alone.

You cannot know in advance how far down it goes. Which is exactly why you do not go down without someone holding the rope. A rite of passage that takes you into the underworld and abandons you there is not a rite of passage. It is just an abandonment with very good lighting.

This is exactly why I built Metamorphosis: Menopause as Initiation, a nine-month journey to the Midlife Maven. The descent, done properly, with real holding around it and a floor underneath it. It begins in August. And it is held by my training as a psychotherapist, which is why I will, without a moment’s hesitation, walk a woman toward specialised trauma support whenever that is what the moment calls for. The holding is real, or it is nothing.

If any of this has landed in your body, I invite you to come deeper into the conversation. Join me for the Wild Knowing webinar series, opening on the 8th of July, where we will go deeper into everything I have written here, and where you will receive your invitation to join the full journey if you are called.

The Gift in the Rising

And now the most important thing, because without it everything I have written is only half the truth.

This is not simply a hard thing that happens to you. It is the work of the passage itself. Whatever you have not yet dealt with, whatever you have spent a lifetime shoving down and burying and building careful compensations around, this is the season it rises. Not to punish you. By design. So that it can finally be felt, and seen, and loved, and at long last dealt with.

That is the gift. It does not look like one while you are inside it. I know. But it is one.

I can tell you exactly what mine was, my loves. My whole life, I had organised myself around not becoming my mother. And that avoidance, which felt like protection, was quietly doing the opposite, because you cannot love a body you are terrified of becoming. I had been at war with my own body, low and constant and out of sight.

The terror that rose in perimenopause was the very thing I needed to face, because facing it was the only way to lay that war down. It was the gate to my own body. On the far side of it, for the first time in my life, I began to love this body. To care for it. To listen to it. Not as the enemy that might become her. As mine. As me. As the only home I will ever have.

And had I not faced it, I am quite certain I would have driven my own health to a far more precarious edge, precisely through my terror of ending up where she did. The fear of becoming her was, unfaced, the very thing most likely to make me ill. Facing it is what is keeping me well.

I am not perfect at this. There are still days I feel the old terror at the edges of things. But it is being loved into wholeness now, a little more each time. And here is the part I can still hardly believe when I say it out loud. The very thing my mother was too ill to do for me, to hold me, to tend me, to keep me safe in my own body, I have finally learned how to do for myself.

That is the miracle of it. And it is why, from the far side of the worst of it, I am grateful for this rite of passage.

The One Thing to Carry

So if she is sitting at the end of your bed tonight, an old fear come back at a depth you have never met, even one you were certain you had healed, hear this.

This is not proof that you failed. This is not your fate, arriving. This is the buried thing, come up at last to be loved into wholeness. It has waited your whole life to be met, and it has chosen this peri/menopausal passage, of all passages, because this is the one where you are finally strong enough to meet it, and finally able to be held while you do.

So meet this moment my love. With help. With people who know exactly what they are doing. Let yourself be felt and seen and loved, the way you have always needed to be. And then watch, quietly, amazed, as the very thing you were most afraid of becoming hands you back your own life.

This will not destroy you. It did not destroy me.

This, whatever demon it is, will return you to yourself.

You do not have to do it alone. You never did. You were never meant to.

in love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

If this piece stirred something in you, be gentle with yourself today. If old trauma is surfacing, please reach out to a trauma-trained therapist or your doctor. You deserve real support for this, and you do not have to carry it on your own.

And don’t forget to save your seat Wild Knowing: The Hidden Initiation of Midlife, on July 8 at 12pm PT on Zoom. [Save your seat here →]

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The Disappearing

My father is leaving.

Not all at once, which would at least be a thing you could stand at the edge of and mourn cleanly. He is leaving the way the tide leaves, so gradually that you keep thinking it has stopped, and then you look up and another long stretch of him is simply gone. It was a stroke first, that took the first piece of him. Then the dementia came in behind it, and has been quietly carrying off the rest ever since. The names. The threads of a sentence. Most of his speech, lately. He still knows me. That much has stayed, and I am grateful for it past saying. But he has gone quiet now, and lives somewhere deep inside himself, behind eyes that still, thank God, warm when they land on me.

Dementia is a strange grief, my loves, and I did not understand it until I was inside it. You lose the person while they are still sitting in front of you. There is a name the researchers give it, the mourning of the living. They call it ambiguous loss. The grief with no funeral and no clean end, because the person is both gone and not gone, every single day.

And underneath it, where I expected only sorrow, I have found something else. A release. And lately, more and more, something even quieter and more surprising. Something close to peace.

The Dinner

Let me tell you about the last time I sat with him.

I flew back, over the ocean, last year, and we all went out to dinner together, our small family gathered round him. We sat and ate and he could barely find the words any more, and mostly just looked out at us. I felt how far back into himself he had gone. There was a version of me, not so long ago, who would have sat at that table with her heart breaking.

But at some point I reached over and took his hand. And I told him I loved him. I told him there was nothing but love here. Nothing he had to do, or say, or be. That we were all right, he and I. That it was all all right. And it was. It was so simple it astonished me. A hand, and a few plain words, and somehow the whole thing was complete.

And something dissolved in me that night that I had been carrying for the better part of thirty years.

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What I Was Waiting For

Because here is what I had been carrying.

For most of my life there was a small and almost desperate hope beneath everything I built. That one day my father would truly see me. Not the version of me that was useful, or impressive, or easy to be proud of from a distance. Me. The actual one. I wrote about the wider version of this, in a piece I called Fatherless. About a whole culture of us raised by fathers who were present and absent in the same breath, there at the table and gone somewhere behind the eyes. My father was one of those. A good man in many of the ways that get counted, and behind the eyes, in the place I most wanted to reach, somewhere I was never quite let in. I knocked at that door for the better part of fifty years.

And there was one particular shape the longing took, one I have not said out loud to many people. He never came to see me. I built a whole life out here in America, thirty years of it, a life I was proud of, and he never once got on the plane. He never made it here. And for years, God help me, I let that mean the only thing a waiting child knows how to make it mean. That I was not worth the journey. That if he had truly loved me, he would have come.

I know better now. The truth, the one I can finally hold without it cutting me, is that my father loved me. He loved me the whole time, in the way that he was able. It simply was not the way I needed. Those are two different facts, and they are both true, and learning to hold them in the same hand has been most of the work of my middle life. He gave what he had. It was not what I was asking for. And he loved me. All of it, at once, true.

The day I was waiting for, when he would turn and see me whole and say the words, is not coming now. The stroke and the dementia have seen to that. That ship has sailed. And at that dinner, with his hand in mine, I understood that I had stopped needing it to come. The waiting had ended without my noticing, somewhere along the way, the way you finally set down a bag so heavy you had forgotten you were holding it.

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The Gift

And in its place, the oddest gift of this whole long leaving.

The stroke took something. The dementia is taking the rest. But between them, they have taken the armour too. Whatever it was that kept my father contained and defended and just out of reach all those years, the emotional distance of a certain kind of man of his time, it has fallen away. He cries easily now. It frustrates him, I can see that it does, this new nearness of his own tears. But for me, I will be honest, it is a blessed relief. The feeling was always in there. I am simply, finally, allowed to see it.

Because that is the gift, the strange and holy joke of it. He may not be able to see me any more, not in the deep way I spent a lifetime waiting for. But I can finally see him. The seeing I was always longing to receive, I get to give instead. I get to look at my father, softened and open and at last unguarded, and see him clearly, and love exactly what I see. It is the wrong way round from how I always pictured it. It turns out to be more than enough.

Across the Ocean

Most of the time, of course, I cannot be there. The ocean sits between us, and I reach him the way the distance allows. On the calls. And in a quieter, deeper way I want to tell you about plainly, because it has become the truest thread between us.

Some of what holds me steady is plain science. Researchers at the University of Iowa found that people with Alzheimer’s go on feeling an emotion long after they have forgotten what caused it. The memory of a visit fades within the hour. The warmth it leaves behind stays. The emotional life, the lead researcher said, is alive and well. And doctors are beginning, at last, to study terminal lucidity, the way some people with advanced dementia surface near the very end, whole and clear for a moment. They cannot fully explain it. But it tells me what I have always known in my body. He is in there. The whole of him. The disease is a curtain. Not an erasure.

And the rest, I know the way I know my own name. We can reach one another without words. I believe it with my whole being, and more than believe it, I have lived it. The Telepathy Tapes devoted an episode to exactly this, to dementia, one called Alzheimer’s and Telepathy. In it, a man named Dan Goerke describes how his wife, Denise, lost her speech to early-onset Alzheimer’s, and how, as her words fell away, something else opened wide between them. He began to sense her. Wordlessly. Her thoughts and her feelings arriving whole, in her own unmistakable voice, from somewhere beneath the disease. And he was not the only one. Family after family told the same astonishing story. A connection that outlived the loss of language, and slipped below words into something older and truer.

I had been doing this with my own father long before I had a name for it. Reaching for him in the silence, and feeling him reach back. So from here, an ocean away, I still myself and I go to him, soul to soul, in the place beneath the wreckage of his memory, and I find him there. Every single time. The body forgets. The names go. The speech goes. The soul does not. The soul can be spoken to, and it answers. The part of him I am reaching for is precisely the part that nothing, not the stroke, not the dementia, not the whole grey Atlantic between us, will ever take.

The Letter Was Always to Me

Somewhere in all of this, with his hand in mine at that table and then carrying him home in my heart across the water, I finally learned the thing my own work has spent thirty years trying to teach me, the thing I held out for everyone but myself. The seeing I waited a lifetime for was never going to come from him. It was not his to give, not in the measure I needed. The one who had to turn at last and see me, and say the words, and mean them, was me.

So I say them now. To the girl who knocked at that door for fifty years, who became so capable and so bright in the hope that it might buy what love is meant to give for free. I see you. I see how hard you worked to be worth the journey. And it was never, not once, your fault that he could not make it. You can come home now. I have got you, and you do not have to earn a single thing.

That is the love letter. It was addressed to him for half a century. It turns out it was always meant for me.

What He Gave Me

And here is what I am left with, now that the longing has gone quiet. Not the long list of what he could not give. The list of what he did.

Because my father gave me a great deal, and these days, more and more, that is the man I think of. The wonderfully eccentric one. The one with the quirky, surprising laugh. The grafter, industrious to his bones, deeply and quietly capable, who could turn his hand to almost anything and usually did. The practical man who grew his own food and baked his own bread. The one who made his own wine, and went ballroom dancing of all the glorious things, and lost himself happily for years in vintage motorbikes and camper vans, in the particular obsessions that made him so completely and unmistakably himself.

That is who I think of now. Not the closed door. The whole, odd, capable, dancing, bread-making, wine-making man who stood behind it. I think of him and I find, to my own quiet surprise, that I simply enjoy him. That I am grateful. For his quirks and his graft and his strange and lovely passions and the life he built with his own two hands.

In this moment, sitting here with all of it, there is nothing left to be upset about. There is only a daughter, grateful for her father. That is where the long road has finally brought me, and I did not expect it, and it is the most peaceful place I have stood in a very long time.

The Fathers We Are Calling Forward

And yet, releasing my father into all this gratitude has not left me only with him. It has left me with a fierce new clarity about what we are missing in the world, and must call back.

Because the wound my father carried was never only his. He was handed it. A boy of his time, taught that feeling was weakness and tenderness was unmanly, that a father provides and protects and presides but does not, heaven forbid, weep at the table or say the words I love you, I see you, I am proud of you, out loud where they could be heard. He spent a whole life behind glass because someone had told him, long ago, that a man belongs there. It took a stroke and the unmaking of his mind to finally let him out from behind it. That is not a personal failing. It is a tragedy with a thousand years standing behind it.

So on this Father’s Day, my loves, I want to do more than grieve, and more than be grateful. I want to call something forward.

I want to honour the good men. The ones already doing it. The fathers choosing, often with no model of their own to work from, to stay present behind their own eyes. To see their daughters, and to say so, in words. To weep at the table. To bless their children out loud instead of leaving them a lifetime of guessing. To stand in a masculine that protects without imprisoning, that is strong enough to be tender, that uses its power to witness rather than to withhold. This is the noble masculine. It is not soft and it is not weak, and the world is quietly starving for it.

To those men, doing the unglamorous, history-altering work of being a father who can actually be reached: thank you. Every daughter you truly see is a fifty-year wait that some grown woman will now never have to endure. Every son you let watch you cry is a boy who will not have to wait for his mind to fail before he is allowed to feel. Keep going. We see you, even on the days the culture does not.

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Father’s Day

So. Dad.

I am not waiting any more. Not because I gave up on you. Because I found the seeing in the one place it could ever have come from, and because, over a quiet dinner with your hand in mine, I stopped needing you to be anything other than exactly who you are. Which is my father. Eccentric, gentle, disappearing, and mine.

I cannot always be in the room. It is a deep pain in my life that an ocean sits between us as you go. But I have found there is a place I can reach you that no water touches and no disease can close, and I go there as often as I can, and I sit with your soul, and I am, in the only way left to me, the warm thing in your room.

And I say it now, out loud and in the silence both, the thing I came all this way to learn how to say. Thank you. For all of it. For everything you did give me, which turns out to have been so much more than I could see while I was still busy counting what you did not.

I see you, Dad. I am proud of you. I love you. There is nothing but love here.

And to every good man being called, this Father’s Day, to stand up and be reachable: so do we. So does the whole aching world. We are waiting for you at a door that, this time, is going to open.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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The Text Over Tea

I was making my morning tea when the text came in.

It was from one of my dearest friends, and it said: look what is happening now. This is how Emperor Trump is celebrating his eightieth birthday. And underneath it, the photographs.

WTAF.

That was the whole of my response, for a good minute, standing in my kitchen with the kettle still going. I am a mystery school teacher with three decades of training in holding the wide and patient view, and what rose up in me, fully formed, was four letters, and not one of them holy.

Because there it was, in the pictures. A steel cage, an actual eight-sided fighting cage, put up on the South Lawn of the White House, under a black canopy that someone had decided to name The Claw. Men inside it, beating each other bloody, for the eightieth birthday of a president who sat at the front in a box beside the man who owns the spectacle and the man who owns the platform it streamed on. The fighters had walked out through the doors of the Oval Office. One of them appeared to skim a copy of the Declaration of Independence on his way to the fight. Jets crossed the sky. The closed captioning, and I truly wish I were inventing this, was sponsored by a cryptocurrency with the president’s own name on it.

My friend called him Emperor Trump as a joke. Standing there with my tea going cold, I did not think it was a joke.

Because if you have been waiting for a sign, a real one, that we are in the last days of this particular civilisation, I think we can stop waiting. This is what it looks like. We have all read about this part in the history books, and somehow assumed we would be spared having to watch it live, on a Sunday, over breakfast.

So I did the only things there were to do. I stood with the old cold drop in my body. I said a quiet prayer to all of my well ancestors that what I was looking at was the fever of a dying thing, the malaise before the end, and not the rude good health of something that means to stay. And then I asked the question that actually matters, the one underneath the WTAF.

What do we do with this?

We Have Seen This Film

We have seen this exact film before. We have just forgotten we were in it.

When Rome could no longer feed its people, it learned to entertain them instead. The phrase the poet used was panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. Give the crowd enough grain to keep it standing and enough blood to keep it cheering, and it will not ask the harder questions about who has taken everything else. The Colosseum was not built at the height of the Republic. It was built as the thing underneath was rotting. The gladiators, the emperor in his box, the roar of the stands, the coin with his face stamped on it. That was not a civilisation at its strongest. That was a civilisation learning to perform strength because the real thing was draining out of it.

So when I watch men brawl on the lawn of the most powerful house in the world, for the birthday of one man, with his face on the money and his name on the captions, I am not watching something new. I am watching something very, very old. The empire has reached the part of the story where it stops governing and starts staging.

The poll, for what it is worth, told the same tale. Most Americans, asked, did not think this belonged on the White House lawn. Even most of his own side did not. This was not a hungry people demanding its games. This was an emperor throwing himself a party and calling it the nation’s.

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What the Spectacle Is For

A spectacle this size is never only a spectacle. It does a job.

Its job is to fill the frame. To be so loud, so bright, so impossible to look away from, that the eye never drifts to the edges, to the quieter footage of what is actually happening to the country while the jets are roaring. The prices people cannot meet. The corruption running in plain sight. The slow, methodical taking apart of the things that were supposed to protect ordinary lives. A cage match on the lawn is a very effective way of making sure you are looking at the cage, and not at the hand deftly going through your pockets.

And there was one line, from the government’s own lawyers, that told the whole truth without meaning to. When people went to court to stop the fights, the Justice Department wrote that the objectors could always just avert their gazes for the weekend.

Avert your gaze. Look away. That is the instruction the dying empire gives, every single time. It is the one instruction we must refuse.

The Hungry Men

Now. I want to be careful, my loves, because the easy thing here is to sneer at the men in that crowd, and I will not do it.

The men cheering at the edge of that cage are not my enemy. They are hungry. And not only for the brawl.

I have written before about the boys we are losing, the young men handed a culture that offers them no rite of passage, no elders, no initiation, no honourable way to become men, and then sells them a counterfeit.

The cage is the cathedral of that counterfeit.

It speaks to something real and ancient in the male soul, the longing for the test, for courage, for the heroic, for a threshold you cross and come out changed. That longing is holy. Men have always needed it. Every culture that loved its men built them a true version of it.

Ours did not. Ours tore down the temple and put up an Octagon. It took the deep hunger for meaning and sold it back as blood and branding and a flag draped over a shoulder for the cameras. The men are not contemptible for being moved by it. They are being fed junk because the kitchen that once made the real food has been boarded up. The hunger is true. The thing being served to it is not.

A Civilisation That Forgot How to Feed Its Soul

This is the part I keep coming back to, the part underneath all of it.

A civilisation reaches for blood-spectacle when it has forgotten how to feed the soul.

And ours forgot a long time ago. This is the world I have been calling motherless across all of these essays, the one severed from the Great Mother, from the sacred, from the feminine face of God, from any sense that life itself is holy and worth tending rather than conquering. A culture cut off from that does not know how to nourish its people, so it learns to distract them. It cannot offer meaning, so it offers spectacle. It cannot give bread, so it gives circuses.

I will say, because I always do, that this is one way of reading it and not the only one. But it is the truest reading I have. What is staging itself on that lawn, the dominance, the conquest, the worship of the strongman, the cage as the highest sacrament a society can offer its young men, is the late, decadent face of an order that was always going to end here. An order built on power over rather than care for. It has run out of everything except the show.

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What Is Actually Dying

So yes. I think we are watching the dying of a civilisation.

I want to be honest about that, because I think a lot of us feel it in the body and have been told we are catastrophising.

We are not catastrophising. Something is ending. You can feel it, the way you can feel weather coming.

But here is the thing I need you to hold, because it is the whole of why I am not in despair.

The end of an empire is not the end of the world.

Those are not the same, and the empire would very much like you to believe they are, because if its death feels like the death of everything, you will fight to keep it alive. You will cling to the very thing that is crushing you, out of terror of what is on the other side.

An empire is not the world. It is one arrangement of the world. A brutal, exhausted, four-thousand-year-old arrangement that is finally, visibly running out of road. And in the oldest story I carry, the one of Inanna going down through the seven gates into the underworld, the death is never the end of the tale. The death is the middle of it. She has to be stripped of everything and hung on the hook and undone completely before she can rise, remade, as Queen of both worlds. Things have to be allowed to die so that something truer can be born from the compost of them.

That is where I think we are. Not at the end. In the underworld. In the long dark middle, watching the old king stage his last and loudest games while the ground shifts under all of it.

Do Not Avert Your Gaze

So here is what I would ask of you.

• Do not avert your gaze. They told you to, in writing, and that alone should tell you it is the one thing worth refusing.

• Watch it. Witness it clearly, name it honestly, and do not let anyone convince you that the spectacle is the same thing as strength, or that the noise is the same thing as a future.

• And then turn, with whatever you have, toward the other work. The unglamorous, deeply unspectacular work of building the thing that comes after. The tending. The feeding. The remembering of how to care for one another and for the living world. Everything the empire forgot. Everything the Mother never did.

Empires fall, my loves. They always have. They are falling now, on a lawn, under a canopy called The Claw, with the cameras rolling and the captions sponsored.

Let it fall. And then let us go and build the thing that actually feeds people.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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Two Languages, One Conversation

Venus crossed into Leo today, and stays until the 9th of July. Twenty-six days.

Let me say something about how I hold this before we go in. I do not think a planet reaches down and rearranges your life. I hold astrology the way I have come to hold most things, as one map among many, useful precisely to the degree that it names something already true. The old sky-watchers were not fools. They watched, for thousands of years, and noticed that certain seasons of the sky rhymed with certain seasons of the human heart, and they gave those rhymes names. Venus in Leo is one of those names. I am not asking you to believe in it. I am asking you to notice what it points at.

Because what it points at, this year, lines up almost uncomfortably with the thing I have been writing about for months. Menopause. The way our bodies somewhere in this passage, stop helping us lie. The confronting, intimate honesty of it.

This transit and that passage are, to my eye, the same conversation held in two languages. One written in the sky. One written in your body. And both of them are saying the same deeply important and inconvenient thing.

The wild knowing is coming back to you.

The Radiance They Sell You

First, though, I have to clear something off the table, because the word at the centre of all this has been thoroughly ruined.

Radiance.

You have been sold a version of it. We all have.

It arrives in soft lighting and good skin and a serene, lit-from-within glow you can apparently buy in serum form if you act now. It is the radiance of the woman who has her life beautifully arranged, who is pleasing to look at, who takes up exactly the right amount of space and not an inch more. It is sunny. It is agreeable. It photographs well.

And it is phony.

Not because there is anything wrong with good skin or soft lighting. But because that radiance is still sourced from outside. It still depends on being seen approvingly, on being pleasing, on the verdict of the room.

It is radiance as performance, the kind you have to earn and maintain and never once let slip. It is the glow of a woman who is still, underneath it all, asking permission to exist.

There is an entire industry that prefers her that way.

A woman who has been taught to distrust her own body is, after all, a woman who will spend a great deal of money trying to fix herself. The glow comes in a bottle. The serenity comes in a subscription. The permission is always available for purchase, and it always, conveniently, runs out.

That is not the Leo Goddess. That is her, defanged and declawed, sold back to you at a markup.

I keep returning to a line I wrote not long ago, about a different counterfeit. A goddess with all her other faces amputated is not the divine feminine. She is a woman who has been made safe to keep. The radiance they sell you is exactly that. One face, the pretty one, held up as the only one you are permitted. The warrior quietly removed. The dark mother. The wild one. The one with teeth.

What the Leo Goddess Actually Is

Here is the real one.

• She sources her love from within. That sounds like a wellness slogan until you sit with what it actually means, which is that she has stopped running her worth through the approval of other people.

• She is not lit because she is being looked at. She is lit, and being looked at is incidental.

• She creates because creation is her nature, not because anyone asked for the output.

• She stands in her own light and, rather inconveniently for the people who preferred her dim, lights up everyone near her.

• She receives as easily as she gives, which, if you were raised female, you will recognise as one of the hardest disciplines there is.

• She plays. She delights. She treats joy as a sacred practice rather than a reward for finishing the washing.

And she has all her faces.

This is the part the soft-lit version leaves out.

• The real radiant feminine is not only sunny.

• The lioness is gorgeous, and the lioness has teeth. There is a fierce, in-your-face, holy heat in her, the same heat that lives in Kali and the Black Madonna and the Magdalene.

• The visceral no to what is false.

• The refusal to keep absorbing what is wrong.

• A woman permitted only the sweet, nourishing, palatable face of the feminine has been handed half of herself and told it is the whole.

• The other half, the one with the boundary and the rage and the bottomless dignity, is the half that was taken.

The Radiant Queen is not the woman who has finally become pleasant enough. She is the woman who has finally become whole.

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How the Knowing Got Trained Out of You

None of which is new. That is the thing I most want you to hear.

The Radiant Queen is not a self-improvement project. She is not something you acquire by July with enough journalling. She is what you were before you were trained out of it.

And you were trained out of it on a schedule. Most of us were.

It happened, roughly, around the age the blood first came. There is a girl, somewhere around twelve or thirteen, who knew things in her body without being taught them.

• Who said no and meant it.

• Who took up the whole room and did not apologise for the room.

• Who had not yet learned that her wanting was dangerous, or her body a problem, or her loudness a liability.

And then the instructions arrived.

• Be quieter.

• Want less.

• Don’t trust that feeling, trust the room.

• Smile when you do not feel like smiling.

• Say the social yes over the internal no, again and again, until the saying becomes automatic and you forget there was ever a no underneath it at all.

We learned to override our sacred bodies. The deep animal instinctual knowing that lives within us, traded in for being agreeable and perceptive and exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s comfort. We got extraordinarily good at it. It is, in its way, a towering achievement. And it cost us the signal almost entirely.

That girl did not die. She went underground. She has been waiting, this whole time, at the far end of the bleeding years, for the blood to come back round and let her out.

Why They Call It Decline

At peri/menopause our menstrual blood is leaving. And the most deeply confronting and amazing thing happens, which nobody quite warns you about, because the people doing the warning have an interest in you not knowing.

The override stops working.

Here is the part no one sat us down and explained. For most of our lives we have been, in the most literal chemical sense, maintained in a state of tolerance. Oestrogen does a great deal more for the female nervous system than anyone told us. It buffers the stress response. It softens the spikes. It quietly smooths the neurotransmitters that let us absorb things and carry on, things that might otherwise register, quite correctly, as intolerable. It is, among its many jobs, a chemical instrument of social harmony.

And then perimenopause begins, and that buffering starts to withdraw.

• The cushioning that let us tolerate what we should perhaps never have been asked to tolerate simply thins out.

• The things that used to slide no longer slide.

• The conversation that would once have washed over you now lands and stays.

• The room that is wrong now feels wrong, and you cannot un-feel it.

• The tolerance you had built, for the half-life, the half-marriage, the work that uses you, the friendships that only take, runs out.

• The instinct comes back online, rude and precise, and refuses to be talked out of what it knows.

And we are told this is decline.

I want you to look very hard at that word, because it is doing an enormous amount of work. We are told the thinning hair and the sleeplessness and the heat and the sudden intolerance add up to a woman diminishing. Becoming less. A problem to be managed discreetly while she carries on and does not make a fuss.

But consider what is actually leaving.

• What is leaving is her availability.

• Her agreeableness.

• Her willingness to abandon herself to keep everyone else comfortable.

• A woman returned to her own instinct is, frankly, ungovernable.

• She cannot be talked into the thing that is bad for her.

• She quietly withdraws her compliance from arrangements that were running on it the whole time.

And a great deal depends on women’s compliance. Rather more than anyone says out loud.

So I have come to think that decline is not a description at all. It is a verdict, passed on a woman at the precise moment she stops being useful in the old way. The culture cannot quite call it what it is, because what it is, is a woman coming back into her own authority. So it calls it a malfunction instead, and offers to medicate the symptoms, the chief symptom being that she has stopped lying.

That is not decline, love. That is the knowing coming back. And the rage that arrives with it is not a chemical accident. It is the instinct’s holy no, thirty years overdue.

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They Have Always Called It Something

And they have always called it something.

This is the oldest move there is. When a woman stops being available, the culture does not say, how interesting, she has come back to herself. It reaches for a word that means broken. We have a long and inventive history of these words. They called it hysteria, from the Greek for womb, on the theory that the trouble with a woman was, essentially, that she had one. They built asylums to hold the women who would not settle. They burned a great many at the stake, and a striking number of them were older, past childbearing, unmarried, ungovernable, no longer producing anything the village could use. Women, in other words, who had stopped lying.

It is the same instinct each time, dressed for the century. The diagnosis. The prescription. The discreet management. The quiet cultural insistence that a woman’s worth falls in exact proportion to her fertility, and that whatever rises in her afterwards is a symptom to be corrected rather than a power to be reckoned with.

They tried all of it. And here we are anyway.

There are something like forty-three million women in this passage in this country alone. Forty-three million nervous systems recalibrating at once. Forty-three million women who held everything together for decades, discovering that the body is now, firmly and without negotiation, declining to continue the performance. That is not a malfunction. That is a whole generation coming off the buffer at the same time and feeling, all at once, what was always there.

Can you feel us.

Menopause Gives It Back

I should say, because it would be dishonest not to, that none of this is tidy while you are inside it. I am not making a banner out of suffering, my loves. For many of us this passage is brutal in plain, physical, unromantic ways, and no amount of mythology takes the edge off a body that will not sleep. If you are in the worst of it, I am not asking you to find it beautiful. I am asking you to consider that it might also be intelligent.

Because underneath the symptoms there is a shape, and the old cultures knew it even when they knew nothing of hormones. They told it as descent.

Inanna takes off her crown at the first gate, her jewels at the next, her robes at the next, and walks down through seven gates into the underworld, and at the bottom she is stripped of everything, even her life, before she can be returned. The story is not a warning. It is a map. It says the way through is down, and the way down takes everything you arrived in, and you do not get to keep your costume.

Menopause has its own seven gateways. You go down through them whether you booked the trip or not. There is the Reckoning, where you first see clearly what you have been living around. The Release, where you begin to set it down. The Unknown, that map-less middle where you are no longer who you were and not yet who you are becoming. And then the long climb back up, through Self-Devotion, Body Love, Self-Expression, and at last Embodied Wisdom, where you arrive carrying everything you learned in the dark.

And what gets taken, gate by gate, is precisely the costume. The roles. The performed agreeableness. The self that was built to be kept. Which feels, from the inside, exactly like losing yourself. It is the opposite. It is losing everything that was never you.

If you want to know which gate you are standing at right now, I have made something for exactly that. A short quiz that reads your place on the map. You can find your gateway here, and I will come back to it before the end, because it opens a particular door.

And here is the bookend, the thing I find almost unbearably tidy. The girl was sent underground at the first blood. The woman is brought back up at the last. The first blood mystery put the knowing away. The final blood mystery hands it back. Menopause is not the end of the wild girl. It is the gate she has been waiting at the whole time.

What to Do With Twenty-Six Days

So. What do you do with twenty-six days of a sky pointing at all of this?

You practise. Gently, and on purpose.

• Take the throne, which is not a metaphor about grandeur. It is your own body, your own voice, your own life, sat fully in rather than apologised for.

• Receive. Unapologetically. The compliment, the help, the abundance, the adoration.

• Become fluent in the lost art of receiving, which for most of us is harder and braver than any amount of giving, because giving keeps us safely in charge, and receiving asks us to be soft enough to let something land.

• Be seen. Turn up the full voltage of who you actually are. Your visibility is not vanity. It is, quite simply, how your gifts reach anyone at all, and they cannot do that from behind your hand.

• And when the instinct speaks, the small clean no, the quiet this is wrong, do not override it out of habit. Just once, this fortnight, trust the feeling before the room.

That is the whole practice. It is smaller than it sounds and harder than it looks.

This Is What I Am Now

I’ll say the next thing plainly, since it is rather the point of this letter.

This is what I am now.

I went down. I have written about my own descent elsewhere and won’t make you sit through it again, (thank goddess!) except to tell you it took everything I arrived in, and there were stretches where I could not have said whether I was being destroyed or remade. As it turns out, those are the same process. I learned the difference between collapse and surrender the hard way. Collapse goes nowhere. Surrender goes somewhere. One is the floor giving way beneath you. The other is the open hand. I surrendered, in the end, because there was nothing left to do. And then, slowly, I received.

And I came back up as her. Not on a good day. As a settled fact. The fully expressed woman, sovereign over her own life, with all her faces intact, no longer available for dimming. The Radiant Queen, if you like, though I would still not put it on a mug.

This is, as it were, my coming-out party. And I would very much like your company.

Primal Knowing

On the 8th of July, one of Venus’s last full days in Leo, I am opening Primal Knowing, the first free, live gathering of Wild Knowing.

It is for you, if you are anywhere in the peri/menopause passage. And it is, at heart, about exactly the thing this whole letter has been circling. Getting you back into contact with your instinctual knowing. The wild, primal, body-rooted intelligence you were domesticated out of, and that this passage is working so hard to return to you.

• We will not be managing symptoms.

• We will be reading the map. Where you are in the descent. Which gate you are standing at. What is being stripped, and what is being handed back.

• We will do it together, beloveds, in a room full of women who do not need a single word of it explained, where you will not have to translate yourself, or soften yourself, or perform being fine.

And there is a doorway in, which doubles as a doorway home.

Take the Seven Gateways quiz. It takes only a few minutes, and it will show you which of the seven gateways you are standing at right now, so you walk into the room already knowing your own location on the map. And here is the part I am rather pleased about. When you take the quiz, you are automatically enrolled in Primal Knowing on the 8th of July. One thing, two doors. You find your gate, and your seat is saved. Plain and simple.

Find your gateway and claim your seat: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/7-gateways-quiz/

That is the whole of it. Find your gateway. Take your place. Come and meet the knowing in a room built to receive it. It is free. It is live. And it falls inside the most radiant window of the whole year for precisely this kind of remembering.

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The Wild Knowing Is Coming Back

So, for the twenty-six days, and honestly for the rest of it.

• Stop overriding your intelligent sacred body.

• Trust the feeling before the room.

• Take up the space you were told to give back.

• Receive the good thing without deflecting it.

• Be seen on purpose.

• Let the fierce face live alongside the tender one.

• And when the old voice insists that all of this is far too much, have a long look at who taught you to say that, and whose comfort it was protecting, because it was not yours, love, and it was certainly not the Queen’s.

You are allowed to take up space.

You are the Radiant Queen of your own life.

The wild knowing is coming back. It was always going to. Come and meet it. I’ll be right here, with the fire lit.

in love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

Venus is in Leo from June 13 through July 9, 2026. Take the Seven Gateways quiz to find where you stand and to claim your free seat at Primal Knowing, the opening gathering of Wild Knowing, live on July 8th: https://discover.priestesspresence.com/7-gateways-quiz/

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What the Heck Is a Tradwife?

I asked it out loud a few weeks ago, sitting with some of my sisters, the way you do when a phrase has been drifting past you for months and you finally admit you have never stopped to look at it. One of us had seen the videos. One of us had a niece who wanted to be one. Not one of us could have given you a clean definition if you had paid us for it. So we did what women around a table have always done. We went down the rabbit hole together.

And what we found at the bottom was stranger, and a good deal darker, than any of us had expected.

It begins, the way these things do now, with the videos.

A woman in a long linen dress is making butter from scratch. The light is doing that thing where everything looks like an old Dutch painting, all gold and holy. There are children, several of them, clean and golden, arranged around a farmhouse kitchen the size of my first flat. She is churning something. She is always churning something. Her voice, when it arrives, is very low and very slow, as though speaking at a normal pace would be a kind of violence.

And I can feel exactly what it is pulling on. It is not pulling on stupidity. It is pulling on the dream. Put it all down, the video murmurs. More than the work, more than the voice, more than being whatever it is I am, the boss-babe with the Substack and the opinions and the forty-seven browser tabs. Come home. Let someone else carry it now. Wouldn’t that be a relief.

And the honest answer, on a tired day, is yes. God, yes. Which is exactly why it irks me. Not because it is absurd. Because something in me leans toward it before the rest of me has caught up.

So I kept pulling the thread after the others had gone home, into where it comes from and who is making it and what it is for. And underneath the butter and the linen, it is not soft at all. It is one of the more sinister things I have looked at in a long while.

What a Tradwife Is

Tradwife. Short for traditional wife. The word is barely a decade old, and it already has tens of millions of followers gathered under it.

A tradwife is a woman who has publicly returned to what she calls traditional womanhood, and built a following on the broadcast of it. Her husband earns. She keeps the home. She raises the children, often a great many of them, and she frames the whole arrangement as the natural, God-given order of things. The look is specific. Sometimes it is the 1950s, the set hair and the shirtwaist dress and the lipstick on before breakfast. More often now it is the homestead. The farm, the linen, the sourdough starter, the raw milk, the baby on the hip and the garden out the back.

The aesthetic shifts. The doctrine underneath holds steady. A woman’s highest purpose is to be a wife and a mother, and her husband is her head.

And I want to be careful here, because it matters. I love to cook and to bake. I love to garden, to make things with my hands, to keep my home and tend my animals. I love all of it. So hear me clearly.

Not every woman who bakes her own bread is a tradwife.

Loving the hearth is not an ideology, and I will have a great deal to say in a moment about why the hearth is sacred.

A tradwife is something narrower, and far more deliberate. She is selling a teaching. The teaching is submission. And the submission is dressed, every single time, as something that we should desire.

What She Is Selling

The tradwife is selling a fantasy of the romantic feminine. A woman who does not want her own voice. Who does not want her own power. The dream is that she can lay all of it down, the voice, the power, the whole exhausting weight of being a person responsible for her own life, hand it across to a man, and call the handing-over her femininity.

And it does not always call itself the tradwife. That is the cleverness of it. It comes rebranded in softer, holier clothes. The divine feminine. Feminine energy. The soft life.

The high-value woman who has learned, at last, to receive. Ballerina Farm is the cathedral of it, but it is everywhere now, scaled down and sold to women who do not own a single cow.

And the word it has chosen for the handing-over is surrender. Surrender your ambition. Surrender your edges. Surrender the exhausting project of having opinions of your own, and let a good man lead. Soften. Receive. Come home to your true nature, which is, apparently, agreeable and quiet and faintly damp from the kitchen.

It is dressed as liberation. It arrives wearing the exact clothes of the thing I believe in, the rest, the body, the refusal of the grind, and walks straight past me into the homes of frightened, depleted women and offers them a deal.

Make yourself smaller, hand the hard work of your own life to a man, and we will call it peace.

It is the diminished maiden. With better lighting. A grown woman invited back into girlhood and told the regression is her homecoming.

The Longing Is Real

I want to be careful, because the easy version of this essay is contempt, and contempt is lazy and is not what I am aiming for here. I feel a deeper call to understand what makes us tick, so this is why I am writing this peice.

I do not think these women are stupid, and I do not think the longing is fake.

The longing is the truest thing in the picture. A woman who has spent twenty years proving she is competent inside a system built to extract her, who is tired in a way sleep does not fix, who has been told the answer to her exhaustion is to optimise harder, is going to look at that golden kitchen and feel something crack open. Of course she is. She has been starving for rest, for a body allowed to slow down, without a name for the hunger.

The longing is holy. What is being sold to soothe it is a cage with a nice view.

And here is the part nobody in the comments wants to sit with. A cage, to a woman who has been running on a treadmill for two decades, can feel like relief. The structure holds you. The decisions get made elsewhere. The unbearable openness of a life you have to author yourself gets quietly closed, and something in the nervous system goes, at last, oh, thank God.

I understand it completely. I have thirty years of training in seeing exactly this mechanism, and I have still felt the pull of it on the bad days. So let us not pretend it is only the gullible who are reached. It is reaching all of us.

The Hearth Is Holy

And there is one more thing I have to speak with care, because it matters more than all the rest.

I am not against the hearth.

In the lineage I have stood in for two decades, the hearth is holy. Hestia is a goddess, the keeper of the flame at the centre of the home, one of the oldest and most honoured faces of the feminine we have, the one the ancients greeted first and blessed last. The woman who tends the fire, feeds people, and holds the warm centre of a family is doing sacred work. There is nothing small about her. I have knelt at that hearth myself, and I will again.

So this is not a quarrel with the hearth. It is a quarrel with being handed one face of the goddess, a defanged copy of even that one, and being told it is the only face I am permitted.

Because she has so many. The feminine face of God was never a single expression. For two decades my work has been one thing under all of its names. Sitting with women while they remember they are larger than the single face they were handed, and find their way back to the feminine face of God in all of her.

The tradwife gospel takes that whole living pantheon and hands you back one figurine. Hestia with her fire turned down low and her sisters quietly killed off. A hearth-keeper with no warrior to defend the hearth, no queen to rule it, no wild one allowed to leave it, no dark mother permitted to end it. Just the apron. Just the smile. Just the staying.

A goddess with all her other faces amputated is not the divine feminine. She is a woman who has been made safe to keep.

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Collapse, Submission, Surrender

The word is surrender. And I am not handing it over.

In my mystery school work, the first teaching of the Great Mother is four words. I surrender, I receive. And the order is not decoration. You cannot receive from the divine until you have surrendered to it. The open hand comes before anything can be placed in it. Which means surrender, the real thing, is not weakness. It is the most active spiritual act there is, the deliberate opening of a centre you actually possess.

And this is where the whole culture trips, because we have confused surrender with two things it is not.

We think surrender means collapse. The white flag. Going down and staying down, the going limp, the quiet folding inward of a woman who has decided it is not worth it anymore.

And we think surrender means submission. Handing your will to another person, lowering your eyes, calling the obedience peace.

Neither of those is surrender.

• Collapse is what happens when you have no centre left.

• Submission is what happens when you give your centre away.

• Surrender is what happens when you have a centre, fully, and choose to open it to something larger than yourself.

• Collapse goes nowhere. Submission goes to a man. Surrender goes to the divine.

And the linen-dress gospel is selling women collapse and submission with the word surrender printed on the label. It is the white flag, marketed as the open hand. It stops at the bottom and calls the bottom home.

The Oldest Story

In the oldest story I keep returning to, Inanna surrenders too. Queen of Heaven, she receives a call she cannot refuse, down into the underworld. At each of the seven gateways she is asked to surrender something. Her crown. Her jewels. Her robes. Every marker of who she has been is stripped from her, one threshold at a time, until she arrives at the bottom naked and undone and is hung on a hook to die.

That is surrender. There is no linen and certainly no butter.

And then. Three days later. She receives. Resurrection. She climbs back up through the seven gateways and takes up everything she laid down, transformed, and comes back not as Queen of Heaven but as Queen of both the heavens and the underworld.

The surrender was the descent. The receiving was the resurrection. I surrender, I receive. The oldest version of the teaching we have, and not a soft one.

Hold the two women side by side. One goes down into the dark, surrenders everything she was performing, and receives an authority she did not have before, unfoolable, dangerous to anyone who would manage her. The other stays in the bright kitchen, collapses her voice and submits her will, and receives a man’s approval and a smaller life.

Both are called surrender. They are travelling in opposite directions.

She does not come back smaller. She comes back Queen of two worlds.

One Map Among Many

I will say the next part openly, because I promised a reader some months ago to keep saying it.

The cosmology underneath some of this, the language of polarity, of masculine and feminine energies, is one cosmology. One map among many. It is ancient and it has given some people something true, and it is not the truth about all bodies, all loves, all lives. The moment anyone tells you this is the nature of woman rather than a story about woman, you are no longer being offered a cosmology. You are being offered a leash with good branding.

And real receptivity, in the lineages that hold it well, is a ferocious thing. The strength to stay open inside the fire. It was never a synonym for going quiet so that he can talk.

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The Soft Front of a Hard Project

The tradwife is not a lifestyle. It is the soft front of a hard project, and you do not have to take it from me, a woman with a Substack and a great many opinions about goddesses. The people who study this for a living have been saying it for years.

• Media Matters ran the experiment. They built a clean TikTok account, interacted only with tradwife videos, and coded the 327 videos the algorithm served up next. Nearly a third had tipped into conspiracy theory and apocalyptic fear. Prepper warnings about a coming civil war. Anti-vaccine content. The government lies, the doctors lie, the schools lie. You start with sourdough, and within a few swipes you are being handed a worldview. The pretty content is the doorway. Something colder is waiting in the hall.

• Julia Ebner, who studies extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and went undercover in these movements for her book Going Dark, found that what radicalises most tradwives is not hatred. It is the search for love. Sian Norris, the investigative journalist whose Bodies Under Siege maps the global far-right war on women’s bodies, names the destination without flinching. Tradwife culture, she writes, is not frilly dresses and tired women romanticising motherhood. It is a subculture with its roots in the far right, built on natalism and white-baby anxiety and the normalisation of male supremacy. The rollback of women’s rights is not a side effect of it. It is the point.

I am not getting carried away. The trad in tradwife was never only about aprons. It has surged, not by accident, in the same few years the right to choose was struck down and the plans for what comes after were written out in the open.

Most of the women in the videos have no idea they are standing in the mouth of that. Even the researchers sounding the alarm are careful to say not every tradwife is a fascist, and a woman has every right to choose her life. Ebner’s finding is the one that stays with me. It is the search for love that radicalises them. The fault was never in the longing. It is in who lies in wait to catch it.

And the answer they catch, once they are inside, is the one you felt land wrong before you could name it. A woman does not need her own voice. Her husband will speak. Her church will speak. The movement will speak for her. She can lay hers down.

Look at the most famous of them. When a reporter finally sat down in the kitchen of the one the papers had crowned the queen of the tradwives, she could not, the way the profile told it, get a single answer out without the husband correcting her, interrupting her, or answering in her place. The queen of the whole dream. And she could not finish her own sentence. There it is, in one image. The voice, spoken over, at the very hearth she was supposed to rule.

And here is what I need you to hold, my loves, because it is the whole of it.

• A woman with no voice is a woman with no vote.

• A woman with no vote is a woman with no defence.

• The surrender being sold in that kitchen is, downstream, every right we have ever won. Not as a metaphor. Actually.

• The same softness that gives him the last word in the marriage gives him the last word over her body, her money, her children, her name.

We did not claw our way into our own voice, over a century of women who did not live to use theirs, only to be talked back out of it. Beautifully. Gently. With excellent lighting.

The women in the videos are not the enemy. They are the recruits.

The project is counting on their exhaustion, and exhaustion is not a character flaw. It is the entirely predictable result of asking a woman to carry everything and smile while she does it. The fury belongs further up. With the people who built the trap, lit it so warmly, and called it home.

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A Motherless World

This is what I was circling when I wrote Motherless. The world has been severed from the Great Mother for ten thousand years. And when you lose the Mother, you lose her teaching. Lose her, and the word goes feral. Surrender stops meaning the open hand and starts meaning the white flag. It gets handed to whoever has a use for it, printed on a cage and sold back to her daughters in soft focus. A motherless world cannot tell the open hand from the surrendered will, because it has forgotten the One who taught the difference.

So of course this is the moment the counterfeit sells. We are starving for the Mother, and someone has arrived offering a costume of her.

They Stole the Words

And they have done it, this is the part that lights my own sacred rage, in my own language.

Divine feminine. Feminine energy. Surrender. Receive. These are the words I have used for twenty-five years to call women home to their power. And they have been lifted, clean, and pressed into the sale of women’s captivity. The exact vocabulary of liberation, turned to move the cage off the shelf.

So I am taking the words back. The way we took back hysterical. They do not get to keep them.

What the Divine Feminine Is

The divine feminine, the real one, the one I have sat with women inside for over two decades, is not small.

• She is not quiet.

• She is not dependent, and she is not waiting to be told what she is for.

• She is the whole face of God the world cut away when it cut away the Mother. And she was never one thing.

• She is the hearth-keeper who holds the centre.

• She is the warrior who guards it with a blade. She is the queen who rules the house rather than serving in it.

• She is the wild one who walks out into the dark when she has to. She is the lover who belongs to no one.

• She is the dark mother who ends what has to end. She is the one who goes down into the underworld, and the one who climbs back up knowing everything there is to know.

• And her first teaching is not submission. It is the four words I gave you earlier. I surrender, I receive. She opens her own hands, on her own terms, to something far larger than a husband. That is the surrender they can never sell you, because it does not make a woman manageable. It makes her vast.

• To reclaim her is to reclaim all of her. Not to keep the one face a frightened culture finds least threatening, and call that devotion.

Surrender, and Receive

So what do we do with this. I do not want to leave you with a diagnosis and a sneer. I have been teaching myself to walk past the autopsy and out the other side.

• We do not refuse the rest. The rest is real. Take the rest.

• We do not refuse the hearth, or the body, or the slowness, or the longing for a life with its hands in something other than a phone. All of it is yours and always was, and you needed no homestead and no husband and no course to be allowed it.

• What we refuse is the counterfeit. The collapse dressed as devotion. The submission dressed as peace. The one amputated face held up as the whole of the goddess.

Because there is a real surrender, the one Inanna makes and the Great Mother teaches.

• You surrender to your own descent.

• To the truth your body has been telling you for years while you smiled and kept a peace that was never yours to keep.

• To the grief, the anger, the long low no that has been rising in you.

That surrender does not make you more agreeable. It makes you impossible to manage.

And on the far side of it, at last, you receive. Not a man’s approval, or a smaller life. You receive yourself, handed back whole and transformed. Your voice, your vote, your no.

The hearth-keeper and the warrior and the queen and the wild one and the dark mother, every face you were told to put down. The feminine face of God, returned to you complete. I surrender, I receive. That is the teaching. That has always been the teaching.

So surrender, my loves. Of course. Always. But down into your own life. Not out of it.

And then, with your hands finally open, receive what the Mother has been holding for you the whole time. All of her. All of you.

In love and devotion,

Elayne Kalila

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I want to tell you something the medical world has been documenting for nearly twenty years and somehow has not gotten around to mentioning to us.

Menstrual blood contains pluripotent stem cells. I love the word pluripotent. It feels like a word describing a magical ability to be overflowing with potency.

What is real is that the blood we have been bleeding every month for thirty or forty years contains pluripotent stem cells. Regenerative cellular gold. The same kind of biological wisdom medicine has spent billions of dollars trying to find in other places, sitting inside our bodies the whole time. Released, every month, for decades. And never named for the women whose bodies were creating them.

Take a breath with me. That is the kind of fact that requires a moment.

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The Biology Underneath

Let me give you the data up front, because we deserve that.

In 2007, researchers identified what they called Menstrual Blood-Derived Stem Cells. Also called Endometrial Regenerative Cells, which I will admit is not a name that exactly sings (someone else really needs to be in charge of naming these things), but the substance underneath the dry, bureaucratic naming is genuinely extraordinary, and quite frankly magical.

These cells are multipotent. The research shows they can differentiate into at least nine different tissue lineages. Cardiac muscle. Lung tissue. Neurons. Skeletal muscle. Blood vessel cells. Pancreatic cells. Liver cells. Fat tissue. Bone.

They are, in fact, ingenious.

They proliferate faster than umbilical cord stem cells. They are easier to collect than bone marrow stem cells. They carry no ethical concerns. They are currently being used in clinical regenerative medicine research for cardiac disease, neurological conditions, endometrial reconstruction, and more.

Across our reproductive life, we menstruate approximately four hundred times. Four hundred. Every cycle, the endometrium regenerates, sheds, and is rebuilt. Every cycle, you have been releasing pluripotent regenerative cells. Every month, for decades, your body has been making biological gold.

We have been told we are inconveniently bleeding. We have been told we are shedding waste. We have been told our menstrual blood is contaminated. Unclean. To be hidden away. Tucked discreetly into the bin. Apologised for if we ever stained a sheet, or our pants, or in any way showed that we were bleeding.

What is real is that we have been making medicine.

For decades.

And we have been told to call it waste.

What This Actually Means

Sit with what I have just said for a moment. The implications are not small.

For your entire menstruating life, your body has been producing regenerative cellular gold and releasing her every month. Not as waste. As medicine. The blood you have been washing out of your knickers for decades has been one of the most biologically valuable substances in your body.

And nobody mentioned this. Not once. Not in a single sex education class, not in a single doctor’s appointment, not on a single tampon box.

Which is wild to me.

This is not an oversight. This is a cultural inversion of one of the most fundamental truths about a woman’s body. We have spent centuries being told we are unclean, that our menstrual cycle was something to be dismissed, and was a nuisance. And yet other cultures that knew better called this blood time sacred. They knew, even without the laboratory data we now have, that what was leaving her body every month was the same substance her body used to build life. They honoured the blood time of a woman’s life because they understood the immense power of this capacity to create life.

Now we have the science to prove what they always knew.

We have been making medicine. For decades. And we have been told to call her waste.

Before She Was Waste, She Was Sacrament

Here is something else that almost nobody is mentioning, because it teeters on the taboo.

For most of human history, in most of the cultures that came before our own, menstrual blood was not seen as waste. It was a sacrament.

In the languages of the ancient world, the words for menstruation and the words for sacred were often the same word. The Polynesian word tapua, which gives us our modern word taboo, meant both sacred and menstruation. They were not separate ideas. They were inseparable. Something set apart. Something powerful. Something not to be approached casually because she carried the force of life itself.

Barbara Walker, in her landmark 1983 reference The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, documents this pattern across dozens of cultures. Early alchemical texts called the menstrual blood of the Great Mother the original raw material from which the world was made. Pre-Christian European traditions honoured it. The Hindu Tantric tradition, more documented than most, considered our blood so sacred that it was a central element of certain Tantric rites. Encyclopedia Britannica, not exactly a fringe source, names this plainly. Menstrual blood, strictly taboo in conventional Hinduism, was also used in Tantric rites.

The Kamakhya temple in the Indian state of Assam still observes, every year, the Ambubachi Mela. Three days during which the goddess herself is understood to be menstruating. The temple closes. The land is held to be in a sacred state of cosmic menstruation. When the doors reopen, water that has been reddened during the festival is collected by the priests and distributed to pilgrims as a sacred substance, said to carry generative power. This is not ancient history. This is happening every year. Pilgrims travel from across India to receive this sacrament.

And feminist scholars have proposed, with varying degrees of acceptance in the wider academic world, that even the Holy Grail of the Western mythological tradition is, at her root, a memory of this older teaching. Sang Real. The royal or true blood. The chalice that holds the blood that gives life. The cup that, before she was the cup of Christ, was the womb of the Mother.

Whether you find the Grail connection persuasive or not, the wider pattern is unambiguous. The blood that our culture has spent centuries calling unclean was, in the cultures that came before our own, treated with the reverence due a sacrament.

We have not always pretended we did not know what this was.

Only recently. Only in the last few thousand years.

Which is, in the long human story, almost no time at all.

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And Then Menopause Arrives

Here is where the teaching opens.

When menopause arrives, something changes. The body does not stop holding the regenerative capacity. The endometrium can still be activated, rebuilt, regenerated. The cellular intelligence is still there, held within. The research is clear on this. What menopause does is stop the monthly release. The blood that has been leaving your body every month for decades is no longer leaving.

Your body is now holding the blood within.

And not only the blood. The body is holding many things at once. The iron rises in your bloodstream as you stop bleeding. Your brain restructures into what the neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi calls, in her own words, a leaner, meaner architecture. Fewer neurons. Better connected. More resilient. The amygdala becomes quieter. The reactivity that drove decades of her life settles. The hormonal rollercoaster that orchestrated reproduction for forty years stabilises into a different, steadier register.

You become, biologically, a different kind of vessel.

What the documented research is just beginning to map is what indigenous knowledge has held for centuries. The endometrial stem cells, the cellular gold, do not disappear at menopause. Recent research has confirmed they remain present in the postmenopausal endometrium, and that they are no longer hormone-dependent. The regenerative capacity that was being released every month is now held within. The energy that orchestrated reproduction for forty years redistributes through the body in ways the science is only beginning to chart. What women’s bodies have always known, the laboratories are now catching up to.

Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, observed this without the laboratory data we now have. She wrote that there is no greater power in the world than the zest of a post-menopausal woman.

She was not being romantic. She was being anthropological.

She had seen what our culture has worked very hard to make us forget.

Her Blood Is Gold

So here is the teaching, my loves, in the plainest words I can give it to you.

Our blood is gold. Until menopause, it has been giving her away. Now we hold it within us.

The womb that held the possibility of children now holds the woman herself. The blood that was offered for the possibility of others is now offered for the possibility of our own becoming. The energy that went outward for forty years is being called back inward, finally. Possibly for the first time in our adult lives.

This is the alchemical shift at the centre of menopause. And it is possibly one of the most wild, magical, and profound shifts that we will ever go through. When we enter this journey of peri-menopause and menopause, we are quite literally in a metamorphosis.

I know that sounds slightly grand written down like that. I can hear it myself. But I mean it in the most ordinary and embodied sense.

Alchemy is the transformation of raw material into gold. The medieval alchemists searched their whole lives for the Philosopher’s Stone, the substance that would transmute lead into gold. They never found it in the chemical sense, partly because they were not actually looking for chemistry. They were looking for the inner gold of awakened consciousness.

The menopausal woman has been doing alchemy for decades.

She has been turning every experience, every loss, every love, every threshold, every heartbreak, every birth and miscarriage and choice and devotion into the gold of who she is becoming. By the time she arrives at menopause, the gold is already in her. The alchemy is already complete. The Philosopher’s Stone is her own life.

Which, when you think about it, is rather a lot to have been carrying around without anyone telling you.

What menopause does is stop the monthly release of the blood that was the raw material of her reproductive years. Now the gold she has been making, the wisdom, the embodied knowing, the lived transmission, the medicine, is held within her.

She is the alchemical vessel.

She is the gold.

The Women Who Saw This Before Me

I want to name that this teaching is not mine. She has a lineage, and I am part of it, and the women who came before me did the work that made it possible for me to write what I am writing today.

Lara Owen published a book in 1993 called Her Blood Is Gold: Awakening to the Wisdom of Menstruation. She was one of the first to name menstrual blood as the alchemical wisdom of a woman’s body. Her title is the title I am giving to this article. With reverence. With acknowledgement. With the recognition that I stand on her shoulders, and on the shoulders of every woman who has been quietly holding this work alive in the decades since her book was first published.

Judy Grahn published Blood, Bread, and Roses in 1993, introducing what she calls Metaformic Theory. She argued, with the precision of a scholar, that menstruation was not peripheral to human civilization. Menstruation was the origin of her. The earliest mathematics, the earliest astronomy, the earliest marriage rites, all of them traced back to ancient menstrual rituals.

Tamara Slayton founded the Menstrual Health Foundation and trained generations of women in the cycle as a sacred navigational system.

I was lucky enough to study with many of these women. And there were countless others, in small dim rooms, in circles, in conferences, in books almost nobody read at the time, holding this work for decades while the wider culture was not ready to enter the dialogue.

What they gave us, all of them, was a map.

This article is one small piece of the larger reclamation they began. And I am beyond grateful for each of them. And I believe that we might just be ready to have this conversation on a wider, broader level now.

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And This Is Where I Have to Stop

Here is what I will not do in this article.

I will not teach you how to actually hold the gold.

Because that part, the part where this teaching comes off the page and lands in your body, in your daily life, in your specific choices about how to live as a woman who is no longer giving her blood away every month, that part cannot be received from an article.

This has to be received in real time. In circle. With other women who are crossing the same threshold. With breath, with body, with the slow attentive work of letting a teaching actually become embodied rather than just understood.

Some teachings can travel through the written word. The biology can. The reframe can. The naming can.

But the transmission and the practice, the way of being, the architecture of a daily life organised around the held gold rather than the released gold, that one is too important to entrust to text.

So I have written you what an article can carry.

The rest is something I am preparing to bring to you live.

Some teachings cannot be received from the page. They have to be received in circle, in real time, in the body, with other women who are crossing the same threshold.

What She Asks of You

For now, my loves, I want you to sit with this teaching.

Not in a hurry. Not trying to make sense of it. Not asking yet how to apply it. Just letting the truth of what your body has been doing for decades, and what is now ready to do differently, land inside you.

Notice what comes up. Notice what changes when you let yourself believe that your blood was always gold. That every cycle you ever had was a release of regenerative wisdom into the world. That every month you bled and apologised for staining a sheet, you were releasing medicine.

Notice what changes when you let yourself believe that the gold you have been giving away every month is now beginning to be held inside you.

For your own becoming. For your own legacy. For the woman you are quietly being made into, inside this great threshold.

That is where I am going to leave the teaching, for now.

The fuller version of Her Blood Is Gold, including how a woman actually lives this in her daily life, what she asks of you, what becomes possible inside her, and how she threads through the seven gateways of the menopausal passage, will be opened in The Untamed Chrysalis. The third and deepest evening of The Wild Knowing series, on the 30th of July. And then again, in much greater depth, inside Metamorphosis, the nine-month initiation that begins on the 15th of August.

I will share the registration links the moment they go live.

For now, the simplest thing you can do is take the free quiz I opened earlier this month. She will help you find your gateway in the seven-gateway map of this passage, and quietly hold a place for you in The Wild Knowing series as she opens.

→ Take the free quiz: Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

And if any of this has landed in your body the way I hope she has, share her with the women in your life who have been giving their gold away for decades without ever being told what they were holding.

They deserve to know.

All of us do.

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A QUICK NOTE FOR THE WOMEN READING THIS FIRST

My loves, this article is written directly to the men in our lives. The partners, the brothers, the grown sons, the fathers, the closest friends. I want you to read it first, because you will know whether it lands. And then, if it does, please send it to the men who love you. You do not need to explain or soften it. A simple message will do. Something like, I want you to read this. It will help you understand what I have been walking through. Please take the time. They have been waiting for this map too. And so have we.

Also if you have not yet taken the new quiz “Where Are You In Your Menopause Journey” here is the link!

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So. You are here.

Which probably means one of two things. Either someone you love has sent you this article and asked you, in a tone that did not quite invite negotiation, to read it. Or you stumbled in by accident and have not yet realised that almost nothing else on the internet about menopause is written for you.

Either way. Welcome.

I am writing this for the men who love a woman walking through the menopausal passage. The husband. The partner. The brother. The grown son. The father. The closest friend. Whoever you are to her, and however that connection is shaped, if she is in this passage and you are trying, with whatever you have, to walk beside her, this article is for you.

And let me say one thing right at the start, because nobody else has said it to you and somebody needs to.

Nobody gave you a map either.

You are travelling with a partner mid-metamorphosis with no instruction manual, no language, no training, and a culture that has worked very hard to make sure nobody around you knows what is happening to her either. Your doctor was given roughly one hour of training in this menopausal passage during medical school. Your own father, if he is still alive, almost certainly was not given language for it either. Your friends are mostly not talking about it. And the woman you love may not be able to fully explain it herself, because she is inside the storm trying to describe the weather.

So if you have been feeling baffled, helpless, hurt, defensive, or quietly terrified, I get it!

You are moving through something genuinely huge with no preparation.

Let me try to give you some.

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What Is Actually Happening to Her

Let me be direct about this.

She, whoever the She is in your life, is in a hormonal initiation that is comparable in magnitude only to puberty. The last time her body went through anything this big was when she was twelve. Her estrogen is in a long, unpredictable freefall. Her progesterone has been quietly declining for years. Her brain is actively rewiring. Her nervous system is recalibrating in ways that have real neurological consequences, including disrupted sleep, cognitive fog, emotional intensity, and physical sensations she did not have access to last year and may not have access to next year either.

This is not vague. This is a powerful biological, emotional, psychological, and spiritual rite of passage. Dr Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College, has spent years scanning the perimenopausal brain. Her research, published in her 2024 book The Menopause Brain, shows that this passage is one of only two structural neurological transitions a woman’s brain goes through in her entire life. The other one was puberty.

And the medical world, frankly, has been catastrophic at explaining this phase of a woman’s life. Only thirty-one percent of US obstetrics and gynaecology residency programmes include any standardised menopause training. Twenty percent of OB/GYN residents finish their entire residency having received zero lectures on menopause. The clinical professor at Yale Medical School has stated publicly that she gets one hour to teach menopause to medical students during their entire OB/GYN rotation.

One hour. For an initiation roughly two million American women cross every single year.

Which means your partner is walking through one of the largest biological transitions of her adult life, often without language, often without medical support, often without anyone around her having a clue what is going on.

If she has not been able to explain it to you, it is not because she does not want to. It is because she does not yet have the words.

What This Really Is

Now I want to take you a layer deeper, because the biological piece is only half of what is happening to her.

Menopause is a powerful rite of passage. A rite of passage is a structural transition between one life and another, marked by an internal threshold and accompanied by the death of who the person was before. Every traditional culture across history has had one for women at this age. Ours does not. Which is part of why she is having such a hard time, and part of why you are baffled.

She is not adjusting. She is not coping. She is not, with any luck and a few supplements, going to return to the woman she was at forty.

She is becoming someone she has not been before.

And here is the part that almost nobody is saying to either of you. In order for that becoming to happen, she has to withdraw her energy from the places she used to put it. The relationships she used to maintain on autopilot. The yes she used to say before checking with herself. The labour she used to absorb without anyone noticing she was absorbing it. The roles she has been performing, often beautifully, for decades.

She is calling that energy back, possibly for the first time in her adult life.

This is what looks, from the outside, like her becoming distant. Or selfish. Or hard to reach. Or no longer the person you fell in love with.

She is not becoming distant. She is becoming present to herself. And that is something most women only do once in their lives. This is when.

She is withdrawing her energy from what she used to do in order to bring that energy into herself. Possibly for the first time.

Which brings me to her symptoms.

The hot flashes. The insomnia. The rage that arrives without warning. The exhaustion that no rest seems to reach. The grief that comes up in the kitchen on a Tuesday for no reason she can name.

Yes, they need to be tended. Yes, she may need medical support. Yes, you can help her find the right doctor and the right framework for her body. All of that is real.

But the symptoms are also messages. They are her body and her psyche telling her, often loudly, what she has been carrying that is no longer hers to carry. What she has been swallowing that needs to be spoken. What she has been postponing that needs to be lived.

Her body is not malfunctioning. Her body is speaking.

If she can listen to what her symptoms are saying, the symptoms move differently through her. Not always faster. Not always easier. But with the meaning intact, instead of being treated as noise to be silenced.

And here is the part of this teaching I most want you to hear.

Her transformation may initiate yours.

If you are the kind of man who can stay close enough to her to actually witness what is happening, something starts to move in you too. Not because you are trying to. Because her becoming, when it is genuinely met by someone close to her, has a way of asking the man beside her, quietly, what he is also being called to become.

You may find yourself reckoning with what you have built. The patterns you have inherited from your father. The work you have not yet done. The questions you have been postponing about who you actually want to be in the second half of your life.

This is not coincidence. It is the deepest possible kind of intimacy. Two people in metamorphosis at the same time, inside the same relationship, both being remade.

Most cultures had a name for this. We have lost the name. But the thing itself is still happening, in living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens all over the world, between women in this passage and the men who are paying close enough attention to be moved by her.

You can be that man. Whether you are now or not. You can become him.

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Eleven Years In, From Both of Us

Let me tell you something about my own partnership.

I met my partner thirteen years ago. He has walked alongside me for eleven of those years through this passage. We are still in it. Still in the middle of the great metamorphosis. And we both know now what neither of us knew at the start.

In the early years, neither of us understood what was happening. My PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) got significantly more extreme. I would become someone slightly different in the days before my bleed. So different, in fact, that I gave her a name.

Helga.

Helga was the more bombastic version of me who arrived without warning, ideally with a list of grievances, and was happy to litigate them at considerable length. She was not subtle. She was not negotiable. And she was, in those early years, putting some real pressure on our intimate life.

My partner, to his credit, became extraordinary at reading Helga’s arrival. He could often feel the shift in my energy before I could. He knew when my period was coming three days before I did. Which, when you think about it, is a kind of magic. He had become more sensitive to the rhythm of my cycle than I was.

And then my cycle began to break apart. Some months it was three weeks long. Some months it was one continuous bleed that did not seem to want to stop. Some months it skipped entirely. The compass that had been quietly orienting me for thirty years was no longer giving me a reading.

I felt cast out into the abyss. Frankly. There is no other word for it.

And as I came unmoored from my own internal rhythm, the tension in our connection became real. Not because either of us was doing anything wrong. Because we had no map. Neither of us knew what was happening, and neither of us had a framework that gave the passage a name.

It is hard to navigate this passage from the inside. I can only imagine how it must look and feel from where you are standing.

Then came the impact on our intimate life. The hot flashes. The night sweats. My body would flare up like a volcano any time he touched me. It wasn’t because I did not want him to touch me, I did. But my body literally could not regulate the heat his hand was transferring to me and it would trigger a hot flash almost immediately. Every loving touch became, biologically, kindling.

I want to share this with you, because the men I have spoken to about this almost never know it. When your partner pulls away from your touch in this passage, it is not because she has stopped loving you. It is because her body has temporarily lost the capacity to receive heat from another body without overheating. The reflex is biological. The love is intact.

Her withdrawal may also be because she is is experiencing other symptoms that make it hard for her to be intimate with you. As estrogen decreases, it often causes a thinning of the skin, in particular the skin of the vulva. Which can lead to increased sensitivity and in some cases vaginal atrophy, (don’t even get me started with the way that this was named) which makes having penetrative sex very painful.

So for me eventually, after years of resistance, I started to enter into the conversation about hormones.

On the Bone of Contention That Is HRT

I want to say something about hormone replacement therapy here, because she may be in the middle of this decision and the cultural noise around it is, frankly, two decades out of date.

In 2002, a major study called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was halted early because it appeared to show increased risks of breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke in women taking the form of HRT that was standard at the time. A generation of women, and a generation of doctors, walked away from HRT in fear. My own decision to consider it took me years, partly because my mother had both breast cancer and cervical cancer, and I was tentative about anything hormonal as a result.

Here is what has changed.

In May 2024, the same researchers published twenty-year follow-up data in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showing no increase in deaths from breast cancer or cardiovascular disease in the women who had been part of the original trial. Women under sixty who started HRT actually showed decreased all-cause mortality.

The form of HRT being prescribed today is largely different from what was being studied in 2002. Lower doses. Bioidentical micronised progesterone instead of the synthetic progestin used in the original trial. Transdermal delivery through patches, creams, and gels, which significantly reduces the risk of blood clots compared to oral pills. The 2024 guidelines from The Menopause Society (formerly the North American Menopause Society) have explicitly removed the old five-year duration limits and now state that arbitrary limits should not be placed on the duration of HRT use.

In November 2025, the United States Food and Drug Administration moved to remove the boxed warnings from HRT products that had been there since the 2002 panic, after a public expert panel reviewed the evidence.

None of this means HRT is right for every woman. The decision is hers, with her doctor, considering her own history and risks. What it does mean is that many women are still operating from fear-based information that is two decades out of date, and may not have been given the current research.

Why I am telling you this. Because if she is wrestling with this decision, she needs accurate information, not the cultural ghost of 2002. And you, as the person closest to her, can help her find the current research. You can come with her to the doctor’s appointment. You can hold the question with her. The choice is hers. The support can be yours.

For my own part, I came to HRT eventually, after careful consideration with my doctors. And I will only say this. Without an honest map alongside her, how is any man meant to understand how deeply this is affecting him too?

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Where to Start

If you want to get up to speed, here are the four sources I would put in your hands. Each one is current, evidence-based, and written by people with the credentials to be saying what they are saying.

• The New Menopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver (Rodale Books, 2024).

  Number one New York Times bestseller. Written by a board-certified OB/GYN and Certified Menopause Provider. Contains an entire chapter on the WHI study and why the 2002 reading has been reassessed. The single best place to start if she is wrestling with the HRT question.

• Estrogen Matters by Dr Avrum Bluming and Dr Carol Tavris (Revised and Updated Edition, 2024).

  Dr Bluming is an oncologist. Dr Tavris is a social psychologist. The book directly addresses the breast cancer question that has kept so many women, including women with family histories like mine, away from HRT for two decades. If her hesitation is specifically about cancer risk, this is the book.

• The Menopause Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi (Avery, 2024).

  Dr Mosconi is a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College who has spent years scanning the perimenopausal brain. Her work explains the cognitive changes, the sleep disruption, the emotional intensity, and the brain rewiring that nobody has been telling either of you about. Read this and the brain fog stops being mysterious.

• The Menopause Society (menopause.org).

  The professional body that sets the clinical guidelines. Their position statements are publicly available. If her doctor is not a Certified Menopause Practitioner, the Society’s find-a-practitioner tool on their website will help you locate one who is. This matters. The right doctor or naturopath can change everything.

What You Are Going Through

Here is something I want to acknowledge directly, you are quite possibly also in your own midlife shift, if you are partnered with someone who is going through hers.

And if this is you, then your testosterone has actually been declining for years. Your body is changing in ways nobody briefed you on. Your sleep is probably different from what it was at thirty-five. Your relationship to your own ambition, your own mortality, your own sense of meaning, all of it is in flux. Some men in this phase find themselves in genuine andropause, with measurable hormonal shifts that affect mood, energy, libido, and cognitive clarity. Almost no doctor will say the word to you.

And underneath the hormonal piece, there is the deeper midlife reckoning. Who you are becoming. What you have built. What you have not yet built. What it means to age as a man in a culture that gave you almost no script for the older man as a figure of wisdom, depth, and luminous authority. You were told to stay productive. To not show vulnerability. To fix things. None of which serves you in this phase of your life.

You are walking your own initiation while she is walking hers.

Which means this passage is happening to both of you. Simultaneously. With no shared language, no shared map, and no cultural framework for two people in metamorphosis at the same time inside the same relationship.

If that sounds genuinely demanding, it is.

If it sounds beautiful, it is also that.

What She Actually Needs From You

In as practical a form as I can give you, after eleven years inside this passage, here is what I have come to understand about what your partner most needs.

1. Do not try to fix her.

This is the single most important thing in this entire article. She is not a problem. This is not a problem. This is a passage. You cannot fix her any more than you could fix puberty when she was twelve. What she needs is not a solution. She needs to be witnessed.

2. Do not say at least you do not have your period anymore.

Or any sentence that begins with at least. I cannot fully explain why this lands as badly as it does. Just trust me. Do not.

3. Believe her body.

If she says she cannot be touched, believe her. If she says she is exhausted, believe her. If she says her brain is not working, believe her. Her body is not malfunctioning. Her body is speaking. The hormonal and neurological shifts are real, and the messages underneath them are also real. She is not exaggerating. She is not over-reacting. She is, on top of an enormous biological transition, trying to function in a culture that does not honour her or help her create the space she deeply needs to make this passage.

4. Sit with her in the dark.

She does not need you to light the candle. She needs you to sit beside her while the candle is out. This is one of the most underrated forms of love available to a partner during this passage. Your presence, without trying to make the darkness brighter, is itself a profound gift.

5. Make her a cup of tea.

Or whatever the equivalent is in your life together. Small ordinary acts of care matter more in this passage than grand gestures. The tea brought without being asked for. The hot water bottle. The bath run for her. The phone call made on her behalf because she does not have the energy. The small things land deepest.

6. Let her withdraw.

She may pull energy back from places she has been putting her for decades. The dinner parties she used to host. The work she used to absorb. The friendships she used to maintain singlehandedly. The way she used to be available to everyone, at all hours, without question. This is not her abandoning the world. This is her bringing her energy back to herself, possibly for the first time in her adult life. If you can recognise the withdrawal for what it is, and not require her to keep performing the old life, you give her the most precious gift available in this passage. Space.

7. Do not take it personally when she changes.

She is becoming someone new. She is supposed to be. The woman she has been for thirty years is being remade. The values she has been carrying may shift. The yes that came automatically may stop coming. The patience she had for your particular small irritations may run thinner. None of this is about you. All of it is about her own becoming, finally, on her own terms.

8. Have your own life.

Your own friends. Your own work. Your own midlife shift to walk. She does not need to be your only world right now. In fact, the men who walk this passage best are often the men who are also walking their own. Get the male friendships. Get the therapy if it serves you. Sit with your own questions. Do your own becoming.

What Happens On the Other Side

Here is the part of this article that I particularly want you to read.

The men who walk their partners through this passage with real presence end up with a different kind of woman on the other side of her. A woman who is more deeply herself. Who has been through the underworld of her own becoming and come back carrying things she did not have access to before. Clarity. Sovereignty. A truer voice. A body that finally knows what she wants and is, perhaps for the first time, able to say.

And the relationship that survives this passage, when it is walked well, ends up deeper than anything you had before. The roles you both built your earlier life around get retired. What is left is honest. The intimacy that returns, when it does, is rooted in a different ground. Both of you have been through something. Both of you have been remade.

The woman you fell in love with is becoming someone she could not have been at the time you met her. If you can stay through this, you get to know her in a way no younger man ever did.

The men I see at the other end of this passage with their partners are deeply, quietly, properly loved. By women who have come into themselves. Which is a different experience than being loved by a woman who has not yet.

It is, frankly, the great gift of this rite of passage that is menopause.

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So This Is Menopause

For the last two years I have been performing in a stage show called So This Is Menopause. A series of monologues by women who have been walking through this passage, delivered live, with humour, with grief, with rage, with reverence.

And at every single performance, men come up to me afterwards. Often quietly. Sometimes with tears.

Thank you. I had no idea this is what she has been going through. Now everything makes sense. Every man needs to see this.

Which is part of why I am writing this article. Because most men do not live in a town where the show is playing. Most men will not, ever, sit in that theatre. But they need the information all the same.

And the women they love need them to have her.

One Last Thing

If this article was sent to you by someone you love, here is what I would suggest.

Do not write back a long reply trying to fix everything. Do not promise to be different.

Just breathe for a few moments and then read it again.

Find the part that lands hardest for you and sit with it for a moment.

Then go to your partner, your sister, your mother, whoever sent it, and say one true sentence. Something like, I read the article. I see you. I am here. Thank you for sending it to me.

Then make her a cup of tea.

It really is that simple. And that hard. And that good.

With deep respect for the work you are doing,

in love and devotion Elayne Kalila

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THE QUIZ IS LIVE

Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

A free two-minute oracle to help you find which of the seven gateways of this passage you are walking through right now. Take it at the link below before you read on, if you are ready.

→ Take the quiz now

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I built you something, my loves.

And I want to tell you why, because the building of this has taken me longer than almost anything else I have made in this work, and there is a specific reason for that.

Across the seven articles I have written so far in this series, I have given you a great deal of language. The reframe of menopause as rite of passage. Who the Midlife Maven is and why I have chosen to name her as such. Peri/Menopause As Your Second Puberty. that we as women experience in our lives. The doctors who were never taught about Menopause.

And underneath all of it, the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. The map I have been carrying for years. The one I wrote about in the fourth article in this series, drawn from the myth of Inanna, from the accumulated wisdom of the sacred feminine lineages, and from eleven years of my own descent.

But here is the thing about a map, my loves. Knowing it exists is not the same as being able to read it.

And I think many of you have been sitting with this exact question.

You have been reading the articles. You have been feeling something land. You have been recognising yourself in pieces of the map without yet being able to say, with any precision, where you actually are inside her.

So I built you something that does.

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The Quiz Is Live

It is called Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey?

It is free and takes about two minutes. And what it will give you, when you have walked through it, is something I have not yet been able to give you in any of the articles.

Your gateway.

The specific place in the seven-gateway map of this passage where you are walking right now. With a teaching on what that gateway is asking of you, what you are most likely facing, and some support as to how to navigate this pase of the journey, and what comes next.

→ Take the quiz

The Seven Gateways

For a taster here is a brief outline of each gateway. Each one names a different threshold of this passage, a different surrender, and a different power that arrives when you have walked through it rather than around it.

Seven thresholds. Seven surrenders. Seven powers.

Gateway One: The Reckoning

This is the moment that clarity arrives, inside of you. The dynamic you have been quietly working around for years. The role that no longer fits. The yes that has been costing you more than you admitted. Suddenly impossible to unsee.

Gateway Two: The Release

You can feel the ground is beginning to move under your feet. The structures you built your identity around starting, with or without your permission, to loosen. The grief of releasing the woman who held it all together so beautifully for so long.

Gateway Three: The Unknown

You are now in the dark night of the soul. Things start to dissolve. You are faced with looking and seeing what has been waiting in the basement of your life for decades. It can be the most demanding gateway of the passage, and the most transformative. You can no longer continue to do things the way that you used to, your body is too tired, you dont have the same capacity, and your old strategies are no longer working.

Gateway Four: Self-Devotion

This is the first gateway of the ascent. The compass that has spent your entire life pointing toward what others need, finally turning toward you. The question many of us have spent decades skillfully avoiding. What do I need? What do I really want?

Gateway Five: Body Love

Your body starts to return to you in a new way. Erotic aliveness coming back, not the way she was at twenty-five but as something slower, deeper, entirely your own. Pleasure returning as information rather than indulgence. Coming home to her.

Gateway Six: Self Expression

Your essence voice coming through. What wants to be created next. What wants to be spoken aloud. The life beginning to reorganise around what is actually true rather than what is expected of you.

Gateway Seven: Embodied Wisdom

You start to emerge. Wisdom as a lived way of being, present in the body and evident in your choices. The woman who has been to the underworld and come back, carrying something the world genuinely needs.

And here is the architecture, my loves, in the simplest possible form. Gateways One and Two are the descent. Gateway Three is the underworld itself. Gateways Four through Seven are the ascent. The map is not random. She is the ancient shape of every true initiation, drawn from the myth of Inanna, refined across thousands of years of women walking this exact passage.

Wherever You Are, You Are Exactly Where She Needs You to Be

Before you take the quiz, my loves, I want you to know that this passage is not linear. It is, like all things truly feminine, a spiral.

You can genuinely be inside more than one gateway at the same time. You may be walking the reckoning of Gateway One in your marriage, while your body is making the fierce renegotiation of Gateway Three. You may be in the deep disorientation of Gateway Three and feel the first tender shoots of Gateway Four breaking through at the same time.

You may cycle back through a gateway you thought you had already walked, at a deeper register, because you are finally ready to meet what you could not meet the first time.

This is simply the ancient shape of initiation.

There is no hierarchy. There is no correct pace. There is no version of this passage you are supposed to be better at.

There is only where you actually are. And the map is only useful from your actual location.

Take the Quiz

Two minutes, my loves. It will ask you a small number of honest questions. It will give you your gateway. And it will give you a short teaching on what that gateway is asking of you right now.

It is free.

→ Where Are You In Your Menopausal Journey? Take the quiz here.

And What Comes After

Once you know your gateway, my loves, you will be ready for what is coming.

In July, I am opening three sacred gatherings I have been deeply preparing for some time. I am calling them The Wild Knowing.

The first, Primal Awakening, on the 8th of July, is free and open to every woman in this passage. The Wild Dark on the 18th. The Untamed Chrysalis on the 30th. Each one walks deeper into the territory the quiz has just shown you.

And in August, I am opening Metamorphosis. A nine-month initiation into the Midlife Maven, walked through all seven gateways of menopause, in circle, with other women walking the same descent.

Both of those doors are coming. I will share the registration links the moment they goes live.

For today, my love, the door is the quiz. This is the simplest, fastest, most generous thing I can give you to help you find yourself on the map of this passage.

Grab a cuppa and listen for the answers to the deep oracle questions.

And if you are called share the quiz with any woman in your life who has been wondering where she is in this great rite.

She has been waiting for this map too.

→ Take the quiz now

Stay close, my loves.

The door is opening.

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Over the last few weeks, I have been getting one question more than any other from the women writing to me.

What do I do with the rage?

How do I transmute it? How do I use it without it spilling out into my relationships? How do I hold it without repressing it and having it damage me from the inside? How do I not turn into the woman I do not want to be, either the one who burns everything around her or the one who quietly disappears into illness and exhaustion?

These are powerful questions. They are the questions a woman asks when she has already done some of the work and knows there is more. They are the questions of women who have read Hysterical and The Boys We Are Losing, felt the rage rise, and arrived at the next layer.

Now what.

This piece is my attempt at an answer.

I want to name that the teaching that follows is not philosophy. I have spent three decades working with rage in my own body and in other women’s bodies. Through nervous system regulation. Through somatic psychotherapy. Through the mystery school work I have been holding for years, where we sit in circle and the women find their way into the power of their own rage and through to the other side of it. This is the work I have been doing in devotion for so long that it is now time to bring some of it into the open.

Let me begin where I should always begin, which is in my own body.

A moment of my own

A long time ago, a man I loved and was married to betrayed me. The details do not matter, and they are mine. What matters is what happened in my body.

The righteousness came first. Then, almost immediately, the rage widened — to him, to every man who had ever done this, to five thousand years of women being lied to. I could feel it pouring through. And underneath it, I felt my heart close. A small click. A door shutting.

What came next I am still reckoning with. The castrating queen who had lived in my body since girlhood came online without my permission and began, day after day, to murder the relationship from the other side. He had broken the trust. That was true. But it is also true that I made sure the relationship died. I did it with small precise cruelties I told myself were honesty. I was tortured by it. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to open. Some part of me could not. The rage had me. I did not have it.

I tell you this not because it is unusual. I tell you because it is ordinary. It is what happens in our intimate relationships, our public lives, our scrolling, our rage at the news cycle. The rage starts as a sacred signal and somewhere along the way becomes something else — something that runs us instead of moving through us.

The trap looks, from the inside, exactly like the cause we are fighting for.

This is what the women writing to me are sensing. They can feel the rage is real. They can feel it is sacred in some way. And they can also feel it pulling toward either spilling out onto the wrong people or folding inward and causing damage. They are trying to find the third path.

That is the path this piece is trying to name.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

Sacred rage

Let me start with what rage is when it is doing its actual work.

Rage is intelligence. It is the body’s recognition that a line has been crossed. A line in your own life, or a line in the world, or both at once. Rage rises when something that should not be happening is happening. It is the nervous system’s most accurate signal that the situation in front of you is not okay.

Rage is also power. It is animating. It pulls energy up from the belly and into the chest, the throat, the limbs. It is what mothers feel when their child is threatened. It is what women feel when they finally stop accommodating. It is what whole movements feel when generations of swallowed no finally arrive in the throat as no more.

This rage is sacred. It is medicine. It is what wakes us up. It is what turns a slumbering culture into a moving one. Every meaningful change in human history has been propelled, at least in part, by women’s rage finally finding its target.

I will defend this rage with my life.

And.

Rage was not designed to be a permanent home.

Rage was designed to move through the body, propel an action, and then release. Like a wave. Like a contraction in labour. It rises, it crests, it does its work, it passes, and the body returns to baseline, available for the next signal.

This is what sacred rage looks like in the body. Hot. Clean. Located. It knows what it is about, who it is addressed to, what it is asking for. Time-limited. It rises, it acts, it releases. A woman in sacred rage is dangerous to the structures that should be afraid of her, and she is also available — to her body, to her loves, to her work, to her own life.

The rage has not eaten her. It has used her, briefly and precisely, and released her.

This is the rage your body is capable of. Some of you have it already. Some of you have had it and lost it. The capacity is in your body. It is not lost. It is waiting for the conditions that let it move.

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Where the rage actually goes

The rage is not the problem. The rage having nowhere to go is the problem.

Here is what the women writing to me are sensing, and what they are right to sense.

Rage that does not move does not disappear. It goes somewhere. It either spills outward in directions you would not choose, or it folds inward and goes underground and corrodes the host.

When rage spills outward in the wrong direction, it ends up on the people closest to us. The husband who is not the man we are actually angry at. The friend who said the wrong thing. The mother. The sister. The child. The colleague. The stranger in the comments section. We start finding evidence everywhere of the injury we are carrying, even in the people who love us. The rage that has no clean target spreads across every available surface, and the people we share our lives with become the surfaces.

When rage folds inward, it becomes something else. Insomnia. Cortisol that does not turn off. Autoimmune flares. Period dysregulation. Libido vanishing. Depression. The collapse of joy as a real biological capacity. The body that was built to move through rage in waves is being asked to live inside it as climate, and the body cannot do that for long without paying.

This is what the women writing to me are trying to interrupt. They can feel themselves doing one of these things, or both. They can feel their relationships straining. They can feel their bodies under siege. They can feel themselves trying to manage the rage by either stuffing it down or scrolling it out, and neither is working.

The reason neither is working is that the rage is not designed to be managed. It is designed to move.

When rage cannot move, it does not become peace. It becomes one of those two modes. And the cost is real.

I want to name this with care, because the women writing to me are not wrong to be enraged. They are living inside a culture that has dismantled almost every sacred space that used to exist for moving collective rage. There are no public rituals. There are no community circles at scale. There are not priestesses on every street corner. There is no language for what is happening in your body. There is no roadmap. Of course the rage has nowhere to go. The architecture for it to go somewhere has been taken away from us.

What I want to offer is the architecture, in small pieces, that you can build back yourself.

Both directions

This is the heart of the teaching, and it is what I have been working with for thirty years.

The medicine goes in both directions.

Rage that is being suppressed must be allowed to express.

Rage that is spilling sideways must be given a container, witnessed, and brought to ground. The same rage, in two different bodies, needs different work.

The woman who has been swallowing her rage for years needs to give herself permission to feel it, voice it, move it. She needs to learn that her rage is not dangerous and that she is not dangerous when she feels it. She needs the rage to come up out of the basement and into her body where it can do its work.

The woman whose rage is spilling sideways needs the opposite. She needs not less rage, but more accurate rage. It would be so powerful for her to learn to feel it before it leaks. She needs witness and a sacred container so the rage has somewhere to go that is not the husband, the child, the friend. She needs the rage to come down out of the throat and into the belly where it can be felt, named, moved.

Most of us are doing some combination of both, in different domains. The same woman who suppresses her rage at work spills it onto her family at home. The same woman who explodes at her husband swallows her grief alone in the bath. The body cycles between repression and spillage because it does not have a third option.

The third option is what the teaching is.

The rage needs to be felt fully. With witness. With a sacred container. With somewhere for the energy to go. And then it needs to be allowed to release. Not bypassed, or suppressed, or just let go in the spiritual sense that almost nobody can actually do on command. Released because it has actually moved.

That is what transmutation is. It is not the rage becoming something nicer, it is the rage doing its work, in full, and then resolving into the next available state in the body. Which is often grief, sometimes clarity or even a precise action, and sometimes, eventually, joy.

The body knows how to do this. It has been waiting to be allowed.

The witness

If there is one teaching from thirty years of this work I would offer above all others, it is this.

Being witnessed in your rage is the medicine.

Not being talked down, or managed, or fixed. Witnessed. Another woman, or a circle of women, present, available, holding the field, while what is moving in you actually moves.

Some of the most powerful work I have ever done with women is in circle, where a woman finds her way into the full power of her own rage, in her body, with sound, with movement, with witness. And then she discovers, almost always for the first time in her life, that the rage is not dangerous, that she is not dangerous, that the rage moves through her and out the other side and leaves her cleaner and more available than she has been in years.

This is what the body has been asking for. Not less rage. Witnessed rage. Rage that has somewhere to go because someone is willing to stay in the room while it moves.

The reason so many of us are cycling through rage that cannot be transmuted is not that we are too angry. It is that we have nowhere to be angry that does not cost us our marriages, our jobs, our friendships, or our self-image. We have no sacred circles. We have no priestesses. We have no rituals. We have no rooms where the rage is welcome.

So we either hold it in until it folds inward, or we let it leak in the wrong directions.

The sacred circle is the medicine. If you have one, deepen into it. If you do not have one, build one. Three women, a kitchen table, regularity. Start there. The capacity to witness each other’s rage is one of the oldest medicines on earth, and we have almost forgotten we are allowed to use it.

How to move the rage

The practices. Use the ones that fit. Do them.

• Shake. Animals shake after threat. They tremble until the stored activation discharges, and then they get up. Humans have forgotten how. Put on music and shake, knees, shoulders, hands, the whole body. Five to ten minutes. You will feel ridiculous. Your body will know exactly what to do.

• Voice. Rage held silently calcifies. Rage voiced moves. Find a place where no one can hear you, a parked car, a forest, a pillow over your mouth, and let the sound out. Not words. Sound. Roar, scream, growl, howl. The body needs to make the noise the rage has been holding. One note: if you are releasing rage to a tree or a forest, please ask permission of the tree first. You can also dig a hole in the earth and release rage into the earth, again with permission.

• Move your body. Walk fast. Run. Dance. Drum. Chop wood. Dig the garden. The rage is kinetic energy. It wants to go somewhere. If you do not give it a destination, it goes inward and corrodes the host, or it spills sideways onto the nearest body.

• Breathe out. The long exhale. Inhale four counts, exhale eight, sigh audibly at the end. Five minutes. The long exhale tells the nervous system the threat has passed. The body cannot stay in rage when the breath has lengthened.

• Be witnessed. Another woman, a circle, a therapist who knows somatic work. The rage moves when it is seen. The rage does not move when it is hidden.

• Bring it to the altar. Candle, stone, photograph, flower. Speak the rage into the space. Name what has been done. Name who has done it. Name what you want to release. Let the ritual container hold what your nervous system is too small to hold alone.

• Act, precisely. Aligned action is itself a somatic discharge. Phone call to the representative. Hard conversation at the dinner table. Vote. Donation. Boundary held. Decision made. Piece written. Email sent. The action does not have to be large. It has to be true. The rage is asking what are you going to do about this. When you answer with something specific, the rage releases.

This is what transmutation actually is. Rage that has found its target and is now doing the work.

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The wider context

A few things for the women asking these questions.

• You did not get here alone. The cultural infrastructure for moving collective rage does not exist in our world. No public rituals. No community circles at scale. No priestesses on every street corner. No roadmap. The fact that you are trying to figure out what to do with the rage, in your kitchen, by yourself, is itself a sign of how much the culture has dismantled. You are not failing. You are inside a system that took the containers away and now sells you outrage as the substitute.

• The algorithm wants you in the loop. Every refresh, every scroll, every click on the next outrage, is making someone money from your nervous system. The architecture of attention is designed to keep you cycling, because cycling is engagement and engagement is the product. Get off the feed when you can. The feed is not the work.

• Some of the rage is not yours. When personal injury fuses with collective injury, your rage at the man who betrayed you fusing with your rage at every man who has ever betrayed a woman, your body cannot tell the difference, and the rage stops being moveable. The lineage rage belongs at the altar, in the circle, in the political action. The personal rage belongs in the personal reckoning. Both are real. Neither benefits from being fused.

• You will fail at this. You will move the rage one day and spill it the next. You will start the practice and stop the practice. You will find yourself at 3am refreshing the feed and hating yourself for it. This is fine. This is the work. The capacity is itself a practice. You are meant to keep coming back.

What is available on the other side

You are not less angry. You are just less haunted. The rage rises when something needs it to rise, and it does its work, and it releases.

You are more focused. Your actions are more precise. You save your fire for what actually matters.

You are more available. To your body, your people, your work, your joy. You have not had to wall any of it off in order to manage the rage, because the rage is no longer something to be managed.

You are still standing in your no. You have not become soft in the way the culture means soft. You are still the woman the structures of harm are afraid of. You are just no longer their unintended ally, the woman so exhausted by holding the rage in failure-mode that you cannot build anything new.

You are building the new. That is what the moving of the rage frees you to do.

A close

I did not save the relationship I told you about at the start. The damage I did from inside the rage was too thorough. That is part of what I carry.

What I did save was myself. With the practices above. With sacred circles of women who let me rage and did not try to fix me. With altars I built in my own house. With actions I took, small and large, that gave the rage somewhere to go. With sleep and water and food and breath. With the willingness to admit that some of the rage was not actually about him, was older than him, was the inheritance I had been carrying since I was a small girl in a kitchen learning to keep myself safe with the only tools I had been given.

I am still doing this work. I will probably be doing it for the rest of my life. The rage rises. Sometimes I move it cleanly. Sometimes I do not. The practice is the practice.

What is different now is that I know what I am inside when I am inside it. I can usually feel the loop as it starts. I can usually find my way back to the practices.

This is what I want for you. Not less rage. Better relationship with rage. Rage as ally, not as jailer. Rage that moves through, does its work, and releases you back to your own life.

You have a life on the other side of this rage. You have work the world is waiting for. You have love to give that you cannot give while you are locked. You have a body that wants to be alive in you.

The rage was never meant to take any of this from you. The rage was meant to protect it.

Move the rage. Use the rage. Trust that what the rage was protecting is still there, on the other side of the moving, waiting for you to come back.

I will be there too.

in love and devotion, Elayne Kalila

If this piece moved something in you, share it with the women you love. Send it to your circle. Take it to your altar. The work is in the moving. Sacred Reckoning begins August 2026.

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THE HYSTERICAL RECKONING SERIES | ARTICLE SEVEN

FREE COMPANION TO THIS SERIES

7 Gateways of Menopausal Initiation

The Midlife Maven Map

A free guide to the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. The same map I have walked alongside countless women in. Download her below before you read on, and let her keep you company.

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I am a blood mysteries activist, my loves. I have been my whole life. Learning about the power of my menstrual cycle was one of the first ways that I began to din my way back to a sense o the sacred feminine, and to a lineage that is old as our blood, breth and bones.

I want to say that here, because I am about to make an argument that asks you to question something you have likely accepted as fact for decades.

I have spent nearly thirty years working with the deep wisdom held in women’s blood. The bleeding years. The conscious-menstruation years. The years with women in recovery from addiction and from violence, helping them understand that their cycle was a navigation system. And now the menopausal years, walking alongside thousands of women through this great second threshold.

The work has shown me, again and again, that the most ancient guidance system a woman has access to is the one our culture has worked the hardest to make her doubt.

So when I tell you that the definition of menopause we have been given is broken, this is not theory. This is what almost three decades in the rooms have shown me.

Menopause is not governed by a date she is a journey.

That is the thesis. Everything else unfolds from her.

If this is your first piece, welcome. This is the seventh article in The Hysterical Reckoning, a series about the menopausal passage and the woman we are becoming inside her. The previous pieces are sitting just below this one on this Substack. Read in any order. They will catch you up. This piece is the foundation underneath all of them.

The Definition We Have Been Given

Here is the medical definition of menopause.

It is the day twelve months have passed since a woman’s last period.

One day. Twelve months. A box ticked on a chart. A line drawn through her reproductive years.

That is what we have been given, my loves.

That is the framework, in every medical textbook, every magazine article, every well-meaning conversation about what stage you are in That single point in time, defined entirely by what has stopped happening in our ovaries.

This is, plain and simple, insufficient.

This tells us about our ovaries, and tells us nothing else about us.

This diagnosis does not name the years of crossing we walk to get to that day. It does not name the woman we become in the walking. It does not name the underworld, the descent, the return. It does not name the new ground we may not yet have reached. It does not name the arrival, when we finally cross the deeper threshold of returnong to ourselves.

This diagnosis was written, my loves, by a medical establishment that has historically pathologised women’s midlife as decline and disorder. It was written from outside our lived experience. And it was adopted into popular culture without question. And this narrow medical diganosis has been quietly accepted by women, who have had no alternative offered.

I have to tell you something, I myself accepted her for years. Decades, frankly. Even as a blood mysteries activist. Even as a woman who has spent her whole life working with the cyclical wisdom of the female body. The cultural force of the medical framework is that strong. I was inside the haze of it without quite knowing I was inside the haze.

And then, slowly, the haze began to lift. Which is why I am writing this to you now.

Because here is what we are not often told, and what changed everything for me when I finally understood it properly.

The Doctors Writing This Definition Were Never Taught Menopause

This is not a small fact, my loves. So let me say her plainly, with the data behind it.

Most obstetrics and gynaecology residency programmes in the United States do not have a dedicated menopause curriculum at all. A national survey published in 2023 found that only 31 percent of US OB/GYN residency programmes include any standardised menopause education. A 2019 survey found that 20 percent of OB/GYN residents received zero menopause lectures during their entire residency. Zero, my loves.

And the rest? An hour. Maybe two. A clinical professor at Yale Medical School has stated publicly that she gets one hour to teach menopause to medical students during their entire OB-GYN rotation. One hour. For the great third hormonal initiation that two million American women cross every year.

Most primary care physicians, who are the doctors the vast majority of women actually see, receive no formal menopause training at all. It is an elective. A footnote. A topic women are expected to educate their own doctors about, after a forty-five minute Google deep dive in the car park.

These are the people who wrote the definition we have all been carrying around as fact. These are the people we have been told know better than our own bodies.

A definition of our most powerful midlife rite of passage, written by people who were not even taught what it is.

Phew.

This is a definition we have been given. We have never been asked whether it serves us.

And the truth is - it doesn’t, never has, and never will.

The Two Words That Mean Everything and Nothing

And then there is the matter of how the language actually behaves, my loves. Because the clinical framework names the phases like this.

Perimenopause. The years of hormonal change before the final period. She can last anywhere from a few years to over a decade.

Menopause. Technically one single day. Twelve months after the final period.

Post-menopause. The rest of a woman’s life after that day.

Tidy, on paper.

Phew, right?

Except the words do not behave that way in real life. Women say I am in menopause when they are technically perimenopausal. They say I am past menopause when they have crossed the clinical line but are still in the deepest work of their lives. The word means everything and nothing. She fragments a unified passage into clinical phases that do not match lived experience.

Which leaves us, my loves, in a peculiar situation.

Some of us are given a name for what we are going through. Perimenopause. As though what we are living is preparatory. As though the reckoning is a warm-up for the real event.

Others of us are told the work is done. Post-menopause. As though we have arrived somewhere we have not actually arrived.

And the marker of completion has been placed, in this whole system, in the wrong place. In our ovaries. Instead of where she actually lives. In the soul’s arrival.

This leaves women confused about where they are in their own passage. And then, almost cruelly, the framework asks them to doubt their own knowing when the map does not fit.

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The Women Who Cannot Find Themselves on This Map

Let me show you what I mean, my loves. Because in my years in the rooms, I have met every single one of these women. Many of them, many times over.

The forty-six-year-old in the deepest descent of her life.

She is told she is perimenopausal. As though what she is living is preparatory. As though her reckoning is a warm-up for the real event. When in truth, my loves, she is in the deepest gate of the whole passage. She is in the underworld. She is being unmade. And the word she has been given does not honour the gravity of what is moving through her.

The fifty-five-year-old who has not yet found her ground.

She is told she is post-menopausal and the work is done. When in truth she is still walking. The bleeding has stopped. The arriving has not happened. She is told to be settled when she is not. And so she begins, quietly, to wonder what is wrong with her. Why she is still in the middle of something her chart says is over. Why the new shoreline has not appeared, when her doctor told her it should have by now.

The sixty-year-old who walked this passage years ago without a map.

She is told her menopause is over and she should be at peace. When in truth she is still gathering what was scattered in the descent. She is still naming what could not be named at the time. She is still in active completion of a rite that the clinical world declared done years before she actually finished her in herself.

Each of these women, my loves, is being asked to map herself onto a timeline that does not match her interior reality. And then she is being asked to doubt her own knowing when the map does not fit.

We have to give them a different map.

A New Definition

So here is the reframe I have been carrying for years, my loves. The one I want to offer you now, plainly, as the foundation of everything else I write.

Menopause is the rite of passage by which a woman becomes the Midlife Maven.

It begins the moment a woman’s body first whispers that the change is coming. And it continues through every gate of the descent, every release, every meeting with what has not yet faced. This passage holds you through the underworld, and walks you back up to the light when you are ready.

And when this passage completes, this when the woman arrives.

Not the day our bleeding stops, my loves. When the midlife maven arrives. When we find ourselves able to stand on new ground and recognise that we have arrived, after a long journey. When the woman you have been becoming is the woman you are now living as. When the Midlife Maven is no longer something rising in her but someone she is.

A woman is in menopause from the moment her body begins to call her into this passage.

A woman is post-menopausal when she has arrived as the Midlife Maven. Not before.

The body marker is one piece of evidence along the way. She is not the gateway. She is one of the many gateways. She is the biological marker of a passage whose true completion lives in the soul.

When you feel her, my loves, you will know.

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The Three Movements of the Passage

In this redefinition, the rite has three movements. A woman may be in any one of them. And the official biological markers do not, by themselves, tell her which.

The Entering.

What the clinical world calls perimenopause. Her body begins to change. The first reckonings begin. The threshold has opened. She is being summoned, gently or with the subtlety of a brick through the window.

The Walking.

The deep middle. The reckoning. The release. The dismantling of what no longer fits. The meeting with what has been waiting in the basement of the self for decades. Her body may still bleed. She may bleed irregularly. She may have stopped. The clinical markers do not name what is happening in the soul. The Walking can last a very long time.

The Arriving.

The integration. The return from the underworld. The Midlife Maven settling into the body as a lived way of being. The new shoreline becoming visible. She may come a year after a woman’s last bleed. She may come ten years after. She comes when she comes.

These three movements are the actual architecture of the passage. The hormonal markers are inside her. Not the other way around.

Why I Am Writing This

I want to tell you, why this reframe matters to me so deeply that I have been carrying her quietly for years before publishing her here.

Because the longer I have done this work, the more I have understood that the clinical definition of menopause is not a neutral piece of medical language. It is the same erasure, dressed in a different costume. The same cultural project that wrote our blood out of sacred consciousness in the first place, now writing our arrival out of it on the other end.

We were not greeted at our first threshold. I wrote about that in the previous article in this series. And now we are being processed at our second threshold the same way. Through clinical markers that tell us when our ovaries have stopped, and tell us nothing at all about who we have become.

This is, my loves, what blood mysteries activism actually is. It is the slow, patient, long-term work of restoring sacred language to what was made profane.

Our blood mysteries are the cyclical wisdom of a woman’s body across her whole life. The menstrual cycle as a navigation system. Ovulation as a knowing. The bleed as a returning.

And underneath them, three great hormonal thresholds at which our bodies undergo their most profound transformations.

Puberty was the first. The threshold at which we received the capacity to create. To become Creatrix in our own body, whether anyone honoured that in us or not.

For some of us, motherhood was the second. Some women walked her. Some did not, by choice or by life. Not having walked her does not mean a mystery was missed. The shape was different. The depth was no less.

And now, perimenopause. The third. The threshold at which we lay down the Creatrix who creates in the body, and become the Creatrix who creates herself.

This is what the menopausal passage actually is. Not an ending. The third great blood mystery of our lives.

And what is being awakened in us as we cross this has a name. I have come to call her the wild knowing. The body wisdom that lived in us before we were domesticated, before we were taught to override our no and soften our truth to fit a room. She is what every cycle we have lived through has been quietly metabolising into knowing. And now, when the blood is no longer leaving us, that lived knowing is being held within.

And here is something else that is beyondamazing. Menstrual blood contains pluripotent stem cells. The medical establishment has been documenting this for nearly twenty years. Regenerative cellular gold, the same biological wisdom medicine has spent decades searching for in other places, sitting inside our bodies the whole time.

We have been making medicine. For decades. And pouring her out.

And in this passage, for the first time in our adult lives, that gold begins to be held within us instead of released. This is the alchemical shift at the centre of menopause. The Midlife Maven is being made of her.

Her blood is gold. Until menopause, she has been giving her away. Now she holds her.

I will be writing about this more deeply in a piece coming very soon.

None of this was ever meant to be reduced to symptoms and dates.

Feminine spirituality, my loves, has always been rooted in our cyclical nature. Our blood was the original calendar. The original altar. The original initiation. The cultures that knew this honoured us. The cultures that lost it began, very slowly and then very systematically, to write us out.

And every clinical definition we accept without questioning is a small further inch of that erasure.

To redefine menopause as initiation is to take a small inch of that erasure back.

Which is what we are doing here, my loves.

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The Long Way Home

I want to tell you something, because this work would not be possible without the women who came before me.

I was not given any introduction to my own puberty. I wrote about that in the previous article. But the loss of the lineage went deeper than the moment of first blood. I had no navigation system at all. No way of charting my own life. No older woman pulling me aside with a cup of tea to say, here is the wisdom you carry in your blood, here is how to live by her.

So I spent much of my twenties and thirties looking for her. Searching, in the way a woman searches who knows she is missing something but does not yet have a name for it.

And then, slowly, I found her. Through the work of women who had been doing this digging long before I arrived.

I found Judy Grahn, whose 1993 book Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World introduced Metaformic Theory. Her thesis: menstruation was not peripheral to human civilization. Menstruation was the origin of it. What we call culture was built originally on women’s blood wisdom. We just somehow lost the credit for it along the way.

I found Tamara Slayton, who founded the Menstrual Health Foundation and trained generations of women in the cycle as a sacred navigational tool.

I found Lara Owen, whose 1993 book Her Blood Is Gold was one of the first to name menstrual blood as the alchemical wisdom of a woman’s body. Her title is the title I have given to my own teaching coming next, with reverence and acknowledgement of the lineage I walk in.

And I found, through them, the others. The women in the small dim rooms of the early conscious-menstruation movement, holding this work for decades while the wider culture pretended it did not exist.

What they gave me, all of them, was a map. The map I had been looking for since I was a girl.

Which is why, my loves, I am writing this to you now.

Because I do not want any of you to spend twenty years looking for what should have been given to you at thirteen.

Find Yourself on This Map

So I want to invite you, to sit with this for a moment. Forget what your chart says. Forget whether you are technically in perimenopause or post-menopause according to the clinical line.

And ask the deeper question. Where am I actually in this rite?

• Has the threshold opened? Is something asking for your attention, even if your body has not yet given the official signal? You may be in the Entering.

• Are you in the deep middle? Are old structures falling away, whether your bleeding has stopped or not? You may be in the Walking.

• Have you returned? Is the new ground, the ground that was not there before, finally holding? You may be in the Arriving.

• Or you may, like most of us, be straddling two of them. The passage is not a tidy march. She is a spiral.

The point is not to label yourself, my loves. The point is to feel where you actually are. And to know, finally, that you are not failing the timeline. The timeline has failed you.

An Invitation

I am building something, my loves, for women who want to walk this passage with real guidance, real company, and the kind of devotional sacred-feminine architecture our culture has never given us at this great threshold.

It is called Metamorphosis. A nine-month Menopause Initiation into the Midlife Maven, where together we walk through the seven gateways of the menopausal passage. Enrolment opens in July.

Before that, I am opening three live evenings called The Wild Knowing. Primal Awakening on the 8th of July, free and open to every woman in this passage. The Wild Dark on the 18th of July, the deeper evening. The Untamed Chrysalis on the 30th of July, the gathering of every woman who has walked any part of this with me.

And on the first of June, I am opening a free quiz that will help you find which of the seven gateways you are walking through right now.

I will share all of these links the moment they go live.

For today, my love, the door is the PDF map at the top of this article. This is free, and is the working map of everything I have just written about. Download it and sit with it, and feel what resonates.

And if any of this has landed in your body, please share her with the women in your life who are at one threshold or the other of this great rite.

They have been waiting for this map too.

Stay close.

The door is opening.

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I have been thinking about a boys.

All of the boys. The ones we are losing right now, in plain sight, while the world that should have raised them looks the other way.

The fourteen-year-old in his bedroom in Manchester or Minneapolis or Mumbai, alone with his phone, an algorithm doing its work on his nervous system.

The seventeen-year-old in a Minnesota high school who just got an email from a National Guard recruiter telling him that enlisting could keep ICE from taking his mother.

The twenty-two-year-old who has just been hired by ICE itself, who applied along with eighty thousand others when the age cap was removed in August.

The boy in the men’s group chat passing around the Tate clip. The boy who shot the woman he had been told he was entitled to.

But I have also been thinking about the boy in our kitchen.

My older brother. Angry, lost, needing direction and holding that did not come, missing our mum in a way that was somehow even more excruciating than mine. I have written about him before. I have not written about the boy inside him.

I have been thinking about that boy a lot.

The Boys Who Broke My heart

And I have been thinking about the boys I met more than a decade ago in the eastern Congo, when I was working with the City of Joy and the women on its staff team, sharing a trauma healing curriculum I had developed called the Safe Embrace. The City of Joy is the sanctuary V founded in Bukavu for women survivors of the genocidal sexual violence that has been used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for thirty years. The women on the staff there have lived through what no human being should live through.

But the boys I want to tell you about, I met at the hospital. Panzi Hospital, also in Bukavu, the hospital Dr. Denis Mukwege built and tends, where the women who have survived the violence go for the surgical repair and medical care their bodies need before any of the rest of the healing can begin. The hospital is the first ground. It is where the body is given back to itself.

The boys I met there were the boys who had done the violence. Or boys like them.

They were former child soldiers. Stolen from their villages when they were nine, ten, eleven. Forcibly recruited into the factional guerrilla groups that have run the eastern Congo as a charnel house for decades. Shamed, beaten, intimidated, and broken into doing horrendous acts of violence against women. By twelve, thirteen, fourteen, they had done things their nervous systems could not metabolise and their souls could not yet understand. By fifteen, sixteen, some of them had been rescued. Pulled out by NGOs, returned to villages that did not want them back, given to programmes that were trying to reintegrate boys who had committed atrocities into communities that had been on the receiving end of them.

When I met some of these boys, they had been in the programmes for a few years. They had done their grief work, in whatever way the programmes could carry them through it. They had been received, witnessed, slowly returned to themselves by elders who refused to write them off.

And they were playing drums at the hospital.

For the women.

I want you to see this image with me, my loves. Because it is one of the most theologically loaded images I have ever stood inside.

The hospital where the women were being put back together. Surgical wards, recovery rooms, the slow medical work of mending bodies that had been catastrophically violated. The women in their hospital beds and their hospital gowns, lying in the ground floor of healing where the body itself is being given back to them. And the boys, formerly soldiers, formerly the hands of the violence, sitting at the edge of the ward, playing the drums.

Holding the rhythm for the women whose bodies they had been part of breaking.

That is what initiation actually looks like. That is what the noble masculine actually looks like, when it has been recovered from the broken boy. He does not arrive in his glory and apologise. He sits down at the edge of the hospital ward and plays the drums for the women he has hurt, and he does it for as long as it takes, and his body slowly learns what his hands were always for.

I have been carrying that image for over a decade. It comes back to me now because what we are watching unfold across the western world is what happens when there is no one to do that work with the boys.

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A word before I begin

I am writing in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside are polarity cosmologies. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

What the data actually says

Let me name what is happening, because it has to be named clearly before we can talk about what is underneath it.

Eighty per cent of British boys aged sixteen and seventeen have consumed content created by Andrew Tate. Only sixty per cent of boys in the same age group have heard of the British Prime Minister. Read that twice. They know the misogynist influencer better than they know the head of their own government. Fifty-six per cent of young fathers under thirty-five in the UK approve of him.

Forty per cent of adult American men, and half of younger American men, say they trust one or more men’s rights, anti-feminist, or pro-violence voices from the manosphere. Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. Two-thirds of young men say no one really knows me.

Far-right extremism in the West has risen by two hundred and fifty per cent in the last five years. Radicalisation that once took months or years now typically takes days, sometimes hours, because the short-form algorithm has been engineered for it. Teachers in Canada are reporting misogynist and extremist beliefs in students as young as eleven and twelve.

Last year in the UK, a young man named Kyle Clifford murdered his ex-partner, her sister, and her mother. Within twenty-four hours of the killings, he had watched videos by Andrew Tate. The judge at trial called Tate a poster boy for misogynists.

Meanwhile, in August of last year, the Department of Homeland Security removed all age caps for ICE recruitment. Anyone over eighteen can now apply. The agency received over eighty thousand applications in the first week. The goal is to hire ten thousand new immigration officers, backed by nearly thirty billion dollars in federal funding. Boys who were in high school last year are now being trained to disappear other people’s mothers from grocery store parking lots.

And in Minneapolis in January, a National Guard recruiter sent an email to around two hundred high school students with the subject line I know it is scary out there, pointing to ICE operations and telling the students that if they enlisted, they might be able to keep ICE from taking their parents.

This is what the recruitment of the next generation of young men looks like in 2026. The manosphere on one side, taking the lonely ones into misogyny and far-right radicalisation through the algorithm. The state security apparatus on the other side, taking the frightened ones into enforcement work through the threat of what will happen to their mothers if they refuse. And in between, the boys.

The boys are being harvested.

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They are not lost because they hate

I want to be careful here, because the easy story is the wrong story.

The boys joining the manosphere are not joining because they hate women. Not at the beginning. Most of them arrive looking for advice on fitness, on dating, on how to make money, on how to be a man in a world that has stopped teaching them what that means. The misogyny is not the entry point. The misogyny is what they are taught once they have arrived inside an ecosystem that has them captive.

The boys joining ICE are not joining because they hate immigrants. Many of them are immigrants themselves, or sons of immigrants. They are joining because there is a paycheck. Because there is a uniform. Because somebody told them that putting on that uniform would make them somebody. Because the alternative is the slow grind of underemployment and loneliness and the suspicion, never quite spoken, that nobody has ever actually seen them as a man.

The boy in our kitchen, my brother, was not angry because he was bad. He was angry because his mum had been sick most of his life, his dad was overwhelmed, the village had not gathered around him, and there was no man in his world who could say to him I see you, you are mine, I will walk you through this. He was a boy who had been left to figure it out, and what a boy left to figure it out usually finds is a hard surface he can hit until he forgets what he is missing.

The men on Motherless were once boys whose tenderness was shamed out of them so completely that they cannot, as adults, bear to be witnessed by a whole woman with her eyes open. The men in the Epstein files were once boys who learned, somewhere, that intimacy was a thing to be taken rather than something to be entered together. The men passing the legislation against women’s bodies are sitting in the gerontocracy of broken boys, none of whom were ever called into the noble masculine by an older man who could have done it.

Andrew Tate himself was once a boy. His father, the chess master Emory Tate, was a complicated man, and Andrew grew up between Chicago and Luton, in a household and a culture that produced the man he became. The misogyny he sells now is the misogyny of a boy who learned, somewhere very young, that the only way to survive the wound of his own tenderness was to weaponise it against women. He is what happens when no one reaches the boy. He is now the recruiting officer for the next generation of unreached boys.

This is what we are looking at , its systemic, my loves.

The boys are not lost because they hate. They are lost because they are starving. And what they are starving for is the same thing my brother was starving for in our kitchen. The same thing the boys in the eastern Congo had been starving for when the guerrilla groups found them. The same thing the seventeen-year-old in Minneapolis is starving for when the recruiter writes to him with the subject line I know it is scary out there.

They are starving to be seen. To be received. To be initiated into something real. To be told, by an adult man they respect, what their strength is for.

When no one reaches them, the algorithm reaches them. The recruiter reaches them. The Tate brothers reach them. The militia reaches them. The Discord server reaches them. Someone always reaches them, because every boy has to belong somewhere, and a boy who is not gathered into the noble masculine is, by simple physics, going to be gathered into something else.

The boys are not the problem.

The vacuum is the problem.

The boy inside the man

I want to say something now that I have been saying for years and that I want to say again, because it is the diagnosis that holds the whole system together.

The boy is in there.

In every man we are watching hurt women, abuse children, bully his way into more power, legislate against bodies that are not his, post in the manosphere, drug his wife, knock on the door at six in the morning to deport his neighbours. The boy is in there. The boy who was crushed before he had a chance to grow into the noble man. The boy whose tenderness was shamed. The boy whose grief was mocked. The boy whose body learned that softness was a way to be eaten.

That boy did not disappear. He went underground. He hardened. He learned to perform a version of himself that the locker room and the playground and the family dinner could not destroy. And now, in middle age, in the late thirties, in the sixties and the seventies, he is running the world from inside a body that has been carrying him since he was nine.

What we are seeing in public is the visible expression of the boy in private. Andrew Tate is a boy. The man at the legislature is a boy. The man on Motherless is a boy. The man in the boardroom who cannot make eye contact with the woman he has been working alongside for a decade is a boy. They are all the same boy at different amplitudes, expressing through different surfaces, in different costumes, with different access to power. But the wound is one wound. The crushing is one crushing.

This is the part that almost nobody can bear to look at, because if it is true, it asks something of us. It asks us to see, in the most monstrous-seeming behaviour, the boy who was never reached. Not to excuse him. Not to absolve him. To diagnose him correctly. Because if the diagnosis is correct, the intervention can be correct. And the intervention is not more punishment for the grown man. The intervention is reaching the boy.

The boy who is currently fourteen.

The boy who is currently twenty-two and applying to ICE.

The boy who is currently fifty-six and has been a man on paper for forty years and has never, not once, been seen by an older man as the boy he still is.

All of them need the same thing.

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What these boys need

This is very close to my heart and I have been saying in my other articles in particular What Happens When the World is Fatherless. But I want to say it again because I think it is so important.

• They need to be seen. Not lectured to. Seen, as the boys they are, by adult men and women who can hold what they actually carry without flinching.

• They need elders. Men who have done their own work. Men who have crossed thresholds and come back changed. Men who have stopped pretending. Men who can say to a boy I see who you are. I see what you are carrying. Come sit with me. I will walk you through this.

• They need rites of passage. Real ones. Not the empty corporate version, not the abstract spiritual version. The kind where a boy is taken away from his mother and his phone and his algorithm, by a circle of older men, and put through something difficult, and brought back changed, and presented to his community as a young man with a name and a place at the fire.

• They need ritual, music, drumming, work, the physical body, the hands doing something that matters. The Congo boys playing drums at the hospital is not a metaphor. It is the actual structure. The body learning what it was always for through repetition, presence, witness, and time.

• They need men’s circles. Not the corporate networking version. The real one. Older men gathering younger men around fires, around tables, around grief, around the work of becoming a noble man. Boys to Men Mentoring has done this with fifteen thousand boys. The Brotherhood Program. Journeymen. The Becoming A Man programme that started in Chicago and now runs in over two hundred schools across America, Boston, Kansas City, Dallas, Washington DC, London. Coaching Boys Into Men, where athletic coaches are trained to do the work because for many boys the coach is the closest thing to a father they have. These programmes exist. They are working. They are wildly underfunded. They are the thing that actually moves boys away from the manosphere and into something whole.

• They need fathers who have done their own work. Not heroes. Fathers. Men who have sat with their own father wound, their own mother wound, their own shame, and come back capable of being present to their sons. This is the longest work and the most necessary one. The fathers of the next generation of boys are the men who are currently in their thirties and forties, many of whom have never been initiated themselves. They cannot give what they have not received. They have to receive it first.

• They need mothers who can hold them as boys without trying to make them into the men they have already failed to be. A mother who can mother her son into his own becoming, who can love him fiercely without taking responsibility for his manhood, who can call in the father, the uncle, the elder, the men’s circle, the rites of passage programme, the mentor. The mothers cannot do the men’s work, but the mothers can refuse to do it for them, and that refusal is part of how the boys are released into the work of becoming.

• They need the older men to come back into the room. This is the most urgent ask of this moment, and I want to be direct about it. The older men in this culture have largely retreated. Some out of disenfranchisement, some out of fatigue, some out of the unkind cultural air that has made being an older man feel like a kind of unwelcome. I understand the impulse. The seclusion is not the answer. The boys are being lost to ICE recruiters and militias and Andrew Tate because the older men withdrew, and the void you left has been filled by people who profit from your absence. The boys are looking for fathers and elders and finding only people who monetise their loneliness. You can do better than that. They need you to.

To the mothers of sons

I want to say something specifically to the mothers, because I know many of you are reading this with a fourteen-year-old in your house, watching what is moving through him, terrified.

You are not crazy. What you are sensing is real. The algorithm has him. The Discord server has him. The boy at school who has been getting deeper into the manosphere has him. The Tate clip his cousin sent him last week has him. You can feel him slipping, in small ways, and you cannot quite find the words to reach him.

I want to say two things to you.

The first is that this is not yours to fix alone. You cannot mother him into manhood. That is not a failure on your part. That is the architecture. Boys need to be initiated by older men into the noble masculine, and that work cannot be done by mothers, even the most fierce and present mothers in the world. What you can do is refuse to let the algorithm and the Tate brothers be the only voices reaching him. You can find the men’s circle, the mentor, the coach, the uncle, the godfather, the rites of passage programme. Bring them in. The men who are doing this work want to be doing it. Many of them are sitting around waiting for boys to be sent to them.

The second is that you have to keep loving him. Even when he is performing the Tate posture in your kitchen. Even when he is repeating things that frighten you. Even when his eyes go cold for a moment and you do not recognise him. The boy is still in there. The boy still needs his mother. Not to agree with the posture, not to soften your truth, not to manage his feelings. Just to keep loving the boy underneath the costume, while also refusing the costume itself.

Your love alone will not bring him home. But your love is part of the architecture that can hold him while the men do their work. Hold the line. Find the men. Refuse the algorithm. Pray, light a candle, keep him in your fierce attention. The boy is still reachable. He has not gone yet.

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What we do now

There is grounded action available, my loves. Let me name some of it.

Find a mentoring or rites of passage programme.

• The Becoming A Man (BAM) programme at Youth Guidance, in two hundred schools across the US and London — youth-guidance.org.

• Boys To Men Mentoring Network in California and beyond — boystomen.org.

• Journeymen Triangle in North Carolina and Journeymen Institute on Vashon Island, Washington — journeymen.us and journeymentriangle.org.

• Rite of Passage Journeys for boys in the Pacific Northwest — riteofpassagejourneys.org.

• The Brotherhood Program at Community Change Inc — communitychangeinc.com.

• Coaching Boys Into Men, which trains athletic coaches in dating violence prevention — search for it locally.

Support the older men’s work.

• ManKind Project — mankindproject.org.

• Sacred Sons — sacredsons.com.

• Evryman — evryman.com.

Send the man in your life. Donate. Talk about these programmes openly.

• If you are a father, do your own work. Find a men’s circle. Find a therapist. Find an elder. Sit with your father wound. You cannot father a boy from inside a wound you have not addressed. Start where you are. The work is available.

• If you are an older man, come back into the room. Your generation is sitting on the lineage. The boys cannot find it without you. Mentor one boy this year. Just one. The boy down the street whose father is not present. The nephew. The son of your colleague. The boy in your congregation. Reach him. Be reachable.

• Watch what your sons are watching. Not as surveillance, as company. Sit with them. Ask them what they are seeing. Do not lecture. Ask. Listen. Then offer them something else. The Brian Cox documentary instead of the Tate clip. The Wim Hof breath work instead of the Liver King supplement scam. The boys are looking for something to be inside. Give them better things.

• Refuse the framing that men cannot be reached. Refuse the language that turns all men into monsters. Refuse to write off the boys, even the ones who have hurt people, even the ones in the militia, even the ones who have already gone deep. The Congo boys came back. The redpillers in the studies are showing up on the deradicalisation forums having woken up. The men in the men’s circles are doing the work. The boys can come home. Hold that as fact, in your body, against every story that says they cannot.

What I believe

Here is what I believe in my deepest heart.

The boy is in every man we are afraid of. He is also in every man we love.

The crushing of the universal boy is the deepest wound this culture is carrying, and it is the wound from which most of the other visible wounds flow. The website. The legislation. The masculinity podcasts. The militia. The ICE recruitment. The boys who shoot the women they were told they were entitled to. All of it is what happens when the universal boy is crushed before he can become the noble man.

But the boy can be reached. The Congo proved it to me. The men who write to me every week prove it to me. The fifteen thousand boys who have come through Boys To Men prove it. The two hundred schools running BAM prove it. The fathers re-fathering themselves in their men’s circles prove it. The older men who have come out of seclusion prove it.

The current dying sick system is not destiny. It is an architecture. It can be built differently. It is being built differently, in pockets, in small rooms, in circles around fires, in school basements at lunchtime, in retreat centres in the mountains, in drumming circles in Bukavu.

We have to scale this work. We have to fund it. We have to talk about it. We have to send our boys to it and our men into the work that supports it. We have to refuse to let the manosphere and ICE and the Discord servers be the only forces moving on the boys.

The noble masculine is not dead. He is sitting at the edge of the circle. He is drumming for the women he has hurt, and he is also drumming for the boys who will come after him, the ones who do not yet know the rhythm but will learn it because someone is holding it for them.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to a mother of sons. Send it to a father. Send it to a man you know who has been doing the work quietly for years and deserves to know that what he is doing matters. The boys are waiting to be reached.

We can do this, my loves.

The boys can come home.

But only if we go and get them.

In love and devotion

Elayne Kalila

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For most of my younger life, I was a woman who knew how to incinerate a man.

This is the letter I have been afraid to write. To my enraged women. On how we speak to the men we love when the world is on fire.

I learned it young. My older brother was angry, and he was bigger than me, and I was scared of him. I did not know how to stand up for myself in any other way, so I sharpened my tongue into something that could cut him in half before he had finished his sentence. It was not a choice. It was a survival. The only one I could find.

And then, as I grew up, I became aware. Of the horrid inequity between women and men. Of the perils and abhorrences of patriarchy. Of the long bloody history we have been living inside. And the fury I had honed in the small kitchen for my angry brother fused, suddenly, with the fury of three thousand years of women, and I became a young woman who was angry with men. Period. Full stop. I would not have said it that cleanly at the time, but my body had said it, and my mouth knew.

So I had really good practice. I learned, early, exactly which sentence would unmake a man across a kitchen, across a meeting, across a bed. I became the castrating queen. I was effective. And it cost me everything I most wanted.

I know I am not alone in this.

After thirty years of working with women, I know only too well how easily we hone this ability, the blade of our words, used to protect and to obliterate at the same time. We get good at it because we had to. We pass it down to each other without quite meaning to. We mistake the sharpness for sovereignty, and only later, sometimes much later, notice what it has cost us, and the people we love.

I have spent the last decades learning a different art. A different kind of sharpening. The art of saying the true thing in fewer words, without the desire to destroy underneath them. The art of letting my words mean what they mean, without arming them first.

What I have learned, slowly, is that the less I say, the more easily I am heard.

When I share a feeling in a thousand words, building the case for it, explaining it, justifying it, anticipating every defence and pre-emptively dismantling it, the feeling itself disappears underneath the construction. The person across from me, regardless of who they are, stops being able to find me. By the time I am done, I have made my feeling airtight, and unreceivable.

The same feeling, in twenty words, lands.

This is not about men needing it simpler, or women being too much, or any of the old tired stereotypes that get reached for in this conversation. This is about something more interesting. The thousand words are not for him. The thousand words are old armour. The thousand words are the part of me that learned, very young, that my feelings would only be received if I could prove they were warranted, justified, defensible.

The heart-forward woman in me does not need her feelings to be justified and she does not need a sword in her mouth either. She just feels them. And speaks them, cleanly, in as few words as it takes. And lets the room do what the room does.

I am still learning her. Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely build the thousand-word case again, or feel the old blade rise, and watch the room go quiet, and notice it too late. Ha.

So this is the letter.

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A word about the title

Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. For more than two thousand years, this word has been used against us. Hippocrates believed the womb wandered through a woman’s body causing chaos. Medieval doctors burned women for hysteria. Victorian physicians sent us to asylums, prescribed forced bed rest, performed clitoridectomies, called every woman’s grief and rage and refusal a disease of the female mind. Freud built his early career on diagnosing us with it. The American Psychiatric Association did not remove hysteria from its diagnostic manual until 1980.

The word has been weaponised against every woman who refused to be quiet. Against every woman who knew the truth before the room was ready to hear it. Against every woman who was right and was told she was crazy. Against every woman whose body said no and whose culture said that is your problem, not ours.

I am taking it back.

What this culture has called hysterical is, in fact, often the most accurate response a we can have to a world that has gone insane. The rage is correct. The grief is correct. The refusal is correct. Our bodies that scream when they can no longer bear what we are being asked to bear is not malfunctioning. It is telling the truth.

So when I call this piece Hysterical, I am not using the word the way it has been used against us. I am returning it to its root. Hystera. The womb. The seat of life-giving power. The body that knows. The voice that names. The fire we have been told for two thousand years was our disease, when it has always been our medicine.

This is the letter from inside that medicine.

Link to The Hysterical Reckoning

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What we are sitting with

I have spent the last weeks writing into the reality of this moment in three pieces — Motherless, Fatherless, and Severed. The Mother in exile for ten thousand years. The noble masculine missing alongside her for four thousand. The Sacred Marriage driven underground for both. The first three pieces did the diagnosis. This one is the practice.

[Link to Motherless]

[Link to Fatherless]

[Link to Severed]

Something has been moving through all of us across these weeks. And what has become clear is that the conversation now has a fourth question, and the fourth question is ours.

We have named the wound. We have seen it. We are on fire. We have refused the premature reunion.

Now what?

How do we carry this rage. How do we speak now. How do we walk out of a dance that has been running for thousands of years, without either swallowing our fire, which we will not do, or letting it burn down the very people we are trying to call home.

That is what this piece is about. And before I go any further, I need to be very clear about the ground I am standing on.

To my women readers

I am not asking you to swallow your truth, diminish your rage, manage their feelings, or make yourself more palatable.

I am not asking you to take responsibility for men’s inability to hear us. I am not asking you to carry one more ounce of what was never ours to carry.

What I am asking is different. And I know it is much harder.

I am asking us to grow up without losing one drop of our fire.

Because here is what I have learned, in my own body, after thirty years of watching this loop run inside myself and inside the women I love. Our righteous rage burns the room down and changes nothing. It feels powerful in the moment, and then we are alone again, and the men we love are further away than they were before we opened our mouths. And the structures we are raging at are still standing.

The flamethrower has not worked. We have thousands of years of evidence.

The awakened feminine — midlife maven, empress, queen, whichever name lands true for you — might.

This is not softening. It is exactitude. The sword we carry when our heart is open is sharper than any flamethrower has ever been, because it cuts cleanly through the specific structure doing the specific harm. And it does not waste itself on the men we love, who are not the structure.

It is time for us to take the raw rage we rightly feel and forge it into sword. To find the sacred beneath the flame.

A note as I begin. I write in the language of women and men because the cultural wound has been enacted along that binary, and because the lineages I work inside —Hermetic, Celtic, Alchemical, Tantric, Magdalene — share a polarity cosmology. These are a few traditions among many. There are cosmologies that do not run on polarity, and humans whose interior experience is not held by these poles. The teaching here is one way of describing reality. It is not the only way. Take what serves and leave what does not.

The fury is real and the fury is holy

We are furious. We have every reason to be.

The Epstein files keep opening and closing and opening again. We have an administration legislating women’s bodies as though women themselves have nothing to contribute to the conversation about their own bodies. There is the daily ordinary violence in homes we will never see, in numbers so staggering that to sit with them is to feel something in our hearts actually break. There is the Motherless website, the Telegram group, the drugged wives, the eyelids held open, the twenty dollars a viewer.

And right now, there is a reckoning that millions of us are walking through at once, where we are saying what the actual fuck is going on and what can I do about it? And we are saying it at full volume.

This is our sacred rage. This is our holy fire. This is, IMHO, exactly what this moment is asking of us.

And…

What I know from my own life is this. We rehearse the maiming sentence in the shower, in the car, in the hour before he comes home from work. We have rehearsed it so many times that some of us have forgotten we could say something else.

And when we deliver it, when we turn toward the men in our lives with that fire at full volume, something happens we need to talk about honestly.

They shut down. They close. They protect.

They go quiet, or defensive, or cold, or away. Sometimes all four in an afternoon.

And we are left holding the fire with no one to hand it to. And we get more furious. And the next time we speak, the fire is hotter. And the next time they hear us, the wall is thicker. Round and round we go, in a loop that has been running in our relationships, our families, our workplaces, our parliaments, for generations.

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What the loop has cost us

On the personal level. It means you have spent more nights than you can count alone in the bed next to a man who used to be able to reach you and now cannot. There is a sentence you have wanted to say to him for ten years, and you have not yet found the way to say it that does not blow up the room.

On the relational level. It means your son is fourteen and has already learned to flinch when you walk into the room, because he does not yet know which mother he is getting. It means your father called and you could not pick up the phone.

On the generational level. Your mother was furious her whole life and never had a way to forge it, and she passed it down to you. Your daughter is watching you now. She is learning her whole life from how you handle this.

On the cultural level. Thirty years of feminist anger and the structures are still standing. The men who run the world have learned to wait us out, to weather the storm, to know that maiden rage will burn itself out eventually. The patriarchy, IMHO, would actually like us to keep running this loop. A diffuse rage is a manageable rage.

On the spiritual level. We have not yet become the women we were supposed to become. The priestess in us, the one who knows how to wield fire with precision, has been waiting for us to grow into her, and we have been too busy being the maiden to come and meet her.

That is what the loop has cost us. That is what running it for one more decade would cost the women coming after us.

I am not interested in paying that price again.

The young woman’s rage and the awakened woman’s rage

The young woman’s rage is raw and necessary. It is the scream of the girl who has been silenced, and she had to scream. Nobody gets to tell her not to. I have been that girl. You have been that girl. We all carry her, and we always will.

The awakened woman’s rage is something different. It is still fire. It is still real. It is still dangerous, in the good way. What it is also is aimed. It knows what it wants to illuminate. It can hold itself long enough to ask the question instead of only delivering the verdict. It can speak to the person in front of it as though that person has the capacity to rise.

We have been doing the young woman’s rage for generations. I built a whole life out of it. Some days I still do.

But we have many years of evidence now. The young woman’s rage has not moved the men.

The awakened one might.

Why the frequency matters

When we speak to the men from pure rage, we are not actually speaking to the noble masculine. We are speaking to the defended boy underneath the armour. The boy who learned very young that feeling anything was dangerous, and that being vulnerable was a way to get hurt.

And the defended boy does what defended boys do. He hides. He hits back. He runs. Every time.

The noble masculine, the man we are actually trying to reach, lives underneath that boy. He is the part of him that wants to protect. That wants to build. That wants to be trusted by a woman he respects. That wants, at the deepest level, to be worthy of the love he is being offered.

He cannot be summoned by force. He can only be invited. Not begged. Not bargained with. Not coddled. Invited.

When we speak from the awakened woman in us, that is the frequency he can hear. Not because the words are softer. Because the aim is true.

This is a different frequency entirely. Bodies know the difference.

How we speak to the men now

These are not a formula. These are the practices I am learning, ungracefully, mostly in the middle of my own kitchen.

One. Speak to what you want to see.

The noble masculine will not show up when you are addressing his broken self. You are not making contact with him, because you are not speaking to him. You are speaking to the wound, and the wound will defend itself.

Speak past the wound. I know you are more than this. I am talking to the man I know is in there. Watch what happens. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes a crack of light. Sometimes a whole landslide of relief, because somebody finally saw him.

Two. Voicing, not unloading.

There is a difference between this is how your actions affected me and this is everything wrong with you and your entire gender and the five thousand years of your mistakes. Both might be accurate. Only one is survivable across the table.

When I need to unload, I take it to the sisters, to the page, to the earth, to the scream in the car with the windows up. When I need to voice, I bring it, clean, to the man in front of me.

Three. Refuse the either-or.

Do not let the conversation become either I love you or I am furious with you. Either you are the noble masculine or you are the monster.

Both is the only true answer. You love him and what he did is not okay. You need him and he has failed you. He is capable of more and he is, right now, not meeting you. Stay in your own ground. Speak what is true. Want him to receive it. And do not require that he receive it in order for you to remain whole.

Four. Call him by his real name.

His real name is not men. His real name is not the patriarchy. His real name is the one his own father probably never called him.

When I have spoken to the noble masculine in a man directly, not as flattery, not as manipulation, but as genuine address to the part of him I know is real, I have watched men change in my lifetime. Not all. Some. Enough to be worth doing.

Five. Stop doing it for them.

This is the one I have to keep learning. Ha.

It is not our job to heal him. It is not our job to parent him. It is not our job to carry his unprocessed grief on top of our own. Our job is to stop mistaking his uninitiated self for who he actually is, and to hold the door of initiation open while he decides whether he is going to walk through it.

Some will. Some will not. Both are true. Neither is our responsibility.

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What it actually sounds like

Because theory is lovely, but what most of us need is language we can use on a given Tuesday.

What is happening to women right now is real. It is in this house. It is in this bed. It is in this body. And I need you to be the kind of man who can hear that without collapsing, because I am not willing to carry this alone anymore.

I am not asking you to agree with me. I am asking you to be with me while I tell you the truth about how I feel.

When you shut down, I lose you. And when I lose you, I lose the person I was supposed to be building this life with. I do not want to lose you. I want you to stay.

I believe you are capable of more than you are currently doing. That is why I am still in this conversation.

When we speak like this we are still on fire. Still in our truth. Still unwilling to be silenced. And we are speaking to the man we love as though he is capable of rising. Because he is. Most of them are. Most of them have simply never, in their whole lives, been spoken to that way.

The piece I know some of you will push back on

We do have to take responsibility for how we use our words.

I know. I can hear the intake of breath from here. Ha. Stay with me.

This is not because the men deserve our careful packaging. It is not because their feelings are more important than our truth. We have done quite enough of that for one civilisation, thank you.

It is because we are calling ourselves into our truth and power and awakened heart. We must be willing to grow into our maturity too. Because our words carry frequency. Because what we speak into a room we are co-creating, whether we like it or not. Because the wild feminine, unharnessed, does not birth the new world. She burns the old one down, and then the next generation inherits the ashes and has to start again from nothing.

We are not here to leave our children ashes.

We are here to call in the noble masculine. To hold the fire and the invitation at the same time. To be both the sword and the door.

This is maturity. This is what midlife has been preparing us for. This is Saturn in Aries asking us to grow the fuck up without losing one drop of our fire.

And the ones who will not meet us

Some are too committed to the structures that protect them. Some are too afraid of what they would have to feel in order to actually change. Some are already so far inside the broken masculine that there is, in this lifetime, no reaching them.

I am not calling those men home. I am not asking you to.

I am talking about the men who can be reached. The husbands. The brothers. The fathers. The sons. The colleagues. The friends. The ones who have been waiting, some of them for decades, for a woman to speak to the noble masculine in them and mean it.

The ones who will not come, will not come. Our job is not to keep throwing ourselves against their walls. Our job is to stand in our ground, speak our truth, call forward what can be called forward, and walk anyway.

But call him forward, first.

What we do now

For the women.

Find your altar. A corner, a windowsill, a shelf. A candle. A stone. A photograph of the women in your line. Light it before you write a message or have a conversation you know is going to be hard.

Find three women. Make a circle that does not break. This is where the fire that needs to spray goes, so that by the time you arrive at the kitchen counter with the man you love, the fire in your hand is clean. Three women. A kitchen table. Regularity. Start it this week.

Have one clear conversation with one specific man this week. Not all of them. One. The one where the loop is running hot. I want to come back to what you said yesterday because I had a reaction to it and I want to tell you what the reaction was. Try it. See what happens.

Read. Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. Marion Woodman on the awakened woman. Stand on their shoulders.

For the brave men who might also be reading.

Breathe before you defend. Just one breath. Long enough to ask yourself, am I hearing the wound under the fire. If you can stay in the room thirty seconds longer than your nervous system wants to, something different becomes possible.

Take this piece to another man this week. Not to a woman. To another man. Read it together. The women in your life cannot do the work of initiating other men into the noble masculine. Only you can.

Write back. Not to defend. Not to explain. Just to say I read this and here is what moved in me. Breaking the silence on your side of the conversation is part of how the loop ends.

Back to the practising

I want to come back to where I started.

Because the holy woman’s work does not happen just at the altar in the temple. It happens at the kitchen counter. In the bedroom. In the half-second before the castrating sentence comes out of your mouth, in the breath that lets you say something true and brief instead.

That half-second is the work. That half-second is where the new world is being built. One conversation at a time. One sentence at a time. One woman at a time, choosing the priestess over the maiden, choosing the forge over the spray, choosing twenty true words over a thousand defended ones.

Some days I do this beautifully. Some days I absolutely do not. Ha.

But every day I am practising. Because I am not going to be the woman who passes this loop on to the women coming after me.

We have been the maiden. We have been the castrating queen. We have been the woman with the razor sharp tongue, and we earned every inch of that fire, and I will not let anyone tell you otherwise.

But the world that is trying to be born now does not need the maiden’s fire alone. It needs ours. The forged kind. The aimed kind. The kind that knows the difference between the structure we must dismantle and the man at the kitchen counter. The kind that can hold a flame in one hand and the open door in the other. The kind that can say the true thing in twenty words and let it land.

Let us be those women.

Not because the men deserve it.

Because we know what we are.

We are the holy women of the next era. The fire is in our hands. The altar is beneath it. And the world needs all of us, sword and door at the same time, calling them home.

If this piece moved something in you, send it to one woman who needs it. Send it to one man who is ready to be in this conversation. The work is in the passing.

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