Saging Well

Given that the contributors to this site are three women, there will inevitably be certain biases in our content. We’re proud to disavow any of the usual biases – race, sexual orientation, religion, age (well, duh) – but this business of gender is a little less amenable to modification.  Try as we might, we probably won’t find ourselves thinking or writing like a definably saging male.

Still, at one point a year or so ago I was sincerely committed to a good faith effort in that regard.  It was in part an appreciation of the complexity of knowing one’s animus, one’s shadow side as a female, and partly just an exercise in creative nonsense while avoiding other less enjoyable obligations.  To that end, however, I took my full name, made an anagram of a male’s full name, Hayden Actien Webb, and wrote a complete blog in his voice.

It was great fun.  We have many choices in our lives but one of them is not typically gender.  I have often thought that if I fully imagined myself as a male, I might be a better partner, friend, colleague, a better mother to my son.   And I really wanted to envision an animus that I liked, an elder male mentor I could respect.  A mentor of my own imagination.

After about twenty posts I abandoned the project, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because it occurred to me that in certain important ways the differences between genders as culturally imposed templates become less and less prominent across the lifespan, as if there is a merging of the two gender identities. I notice this most immediately with faces and bodies. I find myself attracted to the elderly faces who project a strong, non-traditionally gendered persona, faces like Georgia O’Keeffe’s or William Trevor’s. It occurs to me, however, that my idealized sage sort not only looks non-gender specific, but behaves in cross-gender ways.  An elder with both great strength and tenderness sounds ideal to me.

Michael Meade represents one of the male elders who not only embodies those ideals but also works actively to be a mentor to the young males and tragically-overlooked war veterans our culture has not known how to nurture and support.  His website, Mosaic Voices, offers a number of resources for those committed to greater wisdom and service across their lifetimes. The top image in this post comes from his website, and seems to me to beautifully symbolize our role as elders, both male and female.

In the meantime, if I could design my own elderly visage (and in fact some cultures do believe we create our own faces) I have a pretty good idea of what I would want to look like. Conscious and kind sums it up. The wrinkles – well, I think I’m starting to like them.