Lines from a Young Poet, Written for a Woman Entering Midlife
Plus, Some Lughnasadh Reflections
Measure my life in island time
Not bound to earth’s spinning
Though I don’t have the bard’s gift of memorized poetry, those words have stayed with me since I wrote them when I was seventeen.
It’s part of a longer piece, but this isn’t the day to dig through the basement’s plastic totes of nostalgia to find the original. Nor is it for me to decide whether that poem was any good. What matters is that I somehow constructed a paper boat that would hold my changing story for more than a quarter century.
Last week, my kids and I set off northward to Prince Edward Island. This weeklong pilgrimage to the Canadian Maritimes, where my mother’s family has lived for generations, has been at the heart of most of my summers.
There’s an enduring truth in the line that closed that high school poem of mine:
There I learned to walk
And there I expect to fly
It’s true: my first tottering steps took me from one loving set of hands to another in what everyone still calls “The Listening Room,” even though the piano and turntable have been replaced by a bed to make space for more of the endless holiday visitors who want a taste of this island magic.
But still I wonder: all those years ago, when I scribbled in my journal on that porch overlooking the marsh and the fishing boats, all held by rolling fields with their rust red earth, what did I expect flight to feel like?
Now, I come back to this place as a mother with my own heavy human heart and my typical adult concerns. No wings. No mile high accomplishments. No sense that I have the secret to defying gravity.
Have I fulfilled my young princess-self’s expectations? Could I, can I, ever realize those half-spoken dreams?
Wise Words from the Young Genius
In his book Tracking Wonder, Jeffrey Davis describes the Young Genius inside all of us. The Young Genius still glitters with the energy of “when you felt most alive, open, and free to be your unique self.” Jeffrey invites us to bring our Young Genius to work and to all parts of our complicated adult lives.
Whenever I do this exercise, I often see the young poet on that PEI farmhouse porch who felt so completely content in her favorite place on the earth, and who also yearned so completely for something more.
All these years later, it’s a little stunning to realize that all my work, all my experience, all my evolution has brought me to exactly the same sort of feeling looking at the same view.
I’m still learning how to walk. I still expect to take flight, somehow.
At my best moments, I celebrate that wise girl who understood the essence of life’s journey. At my worst, I wonder if I haven’t managed to change at all.
Measuring Life According to an Alternative Metric
In my book The Sovereignty Knot I describe my concept of Sovereign Time. Subconsciously, I must have been thinking of my old poetic vision of Island Time when I wrote it.
Unbound from the lovely but linear concept of the Maiden-Mother-Crone construct, in Sovereign Time, we can access any and all archetypes of Sovereignty at any age and any stage of life:
Free the princess.
Crown the queen.
Embrace the wise woman.
The seventeen year-old can know so much more than the middle-aged mom. The wise woman can speak through the mouth of the young poet. The queen can help keep everyone organized without having to rule every aspect of the show.
Sovereign Time was inspired by French feminist psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time.” She believed we needed an alternative to the linear understanding of time that simply tracked wars, invasions, and the other trappings of “history” with its blatant emphasis on the his.
Women’s Time is an invitation to measure life according to cyclical, natural time of the body—particularly the kinds of bodies that make babies. It gives you a holistic understanding of how you are a reflection of nature and how you are in relationship with nature, especially the moon and the seasons.
Not According to the Calendar, but Tilting Cycles of Time
We find ourselves in the season of Lughnasadh, the first harvest of what we now think of as the Celtic year.
Your calendar may say that August first is the day to mark the holiday, so it might feel this message is coming a bit late. But Lughnasadh is a sacred portal, rather than a specific date. Harvest happens over a long collection of moments, not at a single appointed time.
This year, “true Lughnasadh” - the exact halfway point between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox that would have mattered so much to the pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland who left behind the great monoliths, those miraculous earthly star charts that we can only begin to understand - is on August 7.
The day (whenever you mark it) is named for the sun god Lugh, the shining son of the Tuatha de Dannan.
Though it’s named for Lugh, the feast is actually a celebration of his foster mother Tailtiu. Lugh’s great games, which were celebrated for millennia, were held in honor of a fallen goddess. (Or, perhaps a Cailleach, as
describes in her wonderful contemplation of the festival, Tailtiu and the HAG).Tailtiu died of exhaustion after clearing the great fertile fields of Ireland. Every year, this sense that a moment of celebration is also a memento of ultimate sacrifice means more and more to me.
After running myself ragged over the last year (the last decades?), I feel the burdens of a mother who pushed herself beyond all sense and reason in service to the community and the land. Though it is important to note that I realize that a great deal of my own exhaustion is a response to the modern hustle culture that’s about individual achievement and working in isolation rather than being about selfless services to the collective as Tailtiu was.
Whether we live in a culture that celebrates the collective or the individual, women are still celebrated for their sacrifice, for the way they gave it all to their kids, to their families, to their careers, to the spirit of hospitality and the needs of others.
Tailtiu, we see you for your love and your toil, your selflessness and your sacrifice that put food on the table - and made space for the table to be assembled. We thank you for shaping the land, and, perhaps, for being the land as so many goddesses of Ireland were.
We Are All Lugh
When I go back to that house on the Island, it’s full of ghosts now. As excited as I am to get there, the grief always hits when I cross that threshold. My grandparents’ generation is all gone. My mother is, too. The toddler I was, and the baby versions of my kids as well.
I am Lugh, celebrating life with all who remain, but knowing that our joy is possible because of who came before us and made that place into a home.
Though Island Time may not be bound to earth’s spinning, it is still tied to the cycles of earthly creation. There, the miracles of birth and death are enacted in their own due course.
Maybe, Island Time is about measuring life according to the slower, seasonal tilt of the earth, rather than its relentless daily spin.
Maybe, just maybe, that sense of flight I’ve expected for so long is less about fantasy super powers or about stratospheric achievement, and is more about being able to stay lifted and inspired through the tilting of life’s seasons.
We cannot escape death. We wouldn’t want to. But I know I want us all to have the courage to fly through the space, according to Sovereign Time, that stretches between the first steps of toddlerhood and the elder’s last sleep.
Do you have a copy of The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic?
Buy a signed copy from me (and get a free, personalized Sovereignty Archetype reading) or order the book from your favorite bookseller.