A Hag Wearing Jeans

This morning, sitting with my tea and my journal, I was visited in my imagination by a hag wearing faded jeans and a saggy grey sweat shirt. She was all over wrinkles, like the before pictures on the Weather Channel website.

I hate those images of wrinkle removal: the craggy face, exaggerated; the magic line, like a curtain dropping over reality, that transforms the face to youthful smoothness. The image, in maddening, boring repetition, etches itself on my psyche, one more form of subtle misogyny.

My heterosexual women friends have told me about the descent into invisibility that aging has brought them. No longer important in "the eye of the guy", as one woman put it, makes them feel worthless, like maybe it's their time to go out on the ice and die. I am assured that the most skilled and proficient career woman will feel this irrational tug. For me, a lesbian, "the eye of the guy" has been at best an irritant and at worst downright dangerous. Not being seen has always suited me just fine. And even so, I sometimes feel that aging diminishes me.

The hag, of course, would like to be called Sophia. "Hag" once meant wisdom instead of ugliness and invisibility. That this is a perspective from a long-ago time is attested to by our collective tales. In our stories and myths, what goddess hasn't hidden herself in some toothless old maid, to watch her people from secret vantage? Even Christ has taken the form of the helpless old widow. This could not happen if hags were attractive, held people's attention.

Sophia chuckles at me, daring me to quit projecting. Uncomfortably I remember the times I have smiled indulgently at collective wisdom as embodied in, for instance, the older women in my church. Then even more uncomfortably I think about the ways I am beginning to resemble those women. I'm just a teeny bit hard of hearing sometimes -- often because I think I know what someone is going to say before they actually say it. I ran into a door a couple of days ago -- gently, with a thud -- because I had expected it would be open and so didn't bother looking. I see paradigms I have longed to shed being broken open and discarded matter-of-factly by people a few years younger than me. That makes me unspeakably joyful. It also serves as warning that it is time for my leadership to take a different form.

Sophia nods, satisfied that now she has my attention. She reaches in the pocket of her jeans and removes a small vial. She prizes off the lid and pours a few drops of some liquid into her hand. Tucking the bottle under an arm she rubs her palms together, then comes at me hands outstretched. I close my eyes, expecting she will rub her ointment on my face.

Instead I feel her fingers against my heart. Small and cool, with that unmistakable sensation of another person's healing touch, they massage the oil in. And I remember -- my wisdom. I remember some of the hurts I have transformed through making them conscious, suffering them, allowing them to be healed; some of the projections I have reeled in and used as teachers; a few of the angers and resentments I have engaged and let go; one or two of the bumbling idiosyncrasies I have seen in myself and come to love. I discover in myself a valuable storehouse.

I can't tell you, just at this moment, what more to make of this vision. Sophia has wiped her palms on her jeans and is regarding me with eyes all a-twinkle. I am grateful that Wisdom treats me so gently. I am awed that she loves me with all the quiet certainly of a snowfall. I aspire to love all her children in just the same way. Impossible task for a little biased human -- I know. Yet still -- I can aspire.