“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Once each month on a Saturday afternoon, I meet with a group of women for a Wise Women’s Drum Circle.  We laugh, we play our drums, we speak our dreams, and we share our hearts.  It is remarkable to be in the company of others and never need to backpedal from speaking our truth.  It is a place of giving and receiving acceptance, love, compassion, and open hearts.  It is a place of adding without taking away, of listening without passing judgment, of joining together in a sort of community that embraces our differences, finds our similarities, and celebrates the growth that comes from linking arms and hearts and souls in love.  As I write, I see the faces of all the women who were part of our time yesterday.  I smile, and the warmth swirls all around me; I think of them, and I hope they can feel the warmth, too.

We played a women’s rhythm, Sorsonet, one that is played when young girls are initiated into the community of adult women.  As the three parts of the rhythm wove together, I could hear the steady sound of the grandmother’s voice, the base that held it all together with purpose and serenity.  There was the voice of the mother, non-stop and strident; asserting her place as the worker, the child-bearer, the keeper of the strong and active stage of a woman’s life.  Her sharp beats lay on top of the grandmother’s wisdom and called the young girls to join in the world of adults.  There was the light-hearted rhythm of the girls who skipped between childhood and womanhood, filled with excitement and having no need to hold back their excitement at letting go of childhood and dancing into their new adventure.

We talked about holding on and about letting go, about how these two choices are always working in our lives as we have come from childhood to adulthood and soon to retirement.  In a guided meditation, we were called to visit our future selves and see how we dreamed that we would be when we truly are the grandmothers.  Perhaps we drew on our own experiences with grandmothers and wise women.  Each of us saw a version of ourselves that was physically slower and more deliberate, but still filled with vitality and spirit and creativity.  Each of us saw that our dreams still would carry us when our bodies might no longer be the vehicle that drives our achievement.  There will be a lot of letting go between now and then, and a lot of choosing what to hold onto and carry with us to the next part of our lives.

As we again played Sorsonet, I thought of all the places I have been so far — the carefree days of being a girl, the excitement and hard work of my years as a mother, and the letting go that already has begun to carry me to the ripeness of my grandmother years.  I thought of the way that I moved through a fearlessness born of naivete, to the years of challenging fear and learning to stand in the face of difficulty, and at last to the time when my fears lie beneath the surface and courage is what shows on the face that others see in me.  There is something powerful in learning to hold fear close and only let courage be seen.  This may be the heart of the wisdom we see in the elders, the steady base beat of their lives that assures us that it will be all right and that there is always a reason to dance the celebration of being a woman.  Don’t be afraid, they tell us, to hold on or to let go.  We must do both in order to fully embrace our journey through life.  I take out my drum and begin to play the steady rhythm of the grandmother.  I adjust the shawl around my tiny shoulders and play the song of wisdom and courage, the song that says, “dance!”  And don’t be afraid.