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Explore Dimensionally

[God has] set eternity in the human heart.

—Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV

In ancient myth, womanhood is typically manifested in three distinct phases: maiden, mother, old woman.

The maiden is the young unbridled beauty, full of enthusiasm and promise. The mother is the embodiment of fertility, sexuality, and stability. The old woman—sometimes referred to as the beautiful crone—typically serves as a guide to the hero or heroine. She is the voice that helps the hero find his way back home, back to himself, back to greater knowledge of the world and of the divine. Sometimes blind, she is the character with all the vision and can see what others in the story never can.

When we think about who we are and who we are becoming, I believe it’s helpful to think of these phases of womanhood all within our identity.

We have a young child in every one of us. That child gives us clues about passion, curiosity, play. She is the part of us that roamed and dabbled and risked without knowledge of conformity. It does not occur to this child that there is a right or wrong way to paint, a right or wrong way to climb, a right or wrong way to play. She is innocent, but she is also highly intuitive and unapologetic.

I observe the way my kids play. They are original creatives—all three of them. They do not watch what other people make. They spin ideas out of their own minds and they pile scraps and objects to make their ideas come to life. They take a laundry bag and hang it from a tree and steal salami from the fridge while I’ve got my back turned at the kitchen sink. They hang the net bag from a tree and cut a small hole in the corner and they tear up bits of salami and carrot and make a luring line toward their bag. “Mom, do you want to come see the lizard trap we made?”

My children are inventors, and they are unself-conscious in their craft. I watch their minds work and their hands follow, and I believe they will teach me more than I could learn from any expert. They teach me how to return, how to unlearn, how to focus intently on dabbling. They are my mentors.

And then there is the phase of womanhood I find myself in now: the mother who is learning the fine art of nurturing, caretaking—of others, yes, but of herself too. She is learning how to make peace with herself. She is learning the craft of taking exceptional care of her brood and her body. She is learning all of life’s beautifully difficult lessons. Somewhere in the intensity and the longing and the dizzying days, she is listening for her soul, making sure it’s still in there, giving it space as she can. She envies the freedom of her younger years, and she is grateful to be right where she is too—expanding, listening, desiring. She also longs to be settled, rooted, anchored. Not just geographically, but spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically.

This mother knows, deep down, there is someone in her soul who is all these things already. Deep calls to deep and something within her transcends past or present or future. Wildly, momentarily, she accesses this deeply resilient, storied, wrinkled version of herself and she breathes. This is the older woman within, the voice of home, of rest, of wisdom, of prayer, of insight.

The beautiful old woman is, in Elizabeth Gilbert’s words, “the old lady who lives inside me, whom I hope to someday be.” She speaks the same language as my longings; she knows the persistence of them. When I explore and create and go to the garden of my soul, she nods. “Yes,” she says, “this is the way.”

The film Advanced Style has captured a handful of beauties walking the streets of Manhattan. This documentary follows women in their later years who see their sense of style as an essential manifestation of personal expression. It’s a conversation about aging and beauty and creativity. And these women are amazing! A ninety-year-old with peachy orange eyelash extensions, for example. Another who says she dresses up “for the theatre of her life, every day.” They are extraordinary Miss Havishams, dripping with stories and eccentricity.

I’m drawn to these women not so much for their eccentricities but for the comfort they feel in their own skin, with their own aesthetic. They are unconventional in their risks, and I’m excited by people who show us how they’re living their own art instead of becoming a replica of someone else’s. I believe maturity and experience, like our children, can teach us how to return—in pure forms—to uninhibited expression.

All three of these parts of us give us clues about who we are and who we are becoming: our dabbling child, our expanding mother, our self-possessed and self-expressed older woman.

Spend time with these parts of yourself. Let them speak to you. Let God speak to you through them. They will show you glimpses of eternity here on earth, of how you are to be anchored in your unshakable worth and how you are to wing your way into this world too. How you are both earth and eternity commingled.

In Hebrews, there is a passage about the heroes of our faith, those who “accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. . . . You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.”1

These words make me long for the Home Country, and long for Home-Country-living here too. We long because he set eternity in our hearts, and so as we investigate what he has written there on our hearts, we are linked to past, present, future. We see, like we never have before, that we were made in an image that is three-dimensional.

Reflection & Expression

What does the child or maiden in you know?

What does the mother in you know?

What does the older woman in you know?

How is God using each of these parts of you to give you courage?

For Your Brazen Board

Find images or words that represent these phases of your life.