I’ve been feeling old and ugly lately, a consequence of my societal programming that says that a woman comes with an expiry date when it comes to worth, beauty and desirability. It’s a terrible feeling, but then, I’ve always had a certain dissatisfaction with myself when it came to comparisons with the societal ideal, so really, not so very unfamiliar.
The other night, I had a wonderful dream. I love dreams. They’re perfectly real, of course; while I’m in a dream, I’m experiencing a reality that is as tangible as anything I experience while awake. I’ve learned to accept these experiences and their validity, which is lovely, because this was a very sweet dream (sigh).
In this dream, I am at a coffeehouse and a man is singing. He has an amazing voice, sort of country-folk. Imagine Greg Brown crossed with Steve Earle crossed with Hoyt Axton. Iows, sexy, deep, resonant and to die for. He sang this song:
“A woman’s age
is a love agenda
A woman’s age
is a beautiful thing
It shows in the way she grows
Shines through in all the things she knows
I want to be where Heaven
Heaven is a woman’s age.”
I felt this man singing directly to me. He felt like the voice of God. This dream made me feel good. The song goes through my head all the time, and I find myself singing it a lot. I expect to add verses to it soon.
The subtext of the song was this: a woman blossoms over time, and the blossoms keep unfolding and unfolding. Aging is not about fading and growing less, dimmer less vital with age, rather it’s about complexifying, opening, deepening. And the feeling was that men in general (the collective culture) are stunted and unable to grow along with this ‘woman’ (seemed like a specific woman, who in the dream I felt to be ‘me’, rather than ‘women’ in general), but the problem was not the woman herself.
Understandably, I rather liked this.
