Aging With Grace

Published as “Am-Aging Grace,” cover story in “Mature Lifestyles,” May 2002, supplement to the Woodstock Times and Ulster Publishing’s other weekly newspapers.

Since my late twenties, I’ve had a secret hobby. I’ve been storing images in my mind of beautiful older women.
At that time, I started practicing the Chinese movement art, T’ai Chi Chu’an. Said to take a lifetime to perfect, in T’ai Chi the truly respected masters are very old, in their eighties, nineties, even over a hundred years old, and are known for their
resilient good health, flexible bodies and, most of all, for their often quirky, humorous wisdom. At the first school I went to, there were two older, silver-haired women who, each in their own right, were quite beautiful—straight-spined, limber and vibrant. I knew them only from a distance, but as I reflect on it, I realize that the image of a certain shining inner quality they both had stayed with me as I’ve practiced T’ai Chi and grown older myself.

A few years later, I started going to spiritual classes taught by Hilda Charlton. Hilda was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. In her seventies and early eighties when I knew her, Hilda had been a dancer when she was young, and had a stage presence all her own as she taught the principles of spiritual life to rapt audiences of hundreds of people of all ages, from all walks of life. While she could be the sternest spiritual master, her exuberant sense of humor and fun more often made her seem like a Walt Disney fairy godmother. Hilda had spent eighteen years living in India, and when I first attended her classes, she wore gold-embossed saris, in later years elegant, long velvet gowns which, she would tell us with a conspiratorial wink, came from discount store lingerie departments, but in my eyes made her look like a queen.

Hilda would sometimes jokingly denigrate her own appearance, saying how she was old and fat, which would always take me aback and make me want to defend her to herself. Then I would look at her closely and see, indeed, her face was wrinkled and sagging, and her body was stout, not the slender dancer’s body I’d seen in photos of her when she was young. But I couldn’t hold my focus on that perspective of her for very long. Hilda had spent most of her life developing herself spiritually and helping others, and there was a light that shone through her that was truly majestic, projecting an inner beauty that overshone whatever she looked like in an objective sense. When I think of what a beautiful woman looks like, I don’t think of fashion models or movie stars, I remember Hilda, radiant with the light that she’d cultivated so long that it transfigured her.

I also think of Grandma Kitty. I have no idea how old she was in the 1980’s when a center in my area brought many “elders” from indigenous cultures to teach and do ceremony. When I first saw her, with her long white hair and a face that showed not so much age but rather a weathered, amused compassion earned by observing external events and herself for a long time, I thought to myself, “If you’re going to be old, that’s the way to look!”

To me, there’s something heroic about a woman who looks like that, something exciting—the more colorful beauty of youth bleached to the bones, like the bare trees in winter in a snowy landscape, a beauty that beckons you inward, towards your own deeper knowing. When I first met Grandma Kitty, I didn’t think she was anything special—I had met other teachers who impressed me more with what they did or said. But I kept coming to see her because I felt good being with her, until it finally registered—she was a real grandmother, not calling attention to herself, but making me feel good about myself! In that way, she taught me an unforgettable lesson about what womanly power can be.

Grandma Kitty was a modern descendant of a tradition where, as in all indigenous cultures, growing older means becoming an “elder”—someone revered for wisdom gathered over a lifetime. She was a mother and grandmother, had conquered alcoholism, illness and despair, tested the wisdom that had been handed down to her against her own experience, and come out with something she could teach others even as she continued to go through her own challenges.

This used to be the natural order of things! It’s one more indication of the imbalance of our culture that people resist getting older, look to the young as their models, and not the opposite! In some Native American tribes, it was the “council of grandmothers” who held the power; the chief unable to act until the grandmothers made their decisions. Age is respected in Chinese tradition to such an extent that I know one T’ai Chi master who lied about his age in reverse, claiming to be seventy for a few years before he actually got there. And the wisdom teachings of any of these traditions are usually not much more than interesting intellectual baggage until they’re transmitted by someone who’s sincerely lived with them for so long they’ve come to embody them.

“It is recorded in the Vedas, India’s ancient scriptures,” says Amma Karunamayi, a holy woman from India who visits the U.S. every year, “that thousands of years ago people prayed to live long lives, over a hundred years old. I’ve been asked why people would want to live so long—there weren’t even any modern conveniences then.

“People in those times didn’t want to live such long lives simply to enjoy themselves! Those people wanted wisdom and higher consciousness, and they knew it takes a very long time to attain that.”

In my gallery of older women, I also have pictures of Pravrajika Vivekaprana, a Hindu nun in her sixties with close-cropped grey hair, wire-rimmed glasses and no-nonsense bearing, whose combination of clear intellect and devotion inspires and amazes me each time I meet her, and Shree Maa, a tiny holy lady from India with long grey hair and thick glasses, whose extreme humility doesn’t hide the power and wisdom that pours through her. The poise this gives her—self-sufficiency in the highest sense—always makes me feel, despite her simple cotton sari and unassuming manner, that she’s absolutely the coolest, most fashionable person I’ve ever seen.

These women glow from within. Their beauty is not cosmetic—a face without wrinkles, a perfectly formed physique—but an appearance hammered out by time until its inner substance shines. It’s different than the beauty that distracts with a shiny surface.
In contrast, as my friends and I enter middle age, I hear so many women talking about their fear of losing their youthful appearance. Growing older in the context of these ancient, still-vibrant traditions, with the possibilities of real wisdom and fulfillment that they offer in the long run, has made progressing through the decades an exciting adventure. And even those dreaded effects of aging can be seen in their own light. As grey hairs started outnumbering my dark ones, I was surprised and delighted to discover that they sparkle!

When I conceived this article, I went to the library to see what the “experts” had to say, because newspaper editors like that kind of thing. But in the modern spate of books about aging, nowhere did I find mention of this idea of “elders” as a culture’s wisdom-bearers with a beauty of their own. There were books about the illnesses and weaknesses of older people, and more recent books, like Betty Friedan’s The Fountain of Age, and Gail Sheehy’s New Passages, that speak about developing new vitality and interests as you age, but nothing comprehensive about cultures where it’s understood that it isn’t until you get really old that you fully come into your true power and beauty.

So I consulted with an elder of my own community in Woodstock, NY, Kesii McKaye. Now in her nineties, Kesii is a former actress who studied healing arts around the world, raised children and mothered a vast, extended family over the years. She worked as a healer until the after-effects of a serious car accident slowed her down—though this didn’t prevent her from going to Bali for her 85th birthday. A lifelong human rights activist, Kesii joins the Women in Black in their Sunday vigil on the Woodstock Village Green when she’s able.

Kesii spoke to me at length about the necessity to go beyond limitations. As a young woman with a crippling foot injury, she told herself, ‘If I can’t walk, I’ll fly,’ became a trapeze artist, and joined the circus. She has been experiencing the process of aging with the same attitude of investigation and discovery with which she’s approached everything during her long life.

“My whole life has been about learning something,” Kesii tells me, “and maybe that’s why I’m still on the planet. As years go on and you become an elder, you’re facing shifts and changes, especially in the physical, and you have to have a comparable vision that makes up for that. Sometimes my physical energy becomes extremely low. You have to find a creative way to take that and turn it around, make it into an experience that you’re facing not in a negative way but in a positive way.

“When we get older, we have to learn to translate energy into another way of using it. The physical can be very, very misleading. If you take me away from my physical limitations, I have energy. If someone says let’s fly, dance, jump, I wouldn’t be able to do it, but maybe one can dance in another way. So I’m learning how to dance in ways that have nothing to do with the body, but with emotional, spiritual energy, which is limitless.

“It’s all part of evolving into another place,” she continues. “The negative thing of getting older gets scary to women especially, because they think ‘I’m not going to be accepted, I’m not going to be stereotypically young.’ We have a lot of negatives in our culture. We’ve got to start turning them around, drive in a different lane, see things differently. When you’re five, you’re getting older. We need to look at getting older as a process, not a stigma.

McKaye believes there’s a “whole new gorgeousness of getting past fifty, sixty, seventy.” Says the nonagenarian, “We can enter into a whole new dance of this energy. We can dance at any moment, any hour, any year. If someone gets depressed—‘Oh, I’ll never have my youth again’—how about thinking I might have something better?”

McKaye says she learned that we must give ourselves permission to be experimental at every stage of our lives. “I’ve lived my life wanting to preserve the feeling of being limitless,” she explains. “Kids don’t like to be restrained when they’re little, and that child lives forever in us, doesn’t like to be told what to do or think, wants to be free to find itself. The least fearful part in us wants to live. We have clocks and calendars and we’re so caught up with what we have to do by a certain time that we don’t think about this divine space, our body, that we live in. This body is so strong, so full of promise.”

Putting limits and labels on things has caused considerable tragedy in this world, she believes, suggesting an alternative. “What I’m learning at this point, experiencing the ecstasy of moving my energies through my body in a new, slightly altered state, is pretty marvelous.”
“Wow,” I exclaim.
“‘Wow’ is the most fitting expression to use,” Kesii agrees.

Cassia Berman’s articles on practical spirituality have been widely published in national and regional publications. She teaches T’ai Chi and Qigong in Woodstock, NY and throughout the region, as well as workshops in writing and in women’s spirituality. She can be reached at cassiaberman@verizon.net, or (845) 679-9457.