Fucking Fabulous #3: Talking to the Trees
Letters of Love and Farewell to My Fifties
Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
read: Fucking Fabulous #2: Creating New Maps
Once upon a time, I was lying on a mat under a dazzling tapestry of stars in the Sinai desert, unable to sleep because I was overwhelmed by the expansiveness.
Everything was too big, too far, too wide. I’m a city person. Not just a city person, but a crowded city person. And at the time I was living in Cairo, one of the most crowded cities in the world. I was in the Sinai desert for the annual camel race. And the night before the race, which was scheduled for soon after sunrise, everything was too big, too far, too wide. I wanted to be inside somewhere. Even the inside of a car would’ve worked.
“Reach out and touch us,” the sky whispered.
It was too much sky, too much space, too much! I felt like I was going to be swallowed up.
“You’re too far!” I thought, tossing and turning. “I am not big enough.”
No sleep in sight, I spent most of the night staring at the sky. the last time I saw such an abundance of stars, during a solo road trip across the U.S., I drove off the road, distracted as I was by the beauty above.
“Wink back at us,” the stars urged.
“I can’t reach you,” I insisted.
I was used to Cairo streetlights winking at me when I looked out of the window of a plane during landing. I understood that kind of dazzle.
The fucking fabulous thing about my fifties was its gift of embodiment.
I was in my forties that night in the Sinai desert. And I know now that the reason I felt overwhelmed by the sky and its gorgeous tapestry of stars was that I had long been exiled from my body. I could not reach out and touch that glorious sky nor wink at the sparkles that are stars and I felt overwhelmed in the serenity that is the Sinai desert because I did not appreciate the heft of my body.
The fucking fabulous thing about my fifties was its gift of embodiment.
I expanded in my body. I don’t mean I put on weight, although I did during perimenopause. The fucking fabulous thing about going through menopause, with all its challenges, with how shit and how amazing menopause has been, is that it taught me the heft of my body. And the more I stretched into that body, the more I could reach out and touch space, to misquote Depeche Mode.
The changes puberty kickstarted in my body made me unrecognizable to myself. I became an exile to my own body.
Ever since I turned 50, my body and I began a conversation I long refused. The usual word for it is embodiment. Our bodies, for those of us assigned female at birth, are always viewed in relation to men, our worth defined by patriarchy.
Menopause rendered that conversation moot.
I spent so many years deliberately ignoring the diktats of patriarchy that now that patriarchy doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, I am fucking relieved. Finally!
With patriarchy out of the way, my body and I could talk. Finally!
And then I began talking to the trees.
Ever since I turned 50, my body and I began a conversation I long refused. The usual word for it is embodiment. Our bodies, for those of us assigned female at birth, are always viewed in relation to men, our worth defined by patriarchy. Menopause rendered that conversation moot.
I began walking more intentionally in my fifties and befriended the trees. By intentional, I mean I set out to walk, no particular destination in mind, not on my way somewhere, but walking for the sake of it. When I was younger, being outside, walking somewhere, was usually with a destination in mind–for work, to socialise, to argue with someone; usually in a rush.
Trees? What trees?
The more I walked, the more I expanded. The more I walked, especially when I could see the sky, the more my arms, my legs, my being conversed with the trees and appreciated the wonder of their rootedness and presence–the wide, the narrow, the tall, the short, bodies of their own, determined and demanding appreciation.
You sometimes hear advice to be outside, somewhere bigger than yourself, to remember how small we are, and by extension whatever burdens we have.
Since I began talking to the trees, I have experienced the opposite. The more vast my surroundings, the more I expand to touch the sky, and the bigger I become, to traverse the distance between us. The opposite of my experience in the Sinai desert under the tapestry of stars that night years ago.
The trees taught me.
“Look up,” they said. “See how we do it.”
We New Yorkers are not known for looking up. When we do, it’s all glass and steel and brick, which all have their own language but it’s not the lexicon of expansion.
Then I began talking to the trees in my fifties.
How can you be lonely when you have the trees? Lean in and listen. Relish a silence that is not the absence of noise but an invitation to connect. “Come this way,” the trees beckon.
I want to be a tree when I grow up. I want to bloom in lushness and then shed it all so that I can make room for more fullness that knows exactly its worth.
I’m not making facile comparisons between Spring and youth and Winter as the opposite. I mean all that lushness and shedding and then blooming again in a day, a week, a month, a year. I mean the fucking fabulousness of being alive with all its glory and pain; crooked and broken branches, breathtaking and crushing, calm and chaotic, all of it, give it to me, all!
How can you be lonely when you have the trees? Lean in and listen. Relish a silence that is not the absence of noise but an invitation to connect.
And then the wind! Oh, the wind. Amplifier and conductor at once of all that the trees have to tell me.
“Love me, love me, love me, say you do. Let me fly away with you. For my love is like the wind,” Nina Simone sings. “And wild is the wind.”
There’s a reason that wind and passion are so often twins. And when wind bursts into your heart and carries it away…to where? Who cares! Art awaits, for as Billie Holiday tells us, the winds of March made her heart a dancer. But those are foolish things.
Who cares!
It is fucking fabulous this thing called aging. Like passion, it can overwhelm, but there are trees, role models of how to age just as you are meant to. And the expanse of space–the sky, the stars, the silence and stillness of a desert night–no longer overwhelms.
And now, on my walks, I look up at the sky and, egged on by the trees, I wink. The bigger the space I can expand into, the fuller I become. Isn’t that a wonderful paradox? Just as the trees stretch upwards while their rootedness reaches far beneath.
It is fucking fabulous this thing called aging. Like passion, it can overwhelm, but there are trees, role models of how to age just as you are meant to.
I think of that night in the Sinai desert under the tapestry of stars and I now know that I was not ready. I did not know how to reach out. I was big in different ways in my forties. They were ways that served me then but my fifties needed expansion in new ways. My fifties demanded an embodiment that I had long neglected. Menopause and the trees urged me on.
The trees became my teachers. Lush, bare, crooked, blooming–just as they are. Just as I am. Menopause listened, learned, and nudged me on.
“Excuse me while I kiss the sky!”
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been translated into 13 languages so far. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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