Our culture is sorely lacking formal initiatory experiences. We mark birthdays, graduations, weddings, and funerals with ritual staid enough to lull one to sleep.

We need Rites of Initiation that mark our stages of development–from childhood to adulthood, maidenhood to motherhood, from adult to elderhood.

Lacking these, we are, collectively, being dragged through archetypal initiatory processes without any idea about what’s happening to us. Instead of undergoing formalized rites, we lose ourselves. We quit, run-away, become destructive toward our lives as we both fight against, and are swept up in the initiatory process.

As we age through peri-, full-on, and post- menopause, we focus medically and psychologically, rather than spiritually/archetypically. We undergo it alone, reinventing a wheel as old as time itself.

Let’s speak to each other about what it’s like. An excellent place to begin that discussion is in A Provocation of Crones, where we move—step by step, with eyes wide open–through the Initiatory process of of adulting and eldering.