Level 40: The edge of enchantress

I’ve been feeling a shift for some time, and this week - the week I celebrate four decades Earthside - feels like a significant marker on my journey. The significance isn’t in the number, but in how right it feels - this aging, this slow becoming. I thought I would hit 40 with all the dread and loathing my culture has taught me to regard it with, but I don’t feel that way at all. It’s like gravity pulling something towards the ground after I let it go - I fully accept it because I know that’s how it happens, and there is even something satisfying in it: Maiden becomes Mother becomes Enchantress becomes Wise Woman.

SIDE NOTE: For me, there are four female archetypes that correspond to four phases of life, four stages of the menstrual cycle, four seasons and four phases of the moon: Maiden, Mother, Enchantress and Wise Woman. They have different names. You might know the Enchantress as the Witch, or as Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ celebrated Wild Woman. You might call the Wise Woman the Hag or the Crone.

It’s nice and ordered, right? Except it’s not. Because we are women, and we are not linear - we ebb and flow, we’re unpredictable, we’re messy. There are no lines and dates - no rules, really.

You can’t put a time stamp on transitions like this. It’s not happening TODAY, or even this month or year. It’s a gradual shift, like the changing of the seasons, and at the moment I feel like September in Athens. Am I summer or autumn? Ha - you’ll never know. I might give you wall-to-wall sunshine and temperatures in the 30s, or a massive thunderstorm might roll in from the north, flood the streets and soak you to the bone.

I’m an edge place.

Everything the Enchantress is associated with is about transition: dusk, autumn, the waning moon, the pre-menstrual phase - transitions that move us from times of fullness and plenty to times of rest, dark and quiet. They are times of winding down, and they can also be unstable and uncertain times. So it’s easy to think of the Enchantress as an archetype of depletion – but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Hers is a powerful energy to inhabit - but it isn’t the dynamic inertia of enthusiasm and wild inspiration. The Enchantress’s power is hard-won through knowledge and experience.

Perhaps the Enchantress is about destruction, but she is also about creation. Autumn is when many plants die back and go to seed, of course, but what is more creative than a seed? Just like that, the Enchantress is concerned with what is underneath, what is inside, what is down there in the darkness. And she’s not afraid to explore it.

I believed until quite recently that I wanted to stay forever young - and of course a part of me will always wish that. As I mentioned in a previous note, younger bodies are generally more resilient and compliant, and who wouldn’t want to keep hold of that? And there’s the excitement of having your whole life ahead of you. But now I have half my life behind me, the part I’m looking forward to doesn’t seem any less exciting.

So, on my 40th birthday, what do I want? Only the things every woman wants when she transitions from the Mother archetype to the Enchantress.

Less stress. Less pressure. Less bullshit.

More adventure. More passion. More sleep (hell, yeah). More authenticity.

More enchantment.

Liminally yours,

K