Lines in the Quietening

Fall - Week 41 - On the Silence of Aging

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Last week I wrote about learning to burn with the aspens, about finding the courage to blaze without apology. About embracing peak as performance, as honesty, as the fullest expression of what we are. I meant every word. But this week, standing at the mirror in unforgiving morning light, I’m confronted with a different truth about peak. One the aspens don’t have to reckon with.

Their glory and their ending arrive together, perfectly timed. But here I stand, and the mirror tells a different story than the fire in my chest.

I trace the lines that bracket my mouth. They weren’t there five years ago. Or perhaps they were, but faint enough to be deniable, to be erased with the right expression or the right light or the simple act of looking away. Now they stay. They deepen. The skin at my jawline has begun its slow migration south, obeying gravity’s patient insistence. The texture has changed too. No longer that smooth drum-tightness but something softer, more giving. More honest, maybe. More like surrender. Aging does this to beauty. Not all at once, but in increments you can track with your fingertips.

This is the top, I think. The crest of the hill. Not the summit I imagined. No moment of arrival, no sense of triumph. But simply the place where the path stops climbing and begins, imperceptibly at first, to descend. The aspens turn gold and then release. But I turned fifty in December, and there will be no spring reversal. Only more lines, more softening, more loosening. Only what comes next, which I can’t see yet around the corner.

The cottonwoods along Lefthand Creek are dropping their leaves now, the gold fading to brown, the branches revealing themselves. I see them when I go to the horses, this small copse in its quietening, and I feel a kinship that has nothing to do with burning bright. The aspens in the mountains had their moment. The traffic came, the cameras clicked, the wonder was witnessed. Now the cottonwoods by the creek stand in their own essential quiet, preparing for winter. And I stand at my mirror, watching my face prepare for its own kind of bareness. The stripping away of what was, the exposure of what remains.

I have said all the right things to myself. That aging is a privilege denied to many. That these lines are evidence of laughter, of fifty years of squinting into sunlight and crying and recovering and living fully. That beauty culture is a trap, that youth worship is patriarchal harm, that I contain multitudes beyond the architecture of my face. I believe these things. I do. And yet.

And yet when I look in the mirror, I see more of a stranger housing my familiar consciousness. I am still me inside. Still the girl who was twenty, thirty, forty, but the face that meets the world has shifted, has changed the terms of engagement. There’s a grief in this that I wasn’t prepared for. A grief that isn’t about loss but about transformation. The grief of becoming unrecognizable to yourself.

Near the creek, the grasses stand in shades of gold and rust, already half-asleep. I pass them each early morning where I ride my horse in October’s chill. They catch the light differently now, not green and vital but burnished, papery, done. I have flowers at home still, a few late bloomers I’m tending. But the wild grasses know better. They’ve already let go.

The world sees me differently now. I watch it happen in small increments: the invisibility that creeps in at the edges, the way certain kinds of attention have evaporated like morning dew. This too is supposedly something I should celebrate. Freedom from the male gaze, liberation from objectification. And perhaps it is. But right now, standing here in this threshold moment, I feel only the loss. I know what I’m supposed to feel, that grace and acceptance everyone writes about, the courage of letting go. But what I actually feel is harder: the creeping suspicion that I’ve tipped over the edge. That the blaze might be behind me and I missed it somehow, didn’t recognize it for what it was. That I’m watching the beginning of something I can’t reverse.

And here’s what makes it harder: we don’t talk about this. Not really. Not honestly. Women my age are supposed to have this figured out by now, to have found that grace, that wisdom. So we smile and say the right things and suffer this particular grief alone, each of us at our own mirror, each of us thinking we’re the only one who hasn’t learned to accept it yet. The silence around this particular grief is its own kind of invisibility.

The geese are gathering over Dodds lake, their haunting calls filling the crisp air. At the creek crossing, the cottonwoods stand quieter each day, their leaves scattered on the ground. Everything knows what to do with the changing season. The ancient instructions, the internal compass. But I have no map for this particular territory. No wisdom that feels true in my body. Only platitudes that bounce off the surface of my struggle.

Is there grace in this? Everyone says there must be. Grace in aging, grace in accepting, grace in surrendering to time’s inevitable work. But I right now I cannot find it yet. I am still in the witnessing, the daily confrontation with change. I am still standing at the mirror, tracing the deepening grooves beside my mouth, watching my face reveal time’s passage,

Maybe the grace comes later. Maybe it comes after months or years of standing here, of bearing witness. Or maybe grace isn’t the point at all. Maybe the point is simply this: I am here. Still riding out to the horses. Still standing at the mirror. Still feeling the full weight of this transformation without looking away. That’s not peace. But it’s not running away. And perhaps that’s where something begins. Not yet in finding the answer, but in the willingness to stay.

---

—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane