I Am Beautiful, ELDER

While sitting beside an ancient beech tree, the author questions: "Why am I looked upon as vulgar and shameful, while time renders you, a tree, increasingly more beautiful? We have both developed folds in our skin and gnarls in our limbs."

Utilizing her signature tapestry of nature-based symbology and arts-based practices, she invites us to transform our self-perception of aging: Elderly implies degradation and decay; Elder acknowledges the wisdom gained through life experience.

We humans are storytellers. We express our memories and aspirations through our tales, written, spoken, danced, painted, or sung. We are hopeful for witnesses, for those our love stories, our formulas for resilience, and our dreams remembered, will inspire and guide.

Women, silenced in Western patriarchal cultures, have swallowed their narratives. They have ingested the cultural mantra: Your voice does not matter. All women share some degree of silencing. Elder women are additionally unseen: Invisible and mute in a world where feminine beauty is ephemeral and gifted only to the young, aging women attempt to reclaim this fleeting treasure.

This book, an inspirational offering to Elder women (and to the young women they will inspire), may provide an antidote to the Western patriarchal perspective that deems them irrelevant.

Arts-based practices (dance movement, journaling, ritual, visual art, storytelling, and music) are within this volume, described for both individual and group application. The historical silencing of women is explored both as it applies to culture and to gender binarism.

I Am Beautiful Elder: Transformative Practices for Wise Women has been described as an alchemical blending of poetry, inspirational practices, biographical narratives, and social psychology.