Goddesses in Older Women by Jean Shinoda Bolen M.D

Author:Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

HEALING LAUGHTER

Healing laughter is a relief from tension and an expression of joy and hilarity. Bawdy humor is juicy humor that is also an earthy and sexual commentary about human nature, appetites, and foibles. At its most nurturing—which humor can be—there is an afterglow of good feeling. In the shared laughter, there is a sense of commonality about vulnerabilities and strengths. In making ribald comments or responding to them with laughter, women are acknowledging their sexuality and sexual experience and also revealing the sexual vanities or habits or proclivities of men, which is what men fear most.

To be Baubo/Uzume, a postmenopausal woman has to live in her aging body comfortably and unself-consciously. Her sexual energy is a component of her zest and vitality. With Baubo as an inspiration, she refuses to stop being herself just because she is older: she is a sensual, sexy woman who laughs and dances. Good humor and experience become enhancements to earthy sex. It would be in the tradition of Baubo to take up belly dancing after fifty. In fact, many celebrated belly dancers are postmenopausal women.

It may seem a stretch to appreciate Baubo as an archetype of wisdom, but she is. Hers may be a wisdom that only women can appreciate because she grows out of the numerous inelegant though profoundly important body experiences we have had from the onset of menstruation through pregnancy and menopause. In laughing or joking about what women go through biologically, we can be bawdy Bau-bos. This sharing often leads to more sensitive and serious talk about sexual experiences, miscarriages, abortions, infertility, and loss. In the telling, we are metaphorically lifting our skirts and revealing our vulnerable underside and our source of strength. Each woman’s story becomes a mirror for another woman to see herself and her resiliency. In sharing the pain and laughter, we go through these transitions and experience the healing power of humor, wisely coming to the conclusion that “such is life.”

Baubo is all that remained in Greek mythology of this bawdy aspect of the Great Goddess. When Baubo lifted her skirts and revealed her naked body to Demeter, she revealed a body that once had been a nubile maiden, and then was a full-breasted woman, and now, with her thinning pubic hair and sagging breasts, was the body of a crone. Each phase is part of a cycle, an expression of the dance of life. When we remember our divinity and not just our mortality, we know that everything that happens is part of life, and we are part of a divine dance. The danger of being a mortal is forgetting this. Demeter, in her identity as a human woman, was alone with her sorrow until Baubo raised her skirt and made her laugh. Maybe it helped Demeter put her loss in perspective, or perhaps she was reminded of the creative and sexual power that she had as a woman and a goddess of fertility. Baubo had lost her youth, her looks, and was past

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