Skye Leroux

“If I’m the light, what are you guys?” Nessa said with a sniffle. “I’m the punishment that fits the crime.” Harriett returned to her work. “Jo is the rage that burns everything down. Nessa will have to talk to the dead girls’ mothers. But we’ll all have our parts to play.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Change

“This role of the elder woman as visionary isn’t always an active, “out there” role; sometimes it’s associated with a quieter, more inward-looking aspect of elderhood — perhaps a later life stage, in which she has withdrawn to the solitude and darkness of her symbolic cave, in preparation for her impending death. I think of such elders — the ones we generally don’t know, or have forgotten, precisely because they no longer choose to be seen by the wider culture (though they are often very visible to their family and their community) — as sages. These old women have left their strivings behind, and in the clarity of all that not-doing, they’ve made room for the space in which to cultivate deep vision, insight, and wisdom.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

“Women bring life into the world. To denigrate women is to degrade life itself. There must be equality, not domination. Harmony, not hierarchy. Compassion, not violence. Women must be cherished as we cherish this world that sustains us. We had a Mother once, but She is gone. Returned to the earth that birthed Her. But Her eternal Wisdom lives on. Nourished by it, we too shall bud and bear fruit. In death, we shall return to the earth and live on only in our children. We possess no soul to be redeemed, or judged, or measured. There can be no afterlife, no heavenly authority. We are enough. In our opposites, we are complete.”
― Nikki Marmery, Lilith

“The elder woman who has come to understand the nature of her own journey through life isn’t easily disheartened or daunted by the challenges of the world around her. She’s been around for long enough, and survived enough troubles and traumas, that she’s unlikely to be shocked or overwhelmed by the crises and conflicts that exist in the world around her. She’s seen how easy it is for things to fall apart, but she has also experienced renewal, and she knows how to engage in that necessary work of reimagining better ways of being and living in a troubled world. That’s why it’s so important that, as elder women, we find our own unique way of expressing our own unique gift, our own unique brand of hagitude — because one of the more important of our roles is to encourage the kind of imagination which serves all life on this planet. The elder woman — not only because of her age, but her experience and deep vision — can see ahead; she can predict what might happen and what might go wrong. But, more importantly, her visionary skills can help her to work out how to help put things right again, and how to restore the balance, because in almost all old wisdom traditions around the world, elders act as a living bridge between the visible world and the “unseen” realms — the Otherworld, in whatever ways they might conceive of it.”
― Sharon Blackie, Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life