You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the complexities of aging, self-discovery, and the search for deeper meaning in life.
In this quote, Sue Monk Kidd explores the emotional turmoil and profound thoughts that accompany the journey of becoming an older woman. She articulates feelings of betrayal by her body, the eerie stillness in her creative process, and a longing for unexplored potential, highlighting a desire to simplify and redefine life in search of a new meaning, which resonates with anyone experiencing transitions in life.
Themes
AgingSelf-DiscoveryMeaningCreativityTransition
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on the challenges of aging at a women's conference.
More from Sue Monk Kidd
All quotes →I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
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Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
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Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
Sue Monk KiddRead
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
Sue Monk KiddRead
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