You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

_Mary Oliver
 

If we cannot redefine the illusions of misogyny, youth culture and the mirror surface of consumer advertising, we will misunderstand that each mature woman holds within her a strident reality, a voice and an unequivocal life.

 

The women who understand love and grief, the realm of imperfection, who hold life with a tenderness, whose narratives are at times inconvenient, and whose intellect and sensuality has shifted with experience, are at once essentially knowledgeable, talented, mortal and remarkable.

 

As Susan Sontag suggests in The Double Standard of Aging, 'Women should tell the truth.’.