E58: The Spiritual Domain of Midlife

Katie: Welcome to the "7 Domains of Women's Health." I'm your series co-host, Katie Ward, and I'm here today with Kirtly Parker Jones. And if you've been listening, you know we're exploring the 7 Domains of Midlife.

If this is your first in the series, go back and catch the physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, and environmental domains as well. We've had lots of great conversations and lots of wonderful information to share.

Today, we're going to talk about the spiritual domain. And maybe first I should talk about what I mean by that, because when I first hear spiritual, I think of a specific religion, and I think that that makes sense.

Church is often where we encounter really powerful feelings of being connected to each other and being connected to a greater purpose, and it helps us make sense of important transitions in life through ritual, and tradition, and community.

For me, although I grew up in a very devout household, as an adult, organized religion is not part of my life. So I tend to think of spirituality in more broad, kind of anthropological observational terms. And so, from that perspective, I think spiritual practices are any things that connect us to our past and to each other.

And midlife, more than menopause specifically, is a time in life when we're often caring for and maybe even losing our parents, and it's a transition of becoming an elder in our families and in our communities. Going through those transitions can be really a time when we start to connect to those traditions, and it's something that grounds us, and maybe they even become more salient.

So I think the spiritual domain of menopause, of midlife is an important one to consider.

There are a lot of transitions that may send us looking for a familiar spiritual practice. For instance, rules about how do you bury someone who you've lost, or mark the occasion of a wedding or a new baby.

Kirtly, what's your experience been with spirituality in the menopause and midlife?

Kirtly: Although women in midlife are very, very busy, they don't have usually infants in the house. Maybe grandbabies, but it does offer them a little bit of a sense of thinking beyond themselves, or listening to their own heartbeat and how it connects with something bigger.

Certainly, for many women who have a strong religious foundation, they become more active in their church. So when you look at the ladies who are doing a lot of the work in a church, it's often women in midlife or a little bit later.

For me, I was not raised in any religious tradition. I think I was raised in a spiritual tradition, that the biological and geological world was amazing, and it created in me a spiritual sense.

In my 40s and 50s, I started looking for some kind of framework in which to be able to use words. So you can feel awe, you can feel connected to something, but it's helpful if you have the foundation of a practice that has words to it. And so I started looking for some kind of practice that had words that I could use for the feelings I had.

I can't say I found them, but I do . . . I'm going to quote Richard Rohr. Richard Rohr has a wonderful website. Although he's a Jesuit Catholic, he brings with him spiritual practices from all over the planet. But I'm going to quote him here. "Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our very feet. Every minute of our lives, a continuous sacrament."

I do believe that living on this planet, which may be the only little blue dot in the universe, is a continuous sacrament. And it makes me as a biologist . . . I'm a biophile. I remember going on a tour of a big religious community here in Salt Lake, and the young ladies who were giving me a tour asked me what my religious tradition was, and I said, "I'm a biologist." I don't think that really rang true to them, but they don't understand how biologists feel emotionally connected to the biological world. But I do think it's a continuous sacrament.

And for me, as I think about what might be hard times ahead, and certainly I have had some hard times behind, but that's being part of this biological continuum on our little planet that gives me great solace.

I can't look at anything that's growing without getting tearful, actually. It's so beautiful. So I trained as a molecular, cellular, and developmental biologist before I went to med school. And it's that training that was, to me, a religious training, a continuous sacrament.

Katie: I like that. I just had this wonderful global health trip to Rwanda, and I had what I would consider a very spiritual experience there that I wanted to share.

A colleague that I work with there gave me a gift. It's a basket. It's called a memory basket, and I wish you could see it on the podcast, but I'm going to try and describe it because radio is the most powerful visual medium, right?

So this is a traditional grass basket that women weave, and they make them in various sizes. And in Rwanda, they carry grain and potatoes and clothes and all kinds of stuff in these baskets, and they carry them on their heads.

But the memory basket is kind of like those dolls with a smaller one inside and a smaller one inside. And so this is just a series of smaller and smaller baskets, and it doesn't carry belongings. It carries memories. Each basket is identical to the bigger one. I think this set had five that ranged from large to teeny tiny.

I wrote her a thank you note and said, "I love nested things because they remind me of sort of that special time where the thing . . ." It's a little like you were saying with the cellular biology. This thing that just gives me this incredible joy.

There was a time in my life when I was pregnant and in my womb was my daughter, and in my daughter were her ovaries full of the primordial follicles that were going to become my grandchildren. And at the same time, there was a time when I spent nine months in my mother's ovaries, and she was in her mother.

So that idea of this continuous line of mothers and daughters where you're nested within each other, that is a thing that brings tears to my eyes. This sort of being able to look both backwards and forwards.

I think that's one of the really interesting things about midlife, is you're sort of in the middle of that chain where I can look back and remember the two previous generations, the baskets I was nested in, and also in this place where I'm seeing the baskets nested in me, my daughter. She doesn't have children yet, but the potential there for those children. It felt very much like this series of nested baskets.

Kirtly: Oh, that's so lovely.

Katie: Yeah, I can't say there's this intense meaning there, but I think it's the thing where, when you're looking for it, it's kind of all around you, these little moments that help connect you with the past and the future.

And plants probably the same way. You watch plants grow up and they're made of ingredients that were something else last year.

Kirtly: We are stardust.

Katie: Yes, we are.

Kirtly: We are golden. We are all made of stardust. Well, Katie, the molecular biologist in me will remind you that we carry, in our mitochondria . . . In every cell in our body are these little powerhouses that actually power our cells. And the DNA in our little powerhouses in our cells is our mother's mitochondrial DNA.

So mitochondrial DNA is different from the DNA that you have in your genome that makes you blonde or whatever. These are little powerhouses, and you carry your mother's and her mother's and Eve's mitochondrial DNA.

So it is this basket of energy that goes from mother to daughter to mother to daughter to mother to daughter. And it is a miraculous thing. A continuous sacrament.

Katie: A continuous sacrament. I like that a lot.

You were talking about looking for words to put to your spiritual needs, and I was thinking about the power. I think when I think about various spiritual practices, not necessarily the ones I participate in, but the ones I know about or think about, it's not just words, but it's movement and sound and dance.

And I think part of our connection, if you're looking for it just in words, it might be hard to find. But that ritual of dancing, standing, kneeling, praying, sharing music, sharing food, there are so many aspects to the things that connect us to each other.

Kirtly: Well, for me, it's religious choral music. It can bring me to tears reliably, listening to religious choral music. And there was a famous black choral musician, and he was a director of some very famous choirs, named . . . I think his name is Shaw. I think it was Robert Shaw. But he said, "The divine is found in the human voice and human voices together, because we sing. We sing together. And other animals may make noises, but they don't sing the way we do together."

Now, I am reading a book about sperm whales, and it could be that whales actually sing together. So I don't want to believe that only humans have singing that's meaningful.

But singing is profoundly, for me, a religious experience, listening to the human voice together. Not necessarily a rock band or hip hop. That's not going to do it for you.

Katie: Although I've had some pretty spiritual experiences at a good rock concert. Just saying.

Kirtly: Were there drugs involved, Katie?

Katie: No.

Kirtly: Alcohol? No.

Katie: Maybe a little. But that's a sacrament, too, isn't it?

Kirtly: It is. Of course. Alcohol is often used in sacraments. When we did the "7 Domains of Caffeine," in the Spiritual Domain of Caffeine, we said there really is no spiritual domain of caffeine, although that first cup of coffee, if it's made well, is quite yummy. But when we're talking about fluids that we consume that are related with religious, it's usually alcohol.

Katie: I think whatever your spiritual practices are, midlife is a time when you're sort of in the middle. You're neither the biggest basket or the smallest basket, and you have this perspective on the past and the future.

I think in others of our series, we've talked about how important movement and human connections are, and the ways that you connect with others to be the keeper of the contents of your basket.

And so whatever your joys are, whether it's praying or singing or dancing or rock concerts or family gatherings with traditions around that, I think midlife is really the time to tend to those and to listen and to look for those connections.

Kirtly: Absolutely. And it actually starts to be a topic of conversation when midlife women get together. So when I was 20 or 30, or even 40, if I got together over coffee or over wine on our deck with women my age, we didn't talk about our spiritual life. But now that we're past 50, it more often is a topic that women will share with each other as they are in midlife and beyond.

Katie: That's terrific. I probably need to have more conversations with people. But for me, it's those little moments of a shared connection.

Kirtly: Right. Your story of this memory baskets and the way it's woven in your mind, it was so lovely, and it'll be with me forever in my spiritual pocket.

Katie: I hope so.

Kirtly: Yeah.

Katie: Well, thank you so much for joining us for the Spiritual Domain of Midlife. Again, I'm Katie Ward, and I'm here with Kirtly Jones. I think we are wrapping up the "7 Domains of Midlife," Kirtly. Is that right?

Kirtly: We are. And I'm going to end with my "7 Domains of Midlife" haiku.

 

I am halfway done
Partly cooked, not yet perfect
Soon to be just right