The Wholeness of Our Cycles
This reflection is written by researcher and Grief Coach, Monica O’Connell
Maiden. Mother. Crone. Maiden. Mother. Crone. The magical threes of fairy tales, archetypes, and business PowerPoints. One, two, three. Spring, summer, winter. Maiden, mother crone. I am in an age (not at an age, like a number, but in, like a room I’m just discovering, or a new part of a cycle I’m traveling) where I feel full, alert, ripe with potential, and capable of well-timed movement. I’m a forgotten stream, happily flowing through the under commons, but poised to burst forth with power and beauty any time. I am, here in this fifth decade of mine, inhabiting some new archetype that it not represented within the linear inevitability of the so-called Triple Goddess. Perhaps my silvery, yet rosy-cheeked archetype lives in the deep Autumn woods left apparently forgotten by Tri-G. It makes sense, for I often feel most alive that time of year, wandering through my native Georgia oak and pine forests, inhaling the rot of the forest floor and gazing in awe at the russets and golds above.
The concept of the so-called Triple Goddess was first popularized by Robert Graves in his 1948 book with the telling title The White Goddess. The neatly packaged triumvirate is compelling— the powerful archetypes to which Graves points are ancient, with culturally specific versions emerging and evolving across time, everywhere there continue to be women. For me though, the model stands as a set of reminders: look for what gets left out, and refuse models of being that would refuse to see or try to contain your wholeness.
Graves hoped to instrumentalize our collective energies by linking them to concepts useful to the European, patriarchal, capitalist project: male pleasure and gaze, fertility, domestic work and so forth. When women had nothing left to offer this system, they were demonized as bitter, or wicked crones. We know the sacred power and wisdom of the crone, just like we know the power of our own cycles. But it is easy to find ourselves living stories that do not honor the fullness and wisdom we contain but that instead, keep us small and at times, fearful.
I no longer menstruate. For much of the time that I did, I understood and lived it as something to be dreaded, as an inconvenience I had to endure. I did what I could to hide and minimize it. I suffered embarrassment that added insult to the injury of side-splitting cramps. By focusing only on the painful “fall season” of my luteal PMS and the dramatic crimson winters of my always heavy periods, I inhabited only a small part of my menstrual cycle story. Each season of our cycle helps us experience ourselves, through our goddess bodies, as whole but always in process and embedded within the larger processes and cycles of nature.
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In her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, author Jenny Odell uses bioregionalism as a way to remind us to honor the specificity of our own time and place and, I would add, our own cycles and our own bodies. Quoting Giordana Nanni she says that Europeans carried “the four seasons with them, superimposing them on local seasons wherever they went around the globe.” The ‘fourness’ of the model reminds us of the wholeness of the yearly (or menstrual) cycle, but “most places [or bodies] do not have four seasons. Instead, each has a series of stages corresponding to the ecological character of that specific place.”
The four season model keeps the wholeness of the circle intact. Understanding our cycles as moving through seasons releases us from limiting and limited understandings of “period as only ___ (painful, infuriating, hella inconvenient, or even unnecessary). But we should also feel encouraged to honor the unique characteristics of our own seasons. I remember my own follicular phases as usually brief but nearly manic in their joyful physicality. Always in search of an athlete’s physique, I regret not appreciating the ways my body filled out and slowed down during ovulation. I love all of my seasons and microclimates now. I pay such close attention to them in fact, that I can feel a kind of shadow cycle as it continues to move across and through my body. In a happy alignment with the freshness of Georgia’s early spring, this intelligence is demanding wandering wonder-filled walks, lots of lettuces, asparagus, and snap peas, and cool mint tea.
Maiden, mother, crone. I no longer menstruate. Maidenhood is long gone. I have no biological children and so by many definitions (or judgements) am no mother, even as my creativity births newness into existence daily. I have not yet earned the right to step into the crone archetype but I look forward to fully inhabiting the deep wisdom she promises. No, we need a fourth, a quadruple goddess model, to open the wholeness of womanhood. But how to represent her? By what name shall we know them? They can’t reference violent social hierarchies (mistress, gentlewoman). They must be something elegant, sovereign, and a bit feral. Or at least that is how I am experiencing her today.
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