50th birthday pilgrimage
This past spring I spent my 50th birthday on a sacred menopausal pilgrimage to Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) in the Caribbean Sea of Mexico. I had wanted to do something special for this birthday, and one day Isla Mujeres gently whispered to me.
Isla Mujeres was a sacred site for the Mayan moon and fertility Goddess Ix Chel and has temple ruins on a dramatic and energetically potent point of land jutting into the sea, with a clear view of moon rises over the eastern horizon. It was a healing sanctuary for women and it’s said that only women inhabited the island, including Ix Chel’s priestesses.
Mayan women would make massive pilgrimages over the water to Isla Mujeres and nearby Cozumel for sacred rites of passages in their lives, such as menarche, fertility and mothering, and menopause. They were said to sleep by the sea and have oracular visions and dreams.
So on my birthday I went to the temple site early in the morning, at sunrise, and had a gorgeous ritual for myself. I crowned myself with a crystal tiara, sang to the sea, and made offerings.
I released some of the offerings to the sea, releasing my younger self, my cycling years, all my unlived dreams, and celebrated my lived dreams and my future ahead. One of the things I offered was the natural henna hair dye powder I’d been using to dye my hair. I decided to embrace my aging, to allow the shimmery silver strands to grow out. I’ve earned it! I will no longer continue to try looking young.
The trip was like a dreamy honeymoon just for me, a marriage with the newly crowned Queen in me. I also had a potent dream that I was preparing for a wedding, but I was trying on a used and dirty traditional white bridal gown I had found at a thrift store. In the dream I realized how awful this felt, and went out to get a new, modern one, silvery and smooth like a selkie skin, that fit me better. In the dream there was no awareness or presence of a groom I was marrying.
I had such a feeling of liberation, traveling alone, so far from everyday life, no one could ask anything of me, I could do whatever I wanted. I rose early and met the sunrise on the beach, or I slept in and nested in my Airbnb all day with no care in the world, drifting and dreaming by the sea. The fruit of that was the new bliss and visioning that playfully rose up like champagne bubbles.
It all felt like a radical act of protest to do this, and of that I am very proud.