This short book is, before anything else, a celebration of the Seasoned Woman. She is a treasure of wisdom and grace who needs to be observed for her beauty and for the abundance of sagacity and benevolence she has quietly demonstrated to those willing to open their eyes and observe. It is she and her students who have kept humanity's careening ship, often manned by drunken sailors, afloat.
It is she who has historically been most responsible for the proper nurturing of the hearts, minds, and spirits of both males and females as they have grown and evolved in a world fraught with physical, intellectual, and moral dangers.
Of course, the book generalizes. Not every word applies to every seasoned female on the planet. But the model and the true examples are familiar to all of us because the Seasoned Woman has been our mother, grandmother, sister, lover, or friend.
We are arguably living in the most dangerous time in human history. We are destroying the earth that sustains us, ignoring the pollutants and microbes that may decimate us, building the machines that have the capability to extinct us, and reveling in the societal and political animosities that harden our hearts and souls to it all.
Frankly, most of this is the legacy of a ubiquitous succession of patriarchies that have produced a rather prickly world for most of it's human inhabitants and an existentially dangerous world for all of us.
So now, in a time when women of all ages are asserting themselves with increasing power and are being listened to in ways that are long overdue, this short book offers a heartfelt, often poetic celebration of who the Seasoned Woman has been and is and the place she ought to take in our hearts, minds, and spirits - and the exigencies of our daily lives.
