Betty Friedman Fountain of Age | Powerful Goddess Portraits

Age is an issue of mind over matter.

If you don’t mind, it does’t matter.

Mark Twain

From Betty Friedan’s classic “The Fountain of Age”:

The insistence on seeing themselves as young, the denial of age, is the crux of psychological troubles in older men and women. The changes that age brings are so basic and so numerous that sometimes old defenses and solutions no longer silence the new kinds of anxieties that come with them.

However, even in tasks that demand the muscular strength easier to come by in youth, qualities that may emerge with age–wisdom born of experience, freedom from youthful competitive compassion, cooperation, empathy–can more than compensate for whatever losses that come with age. The real liberation of age is the amazing lightness and solidity of no longer feeling the need to prove oneself to be the best, to outdo the others, to compete–and of being able to fail.

Powerful Goddess Gina Bonati shares, “I am so pleased with what my body is doing in your pictures. It is a good, lithe, and strong dancer’s body I thought i had lost! I am discovering dance again and identify with what I see–the truth that I see and the truth that I sometimes do not see. Sometimes it is buried, sometimes invisible, sometimes it has seemingly died. But as these photographs show me, not yet, and maybe, just maybe, not ever.”

Click on “Leave a Comment” (above left) to tell us how you’ve gotten better with age.