Since it comes with the cosmology of being a woman and like you, I am a most brilliant and radiant vortex of spiralic wisdom, it will not be a surprise that my love story begins on Pluto. Well, not so much on Pluto, really, as with Pluto. On a visit three years ago, to the Smithsonian Space and Airflight Museum, I learned that Pluto which has, despite the fact that this little engine that could has been a part of our solar system for eons, has in fact, been downgraded from a full fledged planet of our solar system to a false planet. And, what’s the reason? It’s inability to clear away the debris from around its orbit. I pondered this fact as my husband was charging ahead into the next Jet Propulsion exhibit, and felt my own gravitational pull direct me toward Dorothy’s shiny red shoes.

Standing in front of the glass cabinet that displays remnants of Oz, I couldn’t’ shake the disruption that this new information about Pluto was sending through my own internal orbit. Though I joked about Pluto’s rejection, there was a kernel of recognition that would tag along with me throughout the rest of that day, and reappear when I arrived home.

It wasn’t until I sat down at my computer, that I realized my recognition and kinship with Pluto was two fold. Entering the mysterious cavern of Perimenopause and coming out into what Margaret Mead has called the Post Menopausal Zest, carries both the opportunity to clear away the debris that you’ve collected in your life, and the risk that you won’t recognize the planet you’ve become.

 But what was it about Pluto being demoted to a false planet that nibbled along the edges of my comfort over the next year? Yes, there was that nagging fear about having the rug pulled out from underneath my sense of how my universe was ordered, but simultaneously, there was the promise of something both foreign and hopeful: the birthing of a new self, or a forgotten self or maybe just a self. As a boomer raised on a curious diet of narcissism, co-dependence, self discovery and consumerism, this new Self is a divine partnership, an appointment for my authentic participation in co-operation with Something much bigger than my personal orbit.

This new Self demands a capital letter and is part of the challenge, the discomfort and the gift of both Pluto and Menopause, because I believe the search for a woman’s Self during Menopause winds through the path of ancient wisdom, prayer, nature and of course, the personal cosmology of our bodies. This is not the perfectly good self that we’ve spent thousands of hours and dollars on getting to know over the past decades, which is a wonderful self just not The Self that is connected to everything else, the knowable and the unknowable. I told you, it’s huge, like it’s a planet and there is nothing false about this Self.