The Mother Tree is Calling

A Clearing in the Woods

I was standing in the jungle in Costa Rica when an unexpected revelation occurred.

My guide stopped walking and pointed to a tree so massive it seemed to hold the sky. The Ceiba, she said. The mother tree. Sacred to the Maya. One of the oldest living things in this forest.

Then she said something that ignited an immediate and unbounded connection with nature...like hugging a tree and becoming one with it. The .25 grams of Ghost mushrooms on board may have been doing their job, but so was nature.

Sometimes it looks like it’s dying. It droops and drops everything, every leaf, every sign of life. It goes so dormant you’d think it was done for. But it’s not dying. It’s gathering. And when it comes back, it comes back with a force that makes everything before it look like a rehearsal.

I stood there in the humid clean air and felt something shift in my heart.

She wasn’t just talking about the tree

I am a woman in my sixties. I hold a PhD in Transpersonal Psychology. I remained rooted while my life burned down around me, more than once. I have built businesses, taught graduate students, loved people through their toughest struggles and greatest triumphs, and spent the better part of four decades being extraordinarily happy and productive.

And somewhere in the middle of all that lived experience, I had a dose of reality that shook me to my core. Not a breakdown. Something more subtle: a voice that had been waiting patiently for the noise of my overstimulated life to die down, and finally, in a jungle, in the mystery, it could be heard saying.

You have had seasons of collapse, of dropping everything only to come back stronger and more alive. This is your third act, the last one before old age. The Mother Tree is coming into fullest expression, and it is fuuuuuukin awesome!

I had been living well. Building, contributing, creating, connecting. But I had not yet been living at my deepest expression, my fullest potential. There is a difference between a life that is very good, even excellent, and a life that is fully, unapologetically, spiritually on fire. I could feel the distance between where I was and where I was capable of being, as an invitation into my truest becoming.

What I did not want was to arrive at the end of these years, the last years of full vitality and creative fire, having played it safe. Having settled into comfort and complacency. Having given from obligation or habit rather than from genuine, aligned abundance.

This is the question I carried to Costa Rica:

Who do I become when I step intentionally into my fullest self, my most powerful expression of these wisdom years?

Our Western culture has a story about women in their sixties and seventies. It involves invisibility. Irrelevance. Graceful decline. It involves anti-aging creams and euphemisms like golden years, as though the only thing a woman can do with her accumulated wisdom, her hard-won authority, her decades of lived experience, is to age attractively and stop taking up so much space. Once her contribution of children and/or work life is complete, her value to the tribe diminishes considerably.

This story is a lie, built deliberately, over centuries, to manage the particular power that arrives in a woman when she finally stops pouring into things outside herself and starts inhabiting her own life. When she looks back at everything she has survived and created and realizes, with a clarity that can only come from having lived this long: I know a lot. I have earned a place at the head of the table. And I am just getting started.

There is even a name for what the culture does to us at this stage. Researchers call it the double standard of aging, documented across twenty-three countries, named by Susan Sontag more than fifty years ago, and still operating at full force today. Men grow distinguished. Women grow invisible. Men are granted gravitas as they age. Women are handed a graceful exit.

Indigenous cultures knew something different. They put their elders at the center, consulted them, elevated them, built community around their accumulated knowledge. The elder woman wasn’t someone to be managed. She was someone to be sought.

We have forgotten this. Or rather, we have been encouraged to forget it.

This publication exists to remember

I started working with sacred medicine, microdosing specifically, not because I was looking for a way to escape. I started because I had done enough personal growth (self-help), enough journaling, enough processing at the level of the mind, and something in me knew the work needed to go deeper. Into the body. Into the places that words can’t access.

What I found there, and what I have watched other women find, was not escape. It is excavation. A gentle, persistent illumination of everything that had been underneath the layers of living a high functioning life: the grief I hadn’t finished, the anger I hadn’t claimed, the woman I had quietly shelved while I was busy building a life worth living.

Microdosing doesn’t do the work. It lights the room so we can finally see what the work is.

That distinction matters. The medicine is perhaps ten percent of this journey. The other ninety is integration - the daily practice of weaving what gets illuminated into how you actually live. That integration is what these essays are about.

This is not a publication about drugs.

It is not a publication about aging gracefully, or finding yourself, or healing your inner child, or becoming at your best as you age.

It is a publication about power.

The power that has been accumulating underneath every role you’ve ever played, every season you’ve survived, everything you’ve created and released, every time you stood strong through the storm. Your power was never gone. It’s been gathering, until you cross the threshold from productive to sovereign.

The wisdom years are not a time to wither and go dormant. They are, if we are willing to do the work, the reanimation of the Mother Tree in all her glory.

I’m Dr. Andrea Howard. I’ll be writing here every week.

I’m glad you’re here.