The beginning of the beginning: a birthday request from me to you
Help me dig deeper into the meanings of forty
Hi, friends,
Bit of a change of pace this week. I’m turning forty next week—a milestone people seem to dread, but I am pumped. In a way I can’t quite explain, I feel I’ve been waiting to turn forty my whole life.
Plenty of spiritual traditions bear evidence of the power of forty:
Muhammad was forty when the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him he was God’s chosen prophet.
According to the Quran, forty is the age at which a person reaches maturity.
The Hebrew Bible is full of forties. To name a few: rain falls for forty days and forty nights during the Flood, and Moses spends three periods of forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai. When forty appears in Jewish scripture, it’s often used to suggest a passage of time that separates two epochs. It’s a threshold number, in other words.
Forty was traditionally the minimum age required before a person was allowed to study kabbalah.
Forty is an established period of testing and trial in the Christian tradition. Jesus spent forty days and forty nights fasting in the desert before he was tempted by Satan. And that’s why Lent lasts forty days.
Forty weeks is the length of the average pregnancy—meaning, forty is right there in the time it takes to grow a human.
And to bring it back to my beloved female mystics: many of their visions and mystical experiences seem to have begun at or just after the age of forty. Margery Kempe was forty when she made her husband agree to a life of celibacy (long story) and embarked on a life of pilgrimage. Hildegard of Bingen was “forty-two years and seven months old” when she received a vision from God telling her to write. She writes: “Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as the sun warms anything its rays touch.” And Hilma af Klint was forty-four when she broke away from her classical training and started to paint visions she had channeled from the otherworld
And I know this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, here’s a little birthday request—because in this moment of stock-taking, I find this village of readers is one of the things I cherish most, and I want to know you more.
If you’ve already turned forty, please click “comment” and tell me about it. I want to hear whether it felt this powerful to you, too. I want to know if your life blossomed in unexpected ways. I want to know if it was an anticlimax or a slow burn or whatever it felt like to you.
And whether you’re forty or not, please share any more insights I might have missed about the deep resonance of forty.
Thank you all for being with me on the journey to here. I can’t quite explain it, but I feel it’s all just about to begin.
Love,
xx Ellie
' Maybe it's just the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man, I don't know who I am, but life is for learning' Joni Mitchell, Woodstock.
40 in many ways has felt like a staggered coming of age: no big party in lockdown, a breakup, but then, starting an MA which also has made me feel like I'm finally 'begining'. I've just turned 43, and after a weepy pre-birthday week, I found myself writing the lyric: ' You stay in bed to weep at it all, but you don't feel broken, you feel wise and new '. Not high poetry, but the flavour of it. I feel so much more connected to what matters these days, it's very sustaining, even in the hard bits.
I also really feel humanity is at a new beginning, we must be, because we're at and ending, and they are the same thing.
Here's one from the Confucian Analects:
The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I found my balance [/stood firm]. At forty, I was free from doubts [about myself]. At fifty, I understood what Heaven intended me to do. At sixty, I was attuned to what I heard. At seventy, I followed what my heart desired without overstepping the line”
Big hug and good luck!