Where the Desert Meets the Sea

I have been home for a few weeks now, and I still wake up some mornings expecting the sound of the Atlantic.

For most of October, I was in Namibia with a circle of Silver Sirens, hosting our very first international retreat. We called it Embracing Elderhood, Reclaiming the Honour of Elderhood. I had dreamed about it for years, planned it for months, and worried about it — in the small, ungenerous hours — more than I would like to admit. Would the women come? Would the programme hold? Would I, a Nigerian Australian woman who has spent most of her life away from the continent, be able to bring them to Africa with any real honour?

They came. It held. And Africa, as it turns out, did not need me to bring anybody anywhere. She simply opened the door.

We stayed in Swakopmund, a small town where the Namib Desert runs straight down into the sea. I cannot tell you what it does to a person to stand on a beach with dunes at her back and cold ocean at her feet. Two things that should not meet, meeting. Sand and water, dry and wet, ancient and endlessly new, holding the same line without either one giving way.

I stood there on the first morning and thought: that is elderhood. That is what we are trying to learn. How to hold the life we have lived and the life still coming in the same body, without one swallowing the other.

Every morning began the same way. Before breakfast, before conversation, before anybody could check their phone, each woman drew one of our Elderhood Cards — twenty-eight African proverbs, each with a small musing and a gentle practice. I watched women who had never met a week earlier share their cards in our morning check-ins. Some laughed. Some went very quiet. One woman drew "You cannot cross a river without getting wet" on the hardest morning of the week, and simply held the card against her chest for a long time.

Then we worked. Three mornings of workshops: purposeful elderhood, befriending our shadows, and meeting death.

I want to tell you about the death day, because it was the one the women were most nervous about, and the one they talked about most afterwards.

We do not talk about dying in the West. We talk around it. We use soft words, change the subject, and leave it to the professionals. But you cannot speak honestly about elderhood without speaking about its end. An elder is, among other things, a woman who has made her peace with the fact that her time is not unlimited — and who has decided, because of that, to spend it well.

In our very first workshop, we were asked a simple question: when you think of death, what is the first word that comes to you? Around the circle, the answers came softly — lost, fear, the unknown. Every one of them honest. Then it was my turn, and I said, "Yippee." Earth time is over.

A beat of silence, then the room fell out laughing. But I meant every syllable. I have never been afraid of death, any more than I have been afraid of ageing. My faith tells me that when this earth time ends, I am going back home — and that knowledge does not make me careless with my life. It makes me free in it.

Nobody in that circle had to share my beliefs, and plenty did not. But something loosened when fear and joy were spoken aloud in the same room. On the day of death, we sat with all of it. We named our fears. We talked about what we want to leave behind, and what we want to set down before we go. There were tears, of course. There was also a great deal of laughter. It turns out that when you stop running from death, you have so much more energy left for living.

The retreat was never meant to stay inside the hotel.

We visited Mondesa, the township on the edge of Swakopmund, and that afternoon rearranged something in me. We met Johanna Hill, whose soup kitchen feeds around four hundred children a day. Four hundred. Every day. Out of very little except determination and love and the conviction that a child should not go to bed hungry while there is anything at all in the pot.

I have met many elders in my life. Johanna is one of the real ones. Nobody gave her a title. The community simply recognised what she was, because of what she did.

I came home certain that Silver Sirens could not simply admire her and fly away. So we have formally partnered with the Johanna Hill Soup Kitchen, and every cent of profit from our limited-edition Elderhood Series goes straight to her kitchen. It is a small thing, measured against four hundred children. But little by little, as another of our cards says, the bird builds its nest.

We also welcomed two honorary Silver Sirens into our community — Professor Ellen Namhila and Janet, both from the University of Namibia, who joined us at our welcome dinner and reminded us that elderhood looks different in every culture, and is honoured in some far more than in others.

Here is what I keep coming back to.

In Australia, I spend a great deal of my energy arguing that older women matter. I write about it, speak about it, and build whole events around it. In Namibia, I did not have to argue. I watched it. I watched how people greeted the older women in our group. I watched how a room shifted when an older person spoke. I watched women in their sixties and seventies — women who, at home, are so often edited out of the picture — walk a little taller with every passing day.

We went to Africa to talk about elderhood. Africa simply showed us what it looks like.

I came home tired, sun-kissed, and full. And more committed than ever to my pledge—to keep training every day to become the kind of elder that Johanna already is.

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

This November, the Silver Sirens community is practising gratitude together every day for the whole month, and I couldn't have asked for better timing. It has been the kind of week that tests whatever you have built. When I opened my eyes some mornings, my first thought was a list of what had gone wrong, what was still undone and what I was carrying.

So I leaned into the practice. Each day I stopped long enough to name what I was grateful for. It was rarely the grand things. More often it was the small, specific, easily missed ones: a kind message arriving at exactly the right moment, my warm bed, another peaceful day, a conversation that left me lighter than it found me. Some days, gratitude arrived before I even looked for it. On the other days I had to search, and the searching turned out to be the practice.

What has surprised me is how different it feels to do this alongside other women. Gratitude is often treated as a private discipline. Practising it in community, I have watched it become something shared. Each day I read what other women have noticed, and it reminds me what to look for. It also reminds me that none of us is carrying her week alone.

It did not fix the week. It saw me through it.