Big Love

The act of reclaiming the phrase, sip by sip

Catching up with an old friend, he shared that after his divorce, he now only dated younger women. When asked why, he said it was because all the women his age were bitter.

I am his age. Therefore, I must be bitter.

To be bitter is to be “angry, hurt, or resentful because of one’s bad experiences or presumed mistreatment.” After a difficult separation I found myself feeling anger, hurt, and also some resentment. In truth bitterness.

Yet in our conversation, I became increasingly bitter over this exchange, for the generalization of women, and even at my friend’s own bitterness and unwillingness to take responsibility for his choices.

People can do whatever they want. My friend wants to date someone half his age? That is his business and midlife crisis.

To say that all women his age are bitter is just too convenient – too neat. And life and relationships are not that.

Later I remembered another definition for the word bitter. One I learned in a plant medicine class, it can also mean “having a sharp, pungent taste or smell, not sweet.” Bitter is one of the six tastes, in Ayurveda, which include: sweet, sour, salty, astringent, and pungent.

The Western diet is lacking in bitters, where sweet and salty tastes rule the land. Consuming herbs in tea can be a useful way to bring in their healing properties. To have a diet with bitters can benefit the body in the gut, digestion, and elimination. Chamomile tea for an upset stomach is a common use of a bitter tea to aid digestion. My favorite so far is mugwort.

So, I aim to become a bitter woman. To invite the healing properties of food as medicine and the bitter taste into my life, body, and mind.

Watch out world, bitter woman coming through.

(And as for my friend and our conversation, well, it ended in the quoting of a Rumi poem that summed it all up. I’m still waiting for him to meet me in the field.)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.
- Rumi