Success is a manifold and changing thing. When women embrace their own ways -- their ways of seeing and attempting to influence the realities around them, their norms of what is sacred, their seasons -- they create lives that are varied, abundant, fruitful, and at day's end rich in wisdom and peace. Sabbath lives. In honoring what makes them women, they transform the world around them.
I began to suspect that achievement could take a form uniquely as a woman . . . and that it might contribute something of singular and irreplaceable value to the culture in which I live.
A successful writer and a committed feminist, at forty, Kathleen Hirsch suddenly finds herself at odds with the life she has constructed, restless and longing for a nameless "something more." Unable to trek to Tibet or retreat to a cabin in the woods, she enters a long season of reflection in the midst of her everyday life. How, she begins to ask, can busy women's lives be more spiritually alive and whole? How, in our most productive years, can we reclaim what we sacrificed in the earlier struggle for success? Hirsch looks back to the defining friendship of her young adult years and examines the very different choices she and her best friend, a poet, have made. A series of unexpected losses and the long-awaited birth of a child, all in a year's time, deepen her probing. Her search gradually impels her to seek out a range of remarkable spiritually and socially attuned women who are consciously trying to live more balanced and integrated lives. They lead her to conclusions that will inspire many women who at midlife are seeking a deeper and more abiding wholeness.
