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Aware or not, we are always engaged in a long conversation with time. That time that advances with us, side by side; the time we perceive as past, and also what we see in front of us.

In The Bow and the Lyre, the poet Octavio Paz tells us about how pre-Columbian cultures expressed the passing of time. Through arrival and farewell rites, they celebrated the death of one time and the birth of a new time, respectively. The Burial of Time stone, in the Anthropology Museum of Mexico, represents this ancient ritual: “Surrounded by skulls, lie the signs of the old time; from its remains, the new time emerges”.

Besides our mortal and finite human identity, two authors remind us of what is essentially the female mark.

In her classic Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes the female archetype as that which is viscerally connected to nature, that “instinctively knows when things should die and when they should live”.

Simone de Beauvoir reminded us that we are not born women: we become women. The authorship of the process of constructing female identity during middle age would, therefore, involve, with each generation, the choice and the definition of what should die and what should remain.