My fabulous mentor is a woman of a certain age. She lives in California in a wonderful retirement community designed Julia Morgan (swoon!). She’s a former seminary president and professor. The people who live in her community have been ministers and professors. It’s a lively bunch — someday I’ll write about the way they’re organized.

But my friend has a group of women who have gathered first casually in friendship, but then formally in the expressed intention “to help each other into the light.”

They’ve done their paperwork and their planning. Now they’re doing something better. They’re building up memories: treasured times when they laugh and eat; good times they can recall when they are easing out of life.

These are good women, earnest and concerned. They do good work and good works. They’re involved in their communities, both in leadership roles and as worker bees. They’re living their lives to the fullest and helping others to do the same. My own dear friend, paints and swims and makes the most laser-like assessments of where the world goes askew. And she usually has a reasoned, yet wildly creative, suggestion about which direction to start working to make life better.

But through it all, she laughs and cries and paints the wonderful and amazing paintings. Her friends do amazing things as well. Really, amazing things. Daring, wonderful, not your father’s grandma kinda things. Wild Women Live Great Lives. They’re the mentors we all need.

One of my favorite stories was of a group outing to a discount shoe store. There they were, distinguished women spanning the decades from 45-80, trying on heels and platforms and thigh high boots and laughing their asses off. If that’s not changing their world, I have no idea what is!