Elderhood – Passage To Joy

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022

Embracing the Crone

Exploring the Wise Mother or Crone Archetype through Art Therapy

It has been a joy exploring and embracing the Crone in the company of other women!

I made a very conscious decision from the start of these sessions to work intuitively and, mostly, to avoid the easy familiarity of words in the pieces I created. I hoped this might open up new insights, coming from that non-verbal interiority.

I’m not sure I had fully connected to the tree as a form of the Mother Goddess/ Wise Woman, though I already had a strong sense of the Goddess as deeply rooted in the earth, yet also connecting upwards and outwards into the universe. Nor had I come across the bear as Primal Mother as within Celtic tradition, something I want to explore further.

Looking back at what emerged for me over the four weeks, the aspects I most want to hold onto to guide me as I move forward are:

Continued focus on letting go and becoming.
Using my increased ability for self-compassion to enable me to uphold my necessary boundaries and direct my energies in a more focused way.
Acknowledging and working with those parts of me that need healing and allowing myself times of true solitude, quietness and rest.
As well as connecting to the wilds around me, accessing the wild within.
Embracing not being productive as a valid and valuable way of being.
Increasing acceptance and befriending of that which I cannot control.
The abiding awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.
The fire in my belly that fuels curiosity and the desire to explore and have adventures.

Alongside this deep-dive into my own relationship to the Crone, there were some delightful bonuses!

This is a time for healing those places that need it, a time to lean in to what fills your soul. It is time for the disintegration of that which binds.
Hildegard of Bingen
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I don’t think I had previously encountered Hildegard of Bingen; her vision, dating all the way back to C12th, delights me!

We are shapeshifting creatures, through and through. Shedding skin after skin, till finally we reach the one that will see us out. The skin that is fused to the bone, that will not shift and will not shake – the skin that contains the essence of everything we were ever going to become. The skin with hagitude.
Sharon Blackie
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I love this term ‘hagitude’, coined by Sharon Blackie, and look forward to reading her book Hagitude; reimagining the second half of life when it is published later this year. I also embrace that sense of moving closer to that skin that is fused to the bone . . . the essence of everything we were ever going to become.

As a record for myself of the learning of these four weeks, I am gathering together below what I posted on Facebook after each session.

Inner Wise Woman (week 1)

My first piece from my Wise Woman/Crone Art Therapy Group – so exciting and liberating to just let it flow.

There were no constraints as to medium and everyone came up with very different pieces from a 10 minute presentation/ meditation, with about 40 minutes to work in. The purpose of these sessions is exploration, not the creation of ‘works of art’!

I will write a much longer post on my blog after the 4-week course ends when I have steeped in all the perceptions.

But some key elements in this for me were:

the wise, old tree, with a very female base, roots both linking it deep into the earth and connecting to all that is;
the Crone’s waning crescent moon;
the tree as connection between grounding earth energy and ethereal sky/moon energy;
the upside down heart, containing power, wisdom, creativity, sexuality, femininity, motherly energy;
The green abundance may seem odd against the bare tree, but this represents the nurturing, green-fingered quality of the crone;
the sunflower represents hope; the basket, woven from the wisdom of the years, contains an abundant harvest.

Where I have come from and where I am going (week 2)

This week’s Crone Art Therapy session around “Where I’ve come from and am going” included a very word based symbolic image of a tree as a prompt. I responded by wanting to get away from words and also from obvious ‘representation’ to something much more deconstructed.

I felt drawn to rush outside to find some birch bark, as well as some heavier bark. There was something here about authenticity as a core value, as well as my deep connection to the wild (and the wild within), to nature.

I didn’t want a white background and the tissue gave me a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, something that underpins my life. And the gold in this and the ‘leaves’ seemed to represent my focus on joy.

If I had had copper wire, this would have formed the ‘roots’, but I used string. For me there was something about the important grounding of our roots, yet also how roots can form tangles that we need to explore and unravel.

The thicker bark represented the ‘hardening off’ of age, endurance, strength, but also the possibility of masked areas, linking to the shadowed area to the left, that which needs healing, grief.

The birch bark captures for me a sense of a protective layer that is also delicate and beautiful, and which can be peeled back to expose the softness and vibrant life beneath.

The ‘leaves’ are somewhat heart shapes, gilded, my precious heart-kin, the larger ones at the core representing Paul and Jessica. I feel truly blessed at this stage in my life by a sense of a genuinely heart-connected community of friends.

The ‘fruits’ are caught up in these ‘leaves’ of loving friendship, as they, together with the ability to find joy in the everyday and the richness of our natural environment, are my greatest blessings.

One of my fellow explorers saw in it a Spirit Bear, which I now also see. This is lovely, as it perfectly captures something of the ‘where I’m going’ part of the brief. These were just a few of the insights from a quick review of Bear symbolism:

“If the bear shows up in your life, it may also be time to take care of your own needs for healing, whether it’s at the physical, emotional, or spiritual level. . . Be sensitive to where you are at and reflect on where you would most need healing. You can call on the bear spirit guidance to direct your energy in a more conservative or focused way. . . Bear medicine emphasizes the importance of solitude, quiet time, rest. . . The spirit of the bear provides strong grounding forces.”

Personal Power and Authenticity – Unique Wise Mother (week 3)

Today’s Art Therapy session was for me like being wrapped in a warm embrace. There was a wonderful sense of tapping into self-compassion.

I rooted myself in the sacred space of the lake, one of my greatest teachers these last few years.

Having in my early thirties defined the purpose of life as learning to love in the broadest sense, the heart is central. At this time in my life, I seek to draw more on the wisdom of my heart than the intellectual processes of my mind.

I wrote some eighteen months ago ‘I want to be a lighthouse when I grow up!’, and this figure radiates and is surrounded by light. That light is also a reflection of the emphasis I have put on experiencing the world with joy. Interestingly, I didn’t see the prismatic quality of what I was seeing as a ‘gold’ paper until I photographed it, but I love that it contains all colours!

There is also that golden joy within, the wellspring, as well as a ribbon of blue, the desire to look inwards and focus on spirit.

Even in Crone-age, there is a fire in my belly that feeds my curiosity, my desire to explore, to have adventures.

Nature has been key to my living since my early childhood, so the greenery acknowledges this.

I have surrounded myself with golden light, which is also the embrace of self-compassion.

Passing through this are the necessary boundaries, somewhat fluid, permeable, yet vital.

There is a sense that this is both who I am and what I aspire to be. I still struggle with boundaries, especially those that protect me from overwhelm and seesawing wellbeing. At best, that golden self-compassion does enfold me, as it did when I was creating this. But too often, it still gets pushed aside by ‘living’

Moving Forward in Embracing the Crone (week 4)

My focus in this last session was the Crone I want to be, the qualities I want to cultivate the me I want to live.

I have always felt a strong affinity with the turning seasons, the cyclical nature of living. The prompt video spoke of a cycle of healing, creating, resting, and blooming. This really resonated as exactly what I aspire to embrace more fully and in a much more balanced way.

I started by creating a circular swirling blue background. I wanted it to reflect an acceptance that there is much we can’t and don’t control. So I used wet watercolour and salt – not as effective as I’d like due to time and probably also that this was not water colour paper as I wanted some scale. It represents the universe, the great blue yonder, the mystery. It may even encompass an ongoing preparedness to make waves!

There is a healing hand, cut from some marbled paper I made years ago. Again, this acknowledges that I cannot fully control my physical healing, the need for acceptance of things as they are, particularly as I age. I also chose a paper that included yellow for self-compassion.

The purple and blue object represents creating and living creatively. Implied within it are the embrace of eccentric purple, of fun and of doing your own thing.

The meditative figure on grey is rest, whether the rest of just stopping and being or the more active rest of meditation.

The final circle for ‘blooming’ contains elements of all these, is rooted in them but blossoms into something more.

At the centre is ‘the handwriting on my soul’, another phrase that caught my attention. I need to read the handwriting on my soul to return to the land of my soul.

The image lacked connectedness to the many wonderful souls whose paths intersect with mine. So, I added dancers to the circle of life. They also represent the freedom and exuberance that the years bring.

Then there are two badly drawn Chinese characters, intended to read laugh and live.

I would like to have include interweaving coloured threads, the strands of all that makes up a life.

There was a sense as I created this that no circle, no element, should be perfect in honour of the great teachings that imperfection gifts us.

Others commented on the sense of balance – I titled it Balanced Flow. I think holding awareness of this cycle more consciously may be helpful to me.

April 30, 2020May 4, 2020

Sage in training – modern elderhood

When you let go of the career and life goals that have driven you forward throughout adulthood, it is hard to escape the questions ‘who am I now and what is my purpose in being?’ Earlier this year I identified that for me, at this point in my life, my most important role is as sage in training.

The unexpected adventure of growing old

I am very much at the beginning of this life-stage, the start of an exploration that will underpin however many years I may have ahead of me.

Building on my initial delving into the qualities and role of the crone, I delighted in the wisdom of Leah Friedman’s The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old. This joyous and eloquent examination of the decades beyond sixty inspires a sense of real excitement in looking at the road ahead, even as it is obscured by mists of unknowing.

As we enter our later years all of us are fools in the sense that we are stepping off the edge of our early lives in order to explore new territory, that of elderhood, a place unknown and strange to us.
Leah Friedman, The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old, page 96

Friedman reflects that, in Hindu tradition, sixty represents a point of transition from ‘householder’ to ‘forest dweller’, one who begins to separate from the daily demands of life in order to spend more time in contemplation and in preparation for death. Though I am not sure I can make such a complete shift in our modern age, I love the idea of embracing at least parts of the identity of ‘forest dweller’!

It is perhaps important to remember that it is only relatively recently that many of us have had any significant expectation of life beyond sixty. Jean Houston observes that

The years beyond sixty, the years of our second maturity, may be evolution’s greatest gift to humanity.
Jean Houston, Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self

At a more individual level, Leah Friedman speaks of an increasing coherence, perhaps a reconciliation with the paradoxes that so often define our humanity:

By our seventies we have lived long enough to forge our oddities and our conventionalisms – these disparate and sometimes contradictory qualities – into a more or less coherent whole. We can begin to see all of our characteristics as demonstrations of our selfhood.
Leah Friedman, The Unexpected Adventure of Growing Old, page 58

She encourages us to let go of the ‘depressing D words’ (decrepitude, decline, diminishment, death . . .) and instead embrace the ‘encouraging E words’ (expansion, experience, expertise, enlightenment, equanimity, emancipation). We can choose how we focus our gaze.

Sage-ing

Elders practice contemplative disciplines from our spiritual traditions and come to terms with their mortality. They harvest their life experiences, pass on their wisdom to younger people, and safeguard the health of our ailing planet. Out of their late-life explorations in consciousness, elders bestow upon the world the life-giving wisdom it desperately needs . . .
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, Preface xiii

To my surprise I discovered that From Age-ing to Sage-ing was written some twenty years ago – it’s a fairly laborious read but repays the effort! At that time, I was working in dementia care, increasingly conscious of the lack of any clear social valuing of aging and feeling a strong impulse towards redefining a model of elderhood. Of course, in my early forties, life took over and that impulse was temporarily shelved.

Now, using The Sage-ing Workbook to provide focus and structure, I am diving into what I think will be both a challenging vision of what aging can be and an excavation of my own story. This is core work for a sage in training.

The curriculum of life’s second half involves more than the completion of our biological imperative. It involves the evocation of soul and spirit . . . a homecoming with our inner nature.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, pages 23 & 27

In From Age-ing to Sage-ing, the ‘jobs’ of old age are defined as

Self-realization
Service to society
Being society’s ‘futurists’

Instead of being retired to uselessness, you can now graduate into the global function of seership, involved in the larger issues of life, the wider cultural and planetary concerns.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller, From Age-ing to Sage-ing; a revolutionary approach to growing older, page 30

Further, the authors identify five key roles of old age, which I think of as the ‘5 Ms’

Mentor
Mediator
Monitor
Mobilizer
Motivator

Potential tasks of elderhood might include:

Coming to terms with our mortality
Healing our relationships
Enjoying and celebrating our achievements
Healing the earth
Legacy creation
Storytelling
Visioning / pathfinding
Stewardship
Spiritual connectedness

Phew, not much to tackle then!

Where am I now as a sage in training?

My aspiration, perhaps the most fundamental focus of this period of my life, is to become truly an ‘elder’, not just an ‘old person’, exposing new dimensions of personhood, new strength of being, the continued and marked evolution of uniqueness and discovery of ‘am’. My aim is to embrace ‘eldering’ as a state of growth, not a static condition. My job is to become a sage, an elder, a wisdom keeper,

a harbinger of the possible human . . .
Jean Houston, Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self.

Implicit in this is a commitment to spending time looking inward, yet also to reflecting this outward. As I age, I hope increasingly to be able to draw on my reserves of knowledge and wisdom while letting go of that which no longer contributes to my wellbeing – a shedding of leaves.

This is our time of ripeness, of the harvest of all that we have been.

As a sage in training and based on my reading so far, as I look ahead, I seek

to weave together the needs for solitude and for connection.
to allow meaningful transformation.
to process at the deepest level my past, my story.
to learn gratefully and gracefully to receive, to accept what I need.
to be ‘an agent of evolution’.

Elders function like old cobblers and dressmakers, sewing us back into the fabric of creation. Through their compassionate relatedness to all of life, the reduce our sense of alienation by helping us rediscover our sacred roots. And they do this without suffering from the disease of deadly earnestness. Elders have a wild, almost prankster-like quality that enables them to see the humor in every situation.
Joan Halifax, Anthropologist

Positive images of ageing

The initial exercises in the Sage-ing Workbook focus on existing perceptions of elderhood. I had a lot of fun creating a collage to represent the positive images of ageing that I have internalized! I am fortunate to have in my life some amazing role models for positive ageing who provided real inspiration as I thought about this. All the women pictured are in their 70s, 80s or 90s and all are feisty boundary pushers in different ways!

My ideal elder

An extension of this exercise was to create an image of my ideal elder, flowing out of those positive perceptions. What came to me feels like a blueprint for becoming.

My ideal elder

remains active and engaged within whatever constraints they may experience.
is open-hearted and loving, with a continuing zest for life.
is curious and continues to be engaged with their own growth.
has many connections with people of all ages.
is able to accept what age brings and to let go of what they can no longer do and what no longer serves them.
is authentic and full of character but also humble – they don’t pretend to have all the answers!
finds ways of being that support and inspire others.
is feisty and funny.
is deeply connected – to self, to the wider community, to nature, to mystery, to spirit, to all that is.

Elders are the jewels of humanity that have been mined from the Earth, cut in the rough, then buffed and polished by the stonecutter’s art into precious gems that we recognize for their enduring value and beauty. We sense their radiance in our youth, but we cannot contain it. It requires a lifetime’s effort to carve out the multifaceted structure that can display our hidden splendor in all its glory.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, The Sage-ing Workbook

October 28, 2018October 28, 2018

The season of the Crone

This is the witching time of year, the season of the Crone!

In ancient times, the Goddess as Crone or ‘Queen of Witches’ ruled the autumn harvest festivals. Hekat in Egypt, Hecate in Greece, Latin Proserpina, Semitic Lilith with her sacred totem the owl, Celtic Cailleach, Welsh Cerridwen – these are just a few of the many manifestations of the Crone Goddess.

The words we use

It is interesting that many of the words we apply to Crones have been twisted from their original meanings to represent something vile, ugly or evil. Hag derives from the Greek ‘hagia’, meaning ‘holy one’. There is little agreement as to the derivation of witch, but suggestions include the ancient Indo-European word ‘weik’, which connects to religion and magic; the Anglo-Saxon witega, a prophet or seer; a relationship to wit, or wisdom; a root meaning ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’. Some people believe that the word Crone is rooted in the meaning ‘crowned one’, though standard etymology still has it as a Middle English term of abuse.

Halloween and Samhain

Halloween has its roots in these ancient traditions, particularly Samhain (pronounced SOW-en) Samhain is the most important of the Celtic festivals, the end of one year and start of the next.

It is a day on which to remember, to commune with and honour the dead. At the same time it was a celebration of the eternal cycle of rebirth.

It is a time of endings, of coming to terms with the many small deaths, the losses that are part of every life. But it is also a time of beginning, of transition and change. It is a time to go within, a time to come to know yourself, to celebrate the growth you have realized over this last cycle and release all that was in preparation for what will be.

Samhain night exists outside time and between worlds, deeply rooted in mystery and enchantment.

Visual exploration of the season of the crone — A visual exploration of the season of the Crone, October 2010, research for the Halloween ‘Crone’ I created

Crone nature

As an archetype, the Crone assists us in transition from one life to the next, leaving one level of our existence and entering the next, hence her association with Samhain.

I find this illuminating as to the nature of the Crone. For me it creates a sense of her as a midwife of the soul. She teaches us that sometimes we must let go if we are to move on.

Looking back at the my visual exploration of the crone in 2010, I love the idea of the season of the Crone as a time to harvest experience and to become a way-shower.

In her article The Ancient Crone, Anya Silverman describes the Crone as

an older woman who has learned to walk in her own truth, in her own way, having gained her strength by acknowledging the power and wisdom of the totality of her experience. She is “a wise old woman’.

A Crone is a woman burnished bright by an inner fire that sharpens both her wit and her intensity, her passion and her power.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, in her wonderful book Crones Don’t Whine, notes that ‘to be a crone is about inner development, not outer appearance’. She writes of the Crone as a potential,

much like an inherent talent, that needs to be recognized and practiced in order to develop. This wise presence in your psyche will grow, once you trust that there is a crone within and begin to listen. Then in the quiet of your own mind, pay attention to her perceptions and intuitions and act upon them. Crone qualities are the distinguishing features by which a crone (as a woman or an archetype) can be known.

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Crone qualities

As I embrace my own season of the Crone, I have been exploring and considering what Crone qualities I would wish to make manifest in my life. These include

earned wisdom
compassion without the illusion and sentiment of youth
non-judgement
inner beauty
confidence
honesty
authenticity
self-knowledge balanced with self-compassion
humour
courage

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s list has an earthy practicality that offers some useful guidance. She says Crones

don’t whine and don’t indulge their whining inner child;
are juicy – and what makes life juicy is being deeply involved in life;
have green thumbs – they nurture growth, weed well, prune and build strong boundaries;
trust what they know in their bones – they transform their bad experiences into wisdom and embrace mystery;
meditate in their fashion, developing heartfulness and nurturing inner life;
are fierce about what matters to them – a crone is a woman who has found her voice;
choose the path with heart, understanding that choosing one path means giving up another;
speak the truth with compassion, increasingly knowing when to speak and what to say;
listen to their bodies, responding to their needs and hearing the underlying messages between the emotional and physical body;
improvise, adapting to change;
don’t grovel – for approval, love, acceptance;
laugh together, the deep belly laughs that come from a well of feeling;
savor the good in their lives, knowing how fortunate they are still to be alive.

Embracing the role of modern Crone

In an awesome blog post, The Rise of the Modern Crone, Diana Frajman suggests that

It takes a woman with an understanding of two of the most basic of human needs to evolve into a modern Crone. Those needs are connection and community.

She suggests that it is only with an understanding of connection that wisdom can have an impact and goes on to define the role of modern Crone:

. . . This is an amazing time to embrace your inner Crone. More than ever the world needs the comfort and certainty that wisdom and experience from a life well lived can give. The voice of expertise and mastery combined with the sageness of maturity and wisdom assures us that there is hope. We need these enlightened guides to bring us safely into the future. That is the role of the new modern Crone.

What a challenge!

Meditating today, I remembered the sense of metamorphosis as I emerged from the stage of maiden to mother. I had a vivid image of pouring all the learning, the experiences, the insights from my life into a great cauldron set amongst the flames and brewing an elixir of transfiguration. I was aware of the Crone as the most powerful embodiment of the feminine, freed from earlier responsibilities and constraints, connected to mystery and a kind of primal wildness.

I am excited to embrace the season of the Crone, to discover in myself its potential and consciously to recognize and practice those ways of being that manifest it most fully.

September 5, 2018

Embracing the age of the Crone – a view from a distance

At 60, I definitely feel myself entering into the age of the Crone. Some definitions would say you begin to cross the threshold at 50. But it was at 44, writing a journalistic exercise about looking forward to a specific birthday, that I first welcomed the vision of this aspect of later life as a woman.

I am looking forward to delving more into what this means to me over the coming months, but I thought I would start with that early vision.

I’m looking forward to being 70. After that I will consider myself to be on extra time, with nothing owed and naught to loose. I will gleefully claim my freedom to ‘wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t suit me’[1].

At a mere 44, the milestone of my allotted ‘three score years and ten’ lies well beyond the horizon. But already I feel the first intimations of the influence of the waning crescent moon, symbol of the Goddess in her final incarnation of ‘crone’.

Perhaps bound up with our contemporary obsession with physical appearance, our pursuit of an illusion of eternal youth, the ‘crone’ has had some very bad press. The word invokes an image of an ugly, wizened, witch of an old woman, maybe embittered and very possibly evil. Is it any wonder that so many women run scared of the inexorable accumulation of birthdays?

I am not soaked in the spell of paganism, claim no great knowledge of its lore. But I willingly embrace its vision of the crone as the ultimate, most powerful manifestation of womanhood. She personifies wisdom, compassion and completion. Her closer relationship to death is not one of fear but a potent awareness of renewal.

So, when I reach 70, dressed in crone’s purple, I will cherish my wrinkles and wear them with pride and relief that youth’s vanity is done. I will breathe deep, walk slow and do nothing, joyously! I will undoubtedly ‘misbehave’ outrageously. I’m looking forward to being 70.

[1] Quoted from “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, voted Britain’s best-loved poem by viewers of BBC TV’s Bookworm

Gina Bearne, 2002