Goddessing

Crones and near-crones in pictures: Joan Myers' Women of a Certain Age (click on the photo to see the next one).

Joan says: "As a woman recently turned fifty, I find myself less and less comfortable with the way American culture defines and portrays older women I reject these cultural limitations for my own aging. I use my camera to explore possibilities, the messages and histories expressed in other women's bodies. I wish less to define than to reveal."

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Another crone story, and so soon: Grace by pomegranatesandpaper [3/24/2004].

Maybe it started with my grandmothers? With Lalla's unconditional love and Lala's stern but consistent and well-boundaried care-taking? Maybe it's because cronehood is right around the corner, what I have to look forward to? Maybe it's my feminism? My Goddess spirituality? Whatever it is, this much is true: I'm in love with crones.

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If a goddess aspect has dominated or defined my life, it would be the crone aspect. A crone goddess was the first to call me; when I was a wee girl I grew up close to many crones, including seven great-aunts, all little old ladies (except two of them, who weren't little); when I lived alone for the first time as a young adult I became close friends with my next-door-neighbor, Mrs. Crawford, an 80-something dynamo who was a living textbook on living well independently into an advanced, crotchety cronehood; I started walking with a cane in my mid-40s when I shifted, body-wise, into an early cronehood.

Recently, of course, scientists have proven how important crones are to the survival of our species, yet they are still almost invisible women in my culture.

The list of women celebrities who deny us the public face of the crone by their numerous plastic surgeries is long, growing, and to me, tragic. I agree with Diane Keaton, who said about plastic surgery: "What's so great about wiping the marks of experience off your face?"

In any case, in my role as cheerleader for crones, I bring you the first of what I hope may be many found crone stories: Getting Home by Robert Brady at Pure Land Mountain.


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I woke from a dream this morning. The dream itself was an action story, a mystery or possibly thriller in which my partner and I were private investigators, investigating ... something. We had broken into a house (actually first one side and then the next of a duplex). In the first side, a man's suit pants crumpled on the sofa and a matching jacket tossed over the back of a chair in some other part of the house let us know the gender of the occupant, and hinted that he was possibly present. Luckily, we quickly discovered in some papers what we were looking for: an address which was an important clue in our ongoing investigation. (And the address we were looking for? It was the address of the house we were in. In terms of dream interpretation, this might mean either "be here now" or "quit thinking about moving.")

To get out of the apartment quickly, we left through the front door, walked across the porch and entered the apartment on the other side. We took the presence of a rope strung across the steps leading from the porch to the yard and street as a sign that we should exit from the back of the house to avoid the risk of being discovered. As we walked through the other half of the house we saw that candles were lit on the buffet in the dining room and heard the tenant (a woman) singing elsewhere, possibly in the shower. The buffet was clearly dressed as an altar. Somehow we knew the woman was Christian and that she was preparing for her Sunday ritual. There was a cat in the apartment, and as we opened the back door to leave I felt a tug -- a deep connection to the cat. I wanted to take her with me but gave up the idea for practical and ethical reasons.

Our exit was a fire escape; the yard was two stories down. As we descended the ladder, it started to sag under our mutual weight. My P was behind me, so I said she needed to go back up to the landing to wait until I had touched ground. She headed back up but got off-balance and somehow found herself dangling from a heavy chain, clinging to it in mid air. She was nervous, and I was nervous for her, because clearly her only option was to slide down the chain, carefully, and hope it was long enough that she didn't have a big fall to the ground when she reached the end of it.

Fortunately, everything worked out. We found ourselves on the ground, intact, and started walking along the side of the house, feeling satisfied that we had found what we were looking for and that we hadn't disturbed the occupants of the house or been found out.

Now there are some obvious clues to how this dream might be interpreted (obvious to me, anyway), but when I started to move into a waking awareness of the dream it was my mood, my feeling state, that felt significant, a feeling of depth and purpose out of proportion to the facts or apparent interpretations of the dream. I decided to stay with the feeling of the dream, to meditate on how it/I felt rather than on what it might mean.

As I meditated, thought pictures of yesterday went through my mind, of my beloved and me down by the lake, energized by the sunshine despite the frigid wind blowing across the water, collecting magnificent pieces of curly willow dropped from the old mother tree. The deep blue of the water was vivid in my mind's eye, and it dawned on me that this is the only time of the year when the water is that deep blue. Even in years when the lake is still frozen at equinox, the deep blue color comes through the ice. It occurred to me that it's the stillness of the water over the long winter that is responsible for this color. Five or six months of non-human activity allow the lake to return to its natural state, a state of grace.

Stillness. Non-human activity. A state of grace.

In many ancient cultures and in several contemporary ones, the spring equinox marks the new year, seasonally and calendrically. Traditionally, statues of deities were taken from villages down to lakes or seas to be bathed, to be renewed. With the sacred bath, the goddess was reborn.

Up from the deep blue of my dream, from the waters of the lake and of my deep self came an awareness: this year, I need to focus on being.

With that thought, I popped into full waking consciousness. I reflected about my hypnopompic meditation practice and how I've used it as a tool to organize my day, to create a "to-do" list from the deepest part of me. I mused about what a "to-be" list would look like. I picked up my new mala, consecrated at the Equinox celebration, and did a being mantra.

Now fully awake, I think about this action thriller-mystery dream and its left-brain/right-brain, male/female, front/back, business/spiritual, upstairs/downstairs polarities, and about its outcome -- finding an address, a place I'm looking for, which happens to be where I am. The dream seems to be saying: Look at these polarities -- doing and being, activity and stillness -- and create some harmony and balance in your life by focusing on being for awhile, or maybe even for a year. When you wake in the morning, meditate on how you'll be that day instead of what you'll do. Let the stirred, muddy waters of your active self settle into a state of grace.

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