The gifts you receive when you give yourself space make me wonder why I don’t do it more often.
The Wylde Crone, who rises to meet us at the crossroads, is personified by Hecate who has over time mutated from benign (but powerful) to witchcraft, ghosts and magic.
Which works just fine for me. For those who need the personification of a named goddess, she is a perfect image for the Crone. Power, magic…and lets add shapeshifter.
I do not think it is heresy to modify a story or myth for our times. In fact, we should all do a bit more story shifting with the tales and yarns we have inherited and tangled together in ways that no longer service us.
The idea of a living myth is alien to many in our materialistic society. For most people, myths are imaginary stories from another time, seeming to have little modern relevance. But a living myth is forged in the depths of our psyches, and it is both alive and potent with psychological power. Although living myths exist only in the subterranean passages of our unconscious, they nevertheless affect our outer world in very direct ways.
For my purposes, the Wylde Crone is the third face of the triune goddesses represented as maiden, mother, crone. In my own work we have the Wylde Child who holds creativity, the Wylde Woman who knows her own power and persists in her dream,s and now the Wylde Crone who is all about transition no matter what time of life you find yourself in the middle of.
I am here to reclaim the word “Crone” just as feminists have reclaimed “Bitch” (one who will not be a doormat for anyone). For me, she is about seeing the lies we have woven into our stories starting with the word “because”. She is about the one step we can take right now toward what comes next. She just might be big and scary enough to quiet the yammering of the lizard brain and our inner critic.
And so I have begun a journey to capture the essence of the Crone and transitions onto a page. I will work it out here, so if you’re as curious as I am as to where this is all going, hang out and do comment with your thoughts – this is a joint project!
Meanwhile, I will share with you the first poem I have written in almost 20 years for reasons I won’t go into. They don’t matter anymore. What matters is that the door is open. Bad poetry spills through and that’s fine too – you have to kiss a lot of frogs they say. I’m sharing because I’m happy it arrived, not because it is polished or finished at all – imperfections are the work of folks in transition and I’m in one big time. Let me encourage you to rework old muscles – whatever that is for you – and to do so without worry about perfections. We don’t have to prove anything to anyone, least of all to ourselves. Be kind to yourself!
Here is a note to myself I wrote in the middle of the night while on retreat:
“When poetry comes knocking on your door at 4 a.m., after 20 years of silence, it is the Wylde Crone Rising. Let her in. ” Now you know where *that* concept came from!
ok – for AEDM 11, my rough draft of a poem:
Praise
Blessed be the explosion
Blessed be the star dust and heat,
the glimmer and hope
that fill the void when everything flies apart
Blessed be the nails
that attached the boards, that blocked the windows
that guarded the house at night
Blessed be the judge
who said change the locks
without regard to how I might pay
Blessed be the counselor who said:
trust yourself; start now.
Blessed be the women stuck in fear
who blazed a path
to the door I did not know was there
Blessed be my children
who deserved better and more.
Blessed be the fist that broke the bone
beneath my eye and swelled it shut
so that, finally, I could see.
