Category: exposition

Cronehood: the imperative, work, province and privilege of becoming truth and living truthfully in the depths

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Aging, Alchemy, Archetype, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Cronehood, exposition, Feminine, Fruition, grandmother, maiden, Mother, Sacred Feminine, witch, witchery, women, WomenfolkLeave a comment 
Ageing is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose:

the fulfilment and confirmation of one’s character.

- James Hillman
“Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.”

- Hilma af Klint
“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with."

— Jean Shinoda Bolen
portrait of a crone
by a queen crone,
Lajuana Lampkins
"Women's most feared power over men is the power to say no. To refuse to take care of men. To refuse to service them sexually. To refuse to buy their products. To refuse to worship their God. To refuse to love them. Every therapist knows that sex can be forced, but no power in the world can force love from any woman who wishes to withhold it."

- Barbara Walker
“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power. 

Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.” 

- Marion Woodman
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maundy thursday, daily

On By ©️K.T. 2025In exposition, Gnosis, Lent, Mother, Motherhood, NarrativeLeave a comment

mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos

As I sat on the maple floor of my kitchen in Chicago on a Thursday evening in 2017, voluntarily polishing my son’s chukka boots for the weekend — it became a meditation on my own father, who was actually my second father, who would often offer to polish or freshen up my scuffed, dirty shoes

— first, my white Keds-knock-offs from Zayre, Venture or Jupiter — the canvas stiffened bright white, an unnatural brand new/ the scent of that liquid polish and sponge instantly conjured/ me smiling/ did I remember to say thank you? did I know (how) to?

later, when I was in high school, he would clean and polish my beloved and preciously expensive pair of Stan Smith white leather Adidas /or were they leather Tretorns? then, when I was in college and always pressed for time or conversation, I began expectantly asking if he could please polish my black heels or black boots for work – but more importantly for the weekend — he always, obliging me.

she was not quite as good at it as he was,
but she tried, and she got better, each time

Every act:

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limineen

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Alchemy, author, cosmos, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Derivate Works, exposition, Knowledge, Lexicon, liminal, liminality, limineen, liminine, threshold, velveteen, Word, WordsLeave a comment
the limineen
as imagined with
The Flammarion Engraving

Limineen : limin + een

noun: the time and space of the thresholds; attendance to or presence in, the in- betweens, the interregnum — of becoming and nonbecoming; of beingness and nothingness; of the material and ethereal; of sacredness and profanity; of love and hate; of calm and rage; of the authentic and the engineered; of inertia and energy.

limineen is both mood and State of this author, an Earthling, human, woman and entity, who finds her self present within and attendant to the thresholds of the corporeal, incorporeal and surreal.

from liminal / lim·i·nal
/ˈlimənəl/ adjective

  1. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
  2. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
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Carl Jung: if you become radically vulnerable and true to yourself — through your life’s expression, you will attract your people

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Alchemy, C.G. Jung, Crone, Crone Consciousness, exposition, Jung, Jungian, thresholdLeave a comment

“Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.

If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e. simultaneously and everywhere.

Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples:

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”

It seems to me that nothing essential has ever been lost, because the matrix is ever present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.

But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinion, and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.”

– Carl Gustav Jung: Letters, Volume II, p. 595

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Crone Consciousness

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Crone, Crone Consciousness, exposition, QuoteLeave a comment

I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me…the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself… That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world.

Anais Nin

Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her.

It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book.

[For a moment] she rediscovered the purpose of her life.

She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name …

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

As soon as you are really alone you are with [the] God[head].

Thomas Merton

holy ghost: a statement

On By ©️K.T. 2025In art, exposition, memo, Narrative, poemo, Spiritive, Spirrative, velveteenLeave a comment

“The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”

Frida Kahlo

in the end, we are all just holy ghosts,

ghosts who sometimes want to feel, or be seen, or be felt by others who are also seeking, whether they know it or not — whether they become known forever after or become, forever unknown — to us.

if anyone were to speculate — or attempt to draw definitions or executive summaries about me — as one particular, ambitionless, ghostly being 






as a mother, poet, crone and Earthling — about my collection of words, opinions, ideas, poems, photos, ephemera, art, beliefs or altars — now, or when i’m dead and gone,





— in the end, and at the beginning,
this is and was, always a place for me to fundamentally 
better understand





my Self — for my self & by my self.





for me,





to try to understand my relationship to Others, to the World, to the Earth;





and also,





for me,





to try to understand my relationship to my creativity – the conception, process and act of creating 





and finally,





to try to understand this strange existence, in and of itself.










no one else has ever been essential to experience, interact with, interpret, interrogate or validate any of it — of mine, ever — yet, they are welcomed to do so — if they happen upon me





yet, my nearest and dearests don’t even know this collection exists




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Wolf Lake

						

				On  By ©️K.T. 2025In childhood, Death, exposition, Father, Funerary, Poem, poetryLeave a comment			

					


		

			

for





 +Willie Mack Riche+










a prologue included for father’s day:





the man who bought my kindergarten clothes when i was four years old and paid my Lutheran school monthly tuition for eight years; the man who had the rusty 1972 VW Bug, gifted to me by my boyfriend for high school graduation restored over the summer before my freshman year of college; the man who adored both my son aka “monster” and “bam-bam”, and my first dog, Digby aka “hound”; the man who endured both the devastating loss of custody of and subsequent parental abduction of — and then, the tragic death of his only biological child, a son.





the man who never got the chance to properly retire and healthfully and happily collect his 30-year, hard-earned Teamster’s union pension — and just go fishing all day because he became acutely ill with undiagnosed kidney failure, and spent the last years of his life on thrice-weekly, hours-long dialysis treatment — and his last six months on Earth dying from a rare, aggressive and metastatic cancer.





may his spirit know peace eternally.










Willie Mack 
gingerly cradling his namesake Mack 
on the first full day of the baby’s life, 
and who we brought home on 
Father’s Day, 1994











“This used to be my playground.”






and, our proxy for church on spring, summer and fall sabbaths.











These were the halcyon days.






Load up the International Harvester TravelAll with wooden doors and quarter panels – it has two gas tanks, you know.
Bought it used, but pristine
on payments – from the showroom on Logan Boulevard and Elston Avenue with zero credit history and all the usury






Have mercy.






Follow me, and I will make you fishers of fish.






He will bait your hook on the bamboo pole he bought you.
Later, you will insist on the “Pocket Fisherman” – as seen on TV.




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