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

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 crone crony

"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

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

Carl Jung: if you become radically vulnerable and true to yourself — through your life’s expression, you will attract your people


“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


p.s.

this phenomenon has been affirmed for me as both the attracted and attractor

Famêlée

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This feels like an arrow
Made from a tree
That rose from
An acorn
That I gathered and stored
In another life

Scribed with a message continually
piercing my heart

I wasn’t only wounded though,
I was woke
into a clarity
that I was already sighting in my dreams,
writing with words
mortal and eternal

You once said, proclaimed or whispered
Every single thing
that I ever believed
My own truths embarrassed in the shadow of your confidence
My inner voice silenced in your animated persuasion
Believing you so completely – for the better of my years
Becoming like and unlike you because of it,
but not be-coming me,
Un-be-coming me every day

I ain’t even mad
You don’t know this – still,
You don’t want
to hear,
or listen;

Our time is running out
Even this admission
Is sure to haunt me one day,
and guilts me today

But I can’t call you confidant or crone
If you refuse to learn,
to evolve,
From this one archetype

The wide and long view
seems to escape you
You live in the moment in the least way, the worst way
And I don’t worship here or there, any more
The faith in your godliness is gone,
It is unfamiliar
For me to pity you
You, deaf and tone deaf

You had all the answers
In the morning shallows, perhaps
But evaporation revealed even those
Were anchor-less, yet stationary
An algae
Mucking up the colorless perfection of sunlit water

But in the deep, or dark, or quiet pools, you were always so lost
And in the ocean, at night
You drown even in its calm
You have ridden civil swells and storms,
I’ll give you that
But have you ever communed with waves
Allowing them to be part of you
Swallowing and absorbing the mystery
Becoming the colorless perfection of dark water

You seem to stay parched
Your belly’s hollow from impious fasting and pious thirst
You do know that’s where your heart sits?

But let’s agree to come around again, friend
We’ll swap places and next time
I’ll be the mother,
and the son,
and the husband,
and the elder,
and the babe,
and the foreign one,
I’ll become The Other One
because,
I want the chance to know
You

 

Her, me.

Licensed under Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/11937802674
Created by Mike Lee. https://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/ Licensed for use under Creative Commons

I learn so many new things each day, that I feel like Samantha, the AI operating system OS¹ in Spike Jonze’s film, “Her”.

It’s as if I am birthing myself out of my own ignorance each and every day.
– kimtnt ⊕

20141007_183235
Rooftop. photo by: kimtnt

The Bottom (RV)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/isawnyu/5885591721/in/photostream/
The Well at Kom Ombo AWIB-ISAW: The Well at Kom Ombo A deep well at the Ptolemaic temple at Kom Ombo, which functioned as a nilometer. The well is also thought to have been used in the ritual worship of the crocodile. by Iris Fernandez (2009) copyright: 2009 Iris Fernandez (used with permission) photographed place: Omboi (Kom Ombo) [pleiades.stoa.org/places/606346]
 

 

Get to the bottom of this.

This, means You
Get to the bottom – of Your Self

Do you have to be thrown
down the well
through loss, by the grave, or near-grave

What if
instead,
we pulled the rug out from under ourselves
to reveal the formidable trap door

What if we climbed down into the dark cellar, willingly

to enter our infinite interior
to touch the well
the ancient aquifer within
where the gods reside and respite with our Twin Selves,
our other-halves waiting for discovery

This infinite, eternal presence
be-neath our weathered houses

What if we willingly descended
Into it
Unto it

And we learned to crave the Original Dark
and its companionship

Where we delve deep into our imaginations, dreams, nightmares,
That connect us primally
to the pool of imaginations, dreams and nightmares of every one,
Of every being that ever existed

Collective Unconscious
made Self Conscious

The dark, deep well
we may all draw from

Pour out your false light
reveal the truth:
the unbearable emptiness of being

Cup your hands
Or wade into the well
Deeper and deeper
submerge, swallow
you’ve been bone dry for so long
Do you see that now?

Baptize
The only way
To rebirth yourself
Into something worth birthing
Into something worth being
is by this sacrament, anticeremonially, un-ceremonially

Knowing now the bottom is
The only place where alchemy happens

Where wine is turned into eternal water,
instead of that story first told to you, by them

And the mystery
the wet, deep, dark becomes you,

Envelops you so completely
You want to drown beautifully

But you must taste the bitters of the surface
Swallowing down your thoughts
Before you drink of the All

To finally collapse in on yourself
Into beautiful nothing
becoming nothingness

Prima materia

In coniunctio

Drenched in Mystery
quenched with Truth
imbibed with Revelation

Reborn
for an endless moment

The perpetual well
archives your eternal experience
as the deja vu

Memory though will evanesce,
even as droplets cling in the hollows of your vessel

Now that you Know
Truth and Mystery
Exist
so near, just beyond,
yet
within you,

Reascend resplendent
Reemerge humbly

the Gods send a daily postcard:
Wish you were here.

 

the Sixth day

apples-490475_1920


We are in the know
We are in love

We are in love with absolute strangeness
Strangers weaving desperate bits of truths with swatches of lies and patches of mystery together
into idols of flesh-like beings ready to exist in the garden of the unknown
We begin as avatars,
with our hollows filled in with wishfulness and wistfulness
Our first chore: fashion a blanket from our shared thoughts and song
and beneath it, together
We’ll conceal our new being from them, for a while
Conceal our new world from them, for a while

Our whole, true selves rarely revealed
to each other,
or to the other-others
to our-selves

Who are You?
I think,
Better to not know your You,
Not wanting to dispel the myth
of the You I’ve created: my You
Not wanting to deconstruct the perfectly vague architecture
of the You I’ve created: my You
Wanting You only as my own creation
knowing You, owning You, or owing You
or revealing to You,
can never be what I have conjured on my side of our bed,
under our quilts, in our garden

Making You up whole,
completing You with my imagination
is godlike,
You, the Adam
I, the Creator and the Ethereal Eve
I give you the role you think you want
But just for this remote rendezvous

A scripted dialogue has gone awry with dangerous improvisation
A genesis of intangible intimacy, here,
Your being and words disembodied, afar,
is enough, for now.

To know You,
whole and complete and present
as [hu]man Incarnate
Near,
Potential,
Warm,
Muse
The angels hold their breath
What will she [i] [they] do?

For now, in the now, I am curiously
content in this undetermined, undefined serving of You
whether,
an apple to bite, to taste,
or an orchard for my harvest

 

 

Am Aum Om

20140814_161559



Who am I.
What am I.

What remains, if it’s taken all away,
if I die or am killed today;
If I were never born today;
If I were reborn today;
If I were unborn today;
if I choose to strip all of it away,
if I strip It all away

I
strip
It
all
away

My birth;

My parentage;

My race;

My ethnicity;

My nationality;

My family history;

My name;

My family;

My childhood;

My background;

My home;

My neighborhood;

My city;

My country;

My back-story;

My culture;

My religion;

My friends;

My loves;

My partner;

My marriage;

My child;

My progeny;

My legacy;

My intellect;

My politics;

My beliefs;

My ethics;

My talents;

My labor;

My education;

My skills;

My occupation;

My associations;

My friendships;

My relationships;

My temperament;

My attitude;

My affection;

My cowardice;

My courage;

My humor

My hate;

My prejudice;

My justice;

My wins;

My losses;

My habits;

My flaws;

My knowledge;

My personality;

My indignation;

My judgment;

My judgments;

My action;

My inaction;

My anger;

My rage;

My compassion;

My strength;

My kindness;

My goodness;

My shame;

My joy;

My pain;

My ideas;

My words;

My speech;

My secrets;

My expression;

My face;

My body;

My womb;

My motion;

My taste;

My scent;

My touch;

My sound;

My body,
my temple
my aperture
my dwelling;
My mind;
My humanity;
My morality;
My dignity;
My presence;

My universe;
My heart;
My love;
My experience;
My gods;
My death;

Who am I
Without them?

What am I
Without them?

What remains, then,
without them?
Who remains, then,
without them?

Then What am I
Then Who am I
Who am I
What am I

Still am I?
am, I?

Am I
Am I, I
Am I Am

Am I sound
Am I essence
Am I origin
Am I alpha
Am I omega
Am I always
Am I all ways
Am I everything
Am I nothing
Am I every thing
Am I no thing
Am I light
Am I dark
Am I god
Am I energy
Am I vibration
Am I consciousness

Am I continuum
Am I infinite
Am I eternal
Am I

I Am
I am
I AM

I  Am
I
Am

Am
Only, Am

Am
Am
Yes,
Am
Yes,

Am
Aum
Aum
Aum
Om

dream[t] poetry: Visitation

A man who wore a kelly green shirt
Surprised me in my dream
Crashed on my grandmother’s couch
swathed in blankets, soft and deep

I don’t ask him why he’s there,
It seems we both already know
This room’s exactly where she died,
This Oakdale house, sold long ago

Still, worried that as she ‘rived “home”
He’d given her a fright,
I go to wake her, see her, touch her . . .
What a beautiful, strange night.

He says, “No need to wake her now,
she’s a gem, it’s all okay,
she didn’t seem to mind me here,
I inferred that I might stay?”

I shush’d us, not to rouse her then,
Sound asleep in her old twin bed,
In disbelief, I hear her breathe
Has our connection stirred the Dead?

I feel wondrous, but then remembrance
forges space for Cardinal guilts
Smiling devilishly, making room for me,
he pats the couch and parts his quilts.

/for s.o’k/

Something Gold Can Stay, Mr. Frost. (Respectfully)

image

Something Gold Can Stay

True, nothing gold can stay,

If nature has her way.

Yes, Eden sank to grief,

And Ego is our thief.

Pure gold’s not beheld or crowned 

‘Tis within true aurum’s found.

By Gnostics’ purest measure

Self knowledge, our sole treasure.

October 2013 

NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

“Nature’s first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leafs a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay.”

 – Robert Frost 

The Yale Review (October 1923)