Dear Nudgers,
As my dear friend Erin approached her 50th birthday, I encouraged her to find a meaningful way to celebrate what I feel is a significant milestone in a woman’s life. Imagine my delight when she told me other friends had honored her with a croning ceremony! I wanted to know everything about this ancient and beautiful ritual and what it meant for her, and she agreed to share. — Kathleen
The Crone
Fifty years is halfway somewhere.
The trappings of youth fall away to reveal your most beautiful self.
The brain, once willing to take off on flights of fancy,
Becomes efficient and direct.
Cut the bullshit; we have life to live.
All the beauty in the world is now more profound, more precious, more appreciated.
Isn’t that what it’s all about in the end? Gratitude?
In fact, that most beautiful self has been there the whole time.
The difference is, you appreciate her now.
— EK Bayer
In some ancient, earth-based religions, there is a name and reverence for each stage of a woman’s life: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. The word crone comes from crown, in reference to a wisdom gained from understanding. I am well aware that my culture thinks of crones as sad, ugly, or a failure of eternal youth. Facing the loss of beauty, motherhood, career, or options can leave us feeling like there’s no chance to regain our agency or worth. Shel Silverstein took the hopelessness of aging to the extreme in The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, tragically sung by Marianne Faithfull on the soundtrack of Thelma and Louise: “At the age of 37, she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair.” It’s a heartbreaking ballad, ending in Lucy’s apparent suicide.
Surely there is an alternative way to embrace aging. My friend Ceri and I schemed about how to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays, and she told me about spiritual croning ceremonies. I wasn’t thinking of becoming a crone, I just felt the pressure of time, and if there was anything important to do in this life, I’d better get to it. Something clicked about a croning ceremony, about shifting the dread of aging to an excitement for what’s next, an appreciation for the wisdom of my age. Embracing a ceremony meant honoring this new me.
A Google search will reveal lots of suggested ways to do a croning ceremony, but there is no formula other than honoring the transition to the next phase of womanhood and expressing a reverence for the wisdom of the crone. Typically based on old pagan ritual, it can be presented with a combination of spiritual elements.
My own spirituality is bricolage, meaning something created from a diverse range of things. My family was agnostic, but I grew up surrounded by Christianity, went to bible study with friends, and participated in spiritual programs offered by the YMCA. In college I learned about how Catholics adapted ancient, Goddess-worshiping, earth-based holidays and rituals from the places of my ancestors. I’ve studied Native American earth-based spirituality and ancient Celtic ritual, reclaiming old, feminine, and forbidden practices. I’ve cast circles in the name of the Goddess to honor the four directions and the elements connected to them. I’ve set intentions, burned candles, meditated, and offered up everything in gratitude. I have a strong yoga practice as well. Bits of wisdom have stood out to me like treasures, and I have collected them.
As Ceri explained her plans for my ceremony, I recognized that in addition to embracing my new life stage, honoring the crone in me also meant accepting this bricolage, no longer subverting my spirituality under mainstream Christianity or even the mainstream agnostic. In preparation, I cleaned the house, set my intentions, and opened my heart to the experience. My wife and a few friends gathered to toast me with champagne and present me with gifts of crystals, incense, and a beautiful carved wand, while my kids started a fire in the pit in our backyard. We gathered around that fire and began.
For the first time in my life, I led a group to stand and face each direction while I cast a circle. For a croning, it felt proper to invoke the Goddess, to acknowledge the sacred feminine, so I called to the fire in the south, which is her spirit; the water in the west, which is her blood, sweat, and tears; the earth in the north, which is her body; and the air in the south, which is her breath. We burned incense in the fire pit and invited our ancestors to join us. Not just any ancestors, but specific women invited for their wisdom, love, or reputation. Ceri brought out three candles. My friend’s six-year-old daughter—shy, but stoked to be included—represented the maiden. She held the white candle, and I lit it. My mama friend took the red candle and lit it from the white one, and I lit the black candle from the red.
Ceri spoke of crones being revered as strong and wise. She noted that our society has lost its reverence for women of a certain age, but in times past, this was a significant doorway only a few women achieved. She spoke of power in moving consciously from a time of nurturing others to a time of nurturing the earth. I set an intention, which is like making a wish, and blew the candles out.
Ceri then brought out a beautiful, dark-purple velvet, satin-lined cloak with tiny pearls around the bottom. Together, my friends held the cloak high over my head, then gently laid it across my shoulders and fastened the black spiral clasp over my throat.
Since it’s creation twenty-three years ago, this cloak has been passed on to many women as they’ve had croning ceremonies of their own, and each woman has added something to it: pins, talismans, patches, and beads. There are secrets sewn inside the hem, and inside, over the heart, there is a pocket with a journal in it. Crones write messages to newcomers, like, “May you join us in happiness and health, taking our courage, strength, and wisdom. Be well.”
Until the next of us is ready for the cloak, I get to wonder at its treasures. I sewed in two tiny keys from a long-gone childhood diary, a keeper of secrets in my maiden days. I wrote in the journal “May I finally unlock my voice, and may the wisdom discerned by writing be passed on to you, and you, and you….”
As the weight of my new label, crone, settled on my shoulders, I felt giddy and light, but also a new, deeper responsibility. I felt like the Universe had finally given me permission to be my authentic self. The Universe would laugh and say I always had permission, I just chose to make other commitments. Still, I finally felt free, and with that freedom came clarity. As I face the end of one era and the start of another, I feel empowered for what is to come.
Being a crone means you can cast aside worries of being judged. I have life to live, work to do, and a voice to unveil. Being a crone means I am free to do this work. I have a responsibility to do it, to speak up, to be the example I wish I had, to put all of my heart into whatever I do. And I am not alone. My opportunities come through the grace of others, and my wisdom through many more. With gratitude, I honor Ceri, who inspired my croning as well as the poem at the start of this missive; my wife, who enables my writing; and also my mother, who birthed my body as well as my insatiable curiosity.
Erin is writing a memoir about her journey as the mother of twins called Mamagrit: a story of twin shooting stars (and also the meaning of life). It will be released in 2020. To learn more about Erin and her work, visit https://mamagrit.wordpress.com.