Crone Chronicles #33 - The Glorious Void
Change, transitions, that-which-we-cannot-control all bring us to a place in which we may feel as if we are falling of into an abyss. Sometimes that feeling grasps an entire nation, or even the world. Editor Ann Kreilkamp reflects, in her editorial for this issue, on one such event: "Every woman I ran across was, like me, altered by this news. The Death of [Princess] Diana was not just news from afar. It hit home."
When we find ourselves in the Void — whether by a personal tragedy, a sudden turn of finances, a job loss, or just the slow waning of our "youthful" energy — we may want nothing more than to frantically return to the status quo, attempt to scramble back up the wall, back to the edge of the precipice we were just pitched off. But, as Ann points out, "Grief shocks the heart open. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the heart lives to give."
The writers in this heart-opening, often wrenching, issue of Crone gift us with stories of catapulting into the own, whether creating community in a seemingly intolerable environment, like the interview with Pat Weber "Creating a Quality of Life in a Nursing Home" or a mother's poignant, almost-too-personal poems for her dead son Tasha Halpert's "Poems for Rejoicing: For Robin." For artist Barbara Helen Berger, it is a journey into real-life "negative space" when she explores the challenges of learning to meditate in "Glorious Void." The "void" can also be a space of openness, of waiting, as in Pattie Layer's "Of Stillness and Snow," or even honoring death as described movingly by Barbara Vienot-Atnot in "A Septuagenarian Muses on Death."
The literal void — outer space — is the subject of an interview by Carol Rosin of two prominent opponents of the militarization of space, journalist Karl Grossman and Air Force Captain Stan Rosen.
This issue isn't entirely devoted to "going off the deep end" there's also essays on Sekmet, the Lioness-headed Egyptian goddess of radical change, healing from uterine fibroids (without synthetic hormones), a trip to the heart of the New Age west in Sedona, Arizona, and much, much more. If you want to learn from the wisdom of experience how to turn a fall into chaos into a leap of faith and transformation, this is your issue.
84 pages, edited and published by Ann Kreilkamp at Winter Solstice 1997.