The Croning Party - Rattle the Bones

A new Crone writes to you today!

At the Cancer Full Moon I received a Croning Ceremony.

The Cosmic Crone joins the great circle of wise women, bone witches, and hags, with a ringside seat for the implosion of Patriarchy.

I vowed in the presence of my beloved sistars to serve the Dark Goddess all the rest of my days.

Lilith is my Dark Goddess Guide in my Croning. She first introduced me to the Dark Goddess a decade ago. Now that I am Croned, she beckons me into a deeper understanding of Who She Is Within Us.
 

As Crone, I amplify my own creative powers through art.
I hold more ceremony and circles of women on the land.
I spend more time alone in Nature, listening.
I spend more time in the Dark.
I initiate women into their womanhood, and Cronehood.
I guide them through the portal of their wounds into their power.

Oh, my women, this is a hard and scary time to be alive on the planet. It is easy to call gleefully for the dismantling of patriarchy. It is easy to forget that it’s an ugly, destructive process. I swing between numbness and rage on a daily basis as I witness the violence perpetrated by rich white men clinging to power.

It is normal to feel what you feel. It is necessary to take action and it is necessary to take care of yourself.

One part of my Charge of the Crone is to inspire you – not to hope, but to ENLARGE yourself.

Know you are big enough to eat the atrocity, banality, misogyny, and racism thrown at you by the dying patriarchy – and spit it out.

To transmute my anger, I wrote this poem:

The Croning Party
(a danse macabre to strike fear in the Patriarchy)

The Hags strip your flesh from your bones
Construct a birdcage from your rib cage
Hang herbs to dry from your spine

Stir the cauldron with your femur

Boil your joints for a stock

Drink soup from your skull

Scrape your hide with your shoulder blade
Stretch your hide over your pelvis

Beat the drum with your fibula
Make a rattle out of your knuckle bones

Baubo the Belly Goddess laughs from her Vulva

What is the joke?

The Crone sucks your bones –

and there is nothing you can do to stop her.

Crones don’t measure the cascade of bones

Crones don’t count the countless dead

Crones dig a furrow with your jawbone
and bury their bony seeds in the dirt.

They make wild music and dance

Watching for the green shoots to rise.
 
- Carla Sanders, Cosmic Crone