A Gathering Of The Necessary

Crones may be the first to be useful, but we will need more than just them.

I spent over fifty years of my life looking for the place where I could belong. When I found it, my children were bewildered by my choice, as I was at times. What was a fifty-something amateur gardener, amateur animal manager, amateur so many things, but clearly a master of none, doing building a small farm in Giza, Egypt? But I knew that I needed to do this, so I refused to simply slid off to a comfortable spot, and I decided to make my own spot. And I documented it in my first blog, Living In Egypt, which I saw as a means of finding my voice by explaining to others outside of Egypt, why it made some mad sense for me to be moving out of my comfort zone into a space that has become so much more than a comfort zone over the years. I moved in 2004 from a comfortable suburb of Cairo to a territory of villages in Giza. Friends and neighbours near my new home were sure that I was quite mad…and they told me so every so often.

During the past twenty years I have working in equestrian tourism as a physical means of sharing my love of the Egyptian countryside and desert with visitors who after 9/11 mainly associated Egypt with pharoahs if we were lucky or perhaps with terrorists if we were not. I have collected so many friends from my visitors and random individuals I’ve found along the way, and gradually, patterns have emerged that are helping me to understand what my particular life is. It most certainly isn’t anything I inherited from my parents or siblings, it isn’t something I learned in school or university, it is an accumulation of moss on a slowly moving stone that has found a space to rest.

Last autumn I found myself agreeing to “own” a gathering of older women on social media. It was initially called A Gathering of Crones online, but it has gradually become known as a Worldwide Circle of Crones over the past year. The membership has grown from about twenty thousand women to almost thirty thousand woman. We make a point of NOT inviting people into the group because some bizarre set of internal rules of Meta/Facebook makes our adminitrative lives misery when this happens. I suspect that this group is one that people are simply supposed to stumble on and then into, assuming that they are women of a certain age. Why women? I don’t know. It just happened like that. Can men do this? Of course. Why not in their own fashion? There are many groups out there in the ‘verse. This particular one is quite kind, which is something that is important to me. At the beginning of this year, I addressed my group, really not feeling terribly comfortable with that sort of possessive pronoun. I am learning that pronouns can mean a lot of things and that to call something mine, truly does not say that it is not also someone else’s.

“I would like to suggest a task for the group but first a bit of introduction. I joined the Crones under the first organiser of this group sometime in August or September I believe. I am not by nature a joiner of groups but the name being used at the time intrigued me and a friend was a member. A little while after joining the group I managed to contact original creator somehow, and I asked her, really not at all seriously, what she had in mind for a large number of elderly women. Was she perhaps collecting them until she had gathered a critical mass of crones; and what would happen then? Oddly enough, my question seemed to really bother her, although she didn't ever tell me why. We had a few conversations and then she invited me to take part in a Zoom conversation with her and two other women in honor of the first year of the group's existence. I agreed but the ever irregular internet of Cairo did not, and although I caught glimpses of the other women who took part, all I got were glimpses. About a week or so later, I took an online call from the first creator asking me to take over the responsibility of being the primary admin for the group. Ever since I had asked the critical-mass-of-crones question, my conversations with the group's creator had been rather uncomfortable and, in fact, she accused me of trying to steal the group on a couple of occasions, an idea that I found very funny, as it could not have been farther from my mind. So when she essentially she gave me the choice of either taking the group on or see it dissolve, I did the illogical thing of agreeing to be the admin of an enormous group about whom I really knew almost nothing.

The first thing I did was to seek assistance and, clearly the universe was in favour of my choice to take on the responsibility, because I was immediately contacted by about 8 women from different locations, all of whom had infinitely more experience in groups like this, and one of whom was a friend of mine from 30 years past in Alexandria, Egypt. I live in Giza on my farm near the desert and she lives on the Red Sea. This series of events was frankly astonishing to me. I had no expectations or even wishes for my life to go in this direction. I guess this was to teach me not to ask stupid questions about critical mass, since I suddenly found myself having to answer the question that I had posed.

The first few months were busy and demanding of all of us admin/moderator crones with a new name to be found, rules and regulations to be sorted out, a myriad other tedious necessary tasks to get the group functioning smoothly. It is now the beginning of the new year in January, and the nuts and bolts tasks are largely done, but the real question remains. Why have we been gathering crones? During the past year or so I have been having odd things happening in my life even before I'd heard of the Crones. Along with just living as a woman in her mid-seventies who has built a farm where people come to relax, get therapy to learn to get along with animals, to enable children to learn about nature, I have been in the process of working out a legal structure for my farm because I want it to be existing long after I am gone. And time after time, people have suddenly appeared in my life or at my farm who have something to offer in this quest. But I don't imagine that a critical mass of crones are going to pull up roots to come here for my farm. It seems clear to me that the farm is one thing while the answer to my question is another.

When I first joined the group someone asked what the difference between a witch, a crone, and a hag might be, and I suggested that it was matter of longevity. Witches are born and may or may not choose or be pushed to becoming crones, and then hags are those of us who have been around the block rather more times and have truly graduated from the school of hard knocks. We are a continuum of traits, skills, gifts, and opportunities, just as women are a vast continuum of appearances, and experiences, which is why this group is, within its chosen boundaries, a completely inclusive group of women. The only reasons a woman may not be in the group are because they don't wish to, because they don't fall within the age requirements of the group, or because they can't behave within the group's fairly lenient requirements of civil behaviour. So now we understand how the group exists but the real question is why.

A lot of us are familiar with mythology, Jungian archetypes, the work of Joseph Cambell and many others, especially since much of this work has to do with the disappearing of the roles of women over the past hundreds and thousands of years. Many of us have read about the discoveries of quantum physics that help us to understand how it is that we as crones do what we do. I'm good at communicating at long distance with people attuned to me. It's been happening to me since I was young. So what would happen to our perception of the world if we were to simply begin to see the world from OUR perspective, as conflicts between good and bad aspects of the universe that can be affected or changed through the behaviour of our spirits, which is stronger than the thoughts of our minds.

When I was a young mother, I found Susan Cooper's series of books called collectively The Dark Is Rising, and I read them to my children at least twice at their request. These are novels about the efforts of some British children to assist ancient forces for good in the world to bring about at least a temporary halt of the forces of evil. Last spring when my son told us that he had bought a home in Cornwall for his wife and new daughter there was universal rejoicing because all of us felt that this was a proper place for him to be and a safe (at least safer than other places) haven for his family. When I went to visit them this summer, he already had all the books ready for his daughter. This is a man who studied theoretical physics before becoming a business man. We all know that there are dark forces at work in our world, and living, as I do, far too close to a genocide, these forces are doing well these days.

I have been doing a lot of thought about what the universe might need from a critical mass of crones. There are many things that a critical mass of crones may offer, but these are complex and they haven't come together for me. However, I suspect that many of the things that we have assumed were real (like democracies), very likely are not, and that many things that we have been TOLD were real, such as corporations having the same rights as people, that politicians trying to help make the world a better place for all of us and not just a few, and that prayers and wishes are not reality...these are the things that are unreal and somehow we need to work to bring our sense of reality back where it belongs, leading us to a world of humanity and peace. What this means is that much of the form of governance in the world has fallen into a few hands that have been working at defining our reality to be something that we know it is not and that is actually quite harmful to us all.

I was born in the US and left it due to my serious disagreement regarding the wars in South East Asia. As the years have gone by I have been horrified at the toll of gun deaths in schools and public places and how they are essentially driven by profit for the arms industry, and then brushed away with "thoughts and prayers", which we condemn as being so insignificant. But are those thoughts and prayers directed towards the correct changes to solve the problems? What if they are incredibly effective but NOT aimed at correction at all? Are all those "thoughts and prayers" providing assisance to the arms industry? Perhaps bringing back genuine caring and kindness is why a critical mass of crones is what the world needs. The problems are everywhere. Egypt is surrounded by five countries, all of which are tied up in military problems. Libya hasn't seen peace for over ten years, Chad is overrun with refugees from Sudan where two armies, neither of which recognise a government, are devastating the country, destroy every thing of value such as schools, homes, hospitals, and agriculture. And then we have Gaza where the US, France, Great Britain, and Germany all refuse to demand that Israel stop bombing and bulldozing the homes of over 2 million people, most of whom are now homeless, living without food, water, hospitals, schools...any of the things that mark a civilised country. What can we do?

Perhaps we need to increase our efforts, get to know other crones. There are a ton of them on Facebook in English alone and I know that they are also there in all the other languages. Military armies depend on large numbers of young men to be present in a few defined places to play their roles in slaughter, but Crones are not bound by space and time. We can work from everywhere. Perhaps we can tip the forces of thoughts and prayers back to the remedying of our problems rather than supporting those who would destroy us? I am not entirely sure how to proceed but we can all see the work that needs to be done. And perhaps it will require a critical mass of crones to get it done.”