Join the Rising!
An anti-invisibility, silence-breaking community project sharing powerful stories from crone or soon-to-be crone womxn who are living and working outside the boxes ageists and the patriarchy want to put us in.
It all started when
I was trying to write a clear, sensible description of this project for you. And then this bit of salty, blazing honesty fell out…
“This culture is epically fucked up and I’m done with living under and watching other womxn live under these conditions. I’ve bled fiftyfuckingseven years of my life into the sucking pit of patriarchal need that passes for society in this country, and I’m not giving one more drop of my blood, sweat, creative and emotional energy. Not. One. Drop. More. And, I’m going to do my damnedest to see that no other womxn does either.”
So now you’ve caught a glimpse of the fire in my belly that has me creating a project exploring the power of older womxn when they break free from the expectations and limitations enforced by society. And, you can see why calling myself – calling women like us – rebel crones starts to make a whole lot of sense.
This community project is about sharing powerful stories from crone or soon-to-be crone women who are living and working outside the boxes ageists and the patriarchy want to put us in. It’s meant to inspire, encourage, and offer a feeling of solidarity to women approaching and in their crone years. To help us refuse the aching, confusing, enraging, socially imposed isolation and invisibility we experience as silvering, softening women of deepening years.
A bit about Ageism and Rebel Crones…
One of the first bits of information I uncovered while down an ageist-keyworded rabbit hole last year was this: we internalize the age stereotypes of our culture at a very young age – often as young as 4 years old.
So, before we’re even able to fully understand who we are as people, we’ve absorbed and internalized that when we reach a certain age we will become whatever the cultural myths tell us we must become. In this culture? That’s not something life-affirming.
Ageism is both insidious and pervasive. Disentangling from it takes walking each day – hell, each moment – with presence, self-kindness, and good people to lift us when we inevitably falter.
The more I think and write about this, the more womxn I talk with about it, the more I realize that circles of womxn moving in solidarity are key to instigating change for us all. Key to taking back our culture, making it a more life-affirming, nourishing, respect-filled place to live.
Being a rebel crone is as much a feeling as an action or an attitude.
It’s the bone-deep memory of council fires where wild and woman voices wove to create wellbeing for a community.
It’s the echo in our cells of 13.8 billion years of growth and change and resilience.
Being a rebel crone isn’t just about redefining how aging or eldering is viewed in this culture, it’s writing an entirely new story about what these years mean and how they can be lived.
It’s about each woman defining her cronedom for herself. The rhythm of it. The ease and joy of it. The service and responsibility of it. The sacred space of it.
It’s not accepting ANY of the current myths or stereotypes for 50-ish women like…
- we must somehow stay eternally youthful
- we must quietly fade to invisibility as spent, useless husks
- we must be sweet, cooking-baking, there for everyone, no sense of self grannys
- the changes in our bodies make us less innovative, creative, courageous…
Coming together. Witnessing each other. Sharing our stories. Defying the invisibility imperative. That’s the antidote.
You and your story are the antidote.
What we did during the project
Shared stories and conversations throughout September 2019 meant to:
- nurture a truly thriving ecosystem of women, who are learning together, supporting each other, trying new things, creating and innovating, bringing unique dreams and perspectives into a world that might have otherwise lost these contributions.
- expand community for all of us involved. This can look like
- pooling our audiences and getting more eyes on our work and people on our mailing lists for the business owners among us.
- making connections and founding a local or virtual crones circle.
- feeling supported enough to start a project or take the first steps toward actualizing a long-held dream.
- finding the solidarity necessary to share your own rising crone story.
These are the amazing womxn who contributed to the conversation:
| Jo Casey | Susie Stonefield Miller | Angel Sullivan | Felicia Baucom | Jen Pavich | Jenny Mahan | Sandy Reynolds | Liz Applegate | Eli Trier | Tammy Takahashi | Edie Weinstein | Santina Kerslake | Cynthia Greb | Jennifer Perry | Robin Reichert | Rahima Warren | Tracy Ann Brooks | Marissa Polselli | Jo Hanlon-Moores | Janet Roper | Julia Barnickle | Nicola Humber | Karen Arthur | Sharon Zink | Tracie Nichols
Tracie Nichols 