“A Kiss for a Crone”
Joanne and I are celebrating her 50th birthday this week. Since it occurs near the Thanksgiving holiday, there is always a feeling of appreciation on various fronts. But this year there is something extra special to be thankful for, namely, this gift of Rose that continues to weave into the fabric of our lives. As many know, Jo began an energy exchange with the essence of Rose back in April, and it’s taken us a good six months to better understand and assimilate this multi-faceted experience into our marriage and family.
Jo began doing private readings for friends almost immediately, short ones at first, and then longer as she grew more comfortable and confident with the exchange. In October, she had a private session with our friend Joyce Kovelman. Since Joyce has Ph.D.s in psychology and neuroscience I was fascinated to observe Rose engage Joyce. After the eighty minute session, Joyce was so impressed that she offered to gift Joanne with a Crone Ceremony, a rite of passage for woman who are “around fifty years or older.”
Joyce had been honored with a Crone Ceremony on her 65th birthday, and wanted to transmit the experience to Joanne. As we are now entering a stage of life in which we’re old enough to be grandparents, our priorities and purpose are shifting accordingly. It is common in our culture to fear aging and death. In fact, we live in a culture that glorifies the beauty of youth over the wisdom of age. So we wanted to redefine this and use the Crone Ceremony to celebrate the arrival of the wisdom years, and simultaneously honor our ancestors. So many of us in the United States are dissociated from our family lineages, so the ceremony served as a way to reconnect with those who came before us, and helped to make our current lives possible.
Joyce offered to host the ceremony at her lovely house in Chatsworth, California, and since Jo’s mom comes out to visit this time of year from Evansville, Indiana, we held it this past weekend. Seventeen people attended physically, and about a dozen others participated virtually by sending Joanne best wishes and/or a gift to mark the occasion. The ceremony consisted of Joyce serving as a minister and going around the circle of participants two times. During the first, we all honored our ancestors and spoke the names of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents while lighting a votive candle. This is a wonderful practice, because it connects us to our family lineages in ways that pretty much have been lost in the United States, a country consisting of immigrants who left families behind in the “old country” and over generations have gotten out of touch with our roots.
In the second pass around the circle, we each took turns in walking up to Joanne, who was sitting on a “throne” of sorts, and honored her in whatever ways spirit moved us to. It was a very moving way to connect to her within our own small community. The final part was opening gifts and reading well wishes sent from as far as the UK, Canada, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Then we broke for a delicious catered dinner and desert.
I am including the lovely words Joanne read to close the ceremony since they capture the essence of the experience. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, so to speak, and even Jo was very emotional as she expressed her deep appreciation and gratitude for having so many wonderful things in her life.
“This ceremony has given me a great deal, from the moment Joyce suggested it. I want to thank you, Joyce, for this beautiful day, and for the opportunity to learn from you. You’re bringing into the world a sacred feminine lineage that is the heritage of all of us, regardless of gender, bloodlines or even written texts, for all knowledge is held safely in consciousness, available to all who hold the keys. I hope to continue in your footsteps of helping to birth a brave a new world.
“I honor my mother, for birthing me in physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual ways. I was born on a Saturday, like today. You’re here for my rebirth and are birthing me again, in important ways. I hope to make the best of the things you’ve instilled in me: a sense of creativity, of religion, of the sacredness in small things, and questioning authority. Thank you, Mom. I honor my father, who couldn’t be here today, physically speaking, but is here in spirit. I honor my fathers and grandfathers, because men are an important part of the process. I come from a long line of them!
“Thank you, Paul, for everything: your support, your love, and for allowing an additional person into our marriage. I’m so very grateful to have you in my life. Please say you’ll stay with me for another fifty years. (To which I replied, “If you’ll have me.”)
“To my friends and family, especially to you who knew how important it is to me, I’m so very honored by your presence and your many gifts today and always. I don’t feel completely deserving, but I’m working on that! Your being in my life helps me heal very deep parts of myself and your support is critical to me. I feel that I’m finally in the community that I’ve missed for most of my life, so my relief and gratitude goes very deep. That’s why I wanted this day to be extra special.
“When I got to thinking about today, I wanted it to be wonderful in every way, and to include the symbols that communicate its mystery and meaning. I knew this is what Joyce meant when she said to “make it mine.” My chair is decorated with pictures of birds, animals, and trees, to represent all the things of nature, to be respected and protected as if they were all my own children. And in many ways, they are.
“The food and beverages represent joy, abundance and communion in the most sacred sense. The cake symbolizes my self that I share with you, with colors and patterns representing my Sumilda jester and Borledim nurturer selves. When you eat the cake, which is chocolate with chocolate mousse filling by the way, representing the Goddess, symbolically you are bringing my self, my body, my intent, into your own. Interesting imagery eh? But why not represent the sharing of myself in my community? Why not emulate the great traditions of the Egyptians with their depictions of Osiris and Isis, and the Catholic traditions of the body of Christ? Why not savor me, and my greater self, or any other individual in our world? Doing so acknowledges my presence, my intentionality, my gifts to you, and my purpose in life: to share the truth of our divinity and nurture the world. We are all divine and we can share our fealings [a neologism fast becoming a trademark of Rose which 
combines the words “feel” and “real”] about ourselves in ways could be found truly heretical. Let us work and play together to recreate these traditions in ways that take the best of the best, finding sacred in the secular, in the average and every day, assuring that the knowledge of sacredness of all things is imbued in our every breath. What a sweet thing that is, and what a better way to celebrate than to stop and smell the roses?
“And then, of course, there are the roses. I’ve always been a little crazy about roses, since discovering them in my mother’s and grandmother’s gardens, playing among them, doing what would be considered the best form of worship: having fun. And the roses bloomed for us in a big way this April, when I got the great teacher that I’d petitioned for in consciousness. Her loving presence has led me on a most magical, healing journey that has helped me make sense of my life, make pieces fit, to resolve issues in most poetic ways, and to be a better person. I not only have discovered this channeling gift, but realized how it has always been mine, and that it will always be. Because I know she’ll never leave me.
“And so, I wish to honor my realization of Her, my sweet Lord, my Lover, my Reverend Mother, my Rose. Words can’t express the gratitude I feel for having Her in my life the way I do now. The only way I can do that is to share Her with you, and to help you remember that your Roses, your essences, are always there for you, too. It’s merely a matter of knowing how to hear them and act in the world. And that is my bliss, my intention, my gift, and my vow, until I take my last breath: to help anyone with the desire to connect most directly with essence, to do so. And I know what we’ll discover together: ourselves—our greater selves who were always there, always will be—and in the remembrance of that, there is no need to fear.
“And so I share the Roses with you to symbolize your connection with me, with all of us, with essence, with Rose, and with All-That-Is, because this is what I’m learning: that you are me, and I am you. You are my teachers as well as Rose, as are the beautiful flowers, trees, birds, and creatures of the world. I look forward to a long and wonderful life with you, my friends and family. Thank you.”
What made the event even more special was the fact that Jo held her first public Rose session after dinner, and was well received. Rose opened with some comments and then opened the floor to questions. It lasted just over an hour, and we’ll transcribe the session and make it available in the coming weeks, along with some pictures and video.
Finally, I wanted to include links to a special DVD I made to honor Joanne and her transition into the Crone stage of her life. We weren’t able to watch it at the ceremony due to a technical glitch, so I wanted to make it available because it further expresses the way of spirit we brought to this wonderful rite of passage. It’s called A Kiss for a Crone, and consists of various pictures we’ve taken in the past two years on vacations in California and Maui, as well as some Kosmic images that express the imagery in the lyrics of the original song by Seal.
Broadband (Best Viewed in Windows Media Player):
http://www.cafemuse.com/newworldview/videos/Kiss_for_a_Crone.mpg
56K Modem (Real Video):
http://www.cafemuse.com/newworldview/videos/Kiss_for_a_Crone.rv
(Most of the above pictures were shot by Gail Becker who also made Jo a lovely album and presented them to her a couple days later. Thanks Gail!)