The Crone Awakening Wisdom (CAW) gathering was a tremendous success. My daughter-in-law Sue drove me 9 hours down to the mountains of North Carolina through driving rain the entire time, including white knuckling it through a canyon where they are fixing the road that washed out with a fairly recent hurricane, and so on.

I was struck by just how authentic women are when we gather together, especially older women, women who’ve “been around the block” and have nothing more to prove. By turns hilarious and deeply serious, every scheduled event, whether it was my 7-member Wisdom Circle meeting once each day, or our morning Story-Telling times, or Friday evening’s  “Honoring the Elders” ceremony (13 of us, over 80, with one 94), or Saturday evening’s “Murder by Chocolate” followed by “Folies” — we retired each day bleary-eyed, exhausted, and utterly thrilled for this annual opportunity to gather, in this case, “Together We Rise,” the theme of the gathering.

I was especially moved by how many women came up to me personally to say how they had always wanted to meet me, on and on and on. By the fact that I DO indeed have “celebrity status” in this crone movement to bring her back into this culture to take her rightful place as a Woman of Wisdom, or at least as a woman who has lived long enough to know that she knows nothing, but that she feels everything, all of it, not just her own feelings, but those within her reach as well, while having learned how, also, through rough times, to hold her own, to maintain her boundaries.

And why do I have celebrity status? Because I had the temerity, back in 1989, to follow the long-term direction of a numinous Dream: of Raven, clawing on my shoulders, cawing “Wake Up! It’s time!

And what’s amazing to me now, is to see the word Crone, if you search for it on google. . .

I took no photos at the gathering, though I’m sure there will be photos incoming on the Crone Awakening Wisdom website. I just asked daughter-in-law Sue to email me one photo, of the glorious sight that met our eyes one early morning when we looked east over the top of The Mountain,” where we were gathered.