Way back in December of 2010, I was wondering “what next” in my long and peripatetic life. Softly, “the voice,” which I hear only rarely, usually at a crucial turning point, spoke, this time in answer to my question. The response, a mere whisper inside my left ear, one word, “Respond.”
So that’s what I did. I began to respond to events in the outside world, as well as offer ongoing and evolving perspectives on my own constantly evolving interpretation of events.
Meanwhile, I was also responding to events in the inner world, my own inner world, prompts from within that felt as or more imperative than those picked up from the outside.
The process getting that website going took about a month. By the end of January 2011, I was up and running, with that title, “exopermaculture,” i.e., on the outside of permaculture, which, to my mind, was a sort of joke, because, in at least my way of understanding permaculture, there is no outside. All realms of life contribute to “permanent culture,” micro to macro, personal to cultural, as well as, of course, the land-based nitty gritty of learning how nature works, how she lives and moves as an entangled, interpenetrating mass. “Permaculture principles” were created in an attempt to capture in words some of what Nature is and does, so as to help us humans learn how to work with her in seeding and producing abundance for all — and not just materially, but on every level and dimension.
Personally, I noticed myself more and more interested in the spiritual, cultural, sociological, and personal levels (or “zones”) of permaculture, and my exopermacutlure blog reflects those interests as well.
The idea of beginning again, occurred to me only as wordpress support flummoxed what I was doing a few days ago. Immediately, the idea of just putting up a site called www.annkreilkamp.net came up as obvious. It’s high time that I drop all identification with any label, even that of the august and, in some circles, “politically correct,” permaculture label. I need to operate in the world as a 78-year-old single sovereign human woman who brings a wealth of experience and — dare I say it? — hard-earned wisdom to share with others.
As before, I prefer to work homeopathically, infusing small potent doses of “medicine” into whatever area of life I currently focus on. I much prefer the examined life to the life of fame, and choose to remain largely under the radar, as with exopermaculture.com, not hooking up this site to any social media platform. Nor do I “optimize searches.” In other words, if you want to read my work then you have to know about this website (likely through word of mouth). That way I don’t encourage trolls, and my ego doesn’t get inflamed.
Short background: Ph.D. in philosophy 1972, Boston University. Full-time teacher, New College of California 1972-73, subsequently fired for being “too experimental” for that experimental college. Student, consultant, conference presenter, and author in astrology, 1976 to present. To date, have launched five independent magazines, one of which, Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001), helped to launch a cultural movement of consciously valuing the aging process. I have, under my belt, an enormous output of both published and unpublished work, dating back to my outrageous PhD dissertation (I had titled it, “This Is Not A Book About Wittgenstein,” but the dissertation committee retitled it), a written corpus which I am now in the process of archiving.
Despite this vast output, I’ve only committed one book to print, This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation.
In the next few years, I aim to have all the rest of it (at least 450 separate items) archived at Tendre Press, and available both as essays (with audios) and e-book essay collections.
Meanwhile, on this site, I offer my continuing response to the ongoing, accelerating human drama of our times.