Maiden...Mother....CRONE! (Part 1...Maiden)

Crone.  That word has become so much a part of my life that I think I must say it in my sleep (lol).  We've discussed the word Witch but what about the word "Crone"?  It brings to mind a cratchety (word?) old woman, bent with time, walking with a stick with the wrinkles of time wearing on her face.  But why must this be a negative thing?  It has become so because that is what society gives it.

To show you what the word Crone means to this writer I am giving you a peek into a book that I am in the process of writing "She Were Three".  This is the "Maiden" part and only by understanding THIS can we understand the rest.

The mirror in those days showed a long thick mane of wheat-coloured hair.  Her Rubinesque figure was firm, her body strong, not yet marred by illness or even childbirth and her mind, a sponge, hungering for every drop of knowledge that she could glean from the books in the musty-smelling libraries, fro the others that she heard at the festivals, sitting at the bonfire, their heads bowed together.  Nobody paid her much attention but she felt the stirring in her body and in her heart that only the change of the moon and of the seasons, only the pull of the waves of the ocean and the rush the winds and the attraction of man to woman could cause.  Darkness and brilliant light existed in the same space.  Silence and deafening sound in the same note of music and suddenly a knowing came over her as what she heard, what she read and what she felt came together in one glorious word whispered in her senses and in her spirit --Magic!

It started with history.  She read musty-smelling tomes in her school Men who stood in judgement of a small the village where the ways of getting to the truth was pulling gentle people from the arms of their families and found ways to make human suffering that would force words from their lips that were never the truth but were confessions giving them the right to inflict pain on others.

Children who point the fingers at adults and white haired men who ordered horrendous evils that human capabilities offend.

As she read these words she felt a wetness in her eyes and a horror welling up in her chest and to her throat.  she felt a connection that she had never felt before.  Not in the school where teachers droned on about the alleged history of her country--not in the church that her Mother insisted she attend.  Not with friends of her own age that tittered on about clothes and boys and other uninteresting activities that happened daily around her.

This connection called to her spirit at the level of her soul. These spirits called to her and her heart heard them.  The words she read be ame her own memories and yet she knew not how this was possible.  She was a maiden and not near old enough to have experienced the hateful things that her heart remembered.  As she closed the books and replaced them on the shelf her hands shook.

As the woman that she had become so many years later summoned these memories it became as if she were experiencing them now.  She felt a young woman's full breast as she held the heavy books to them, making her way slowly to the hidden corner of the school library that held the barely-used texts.  She beheld them with a child's wonder surprised at the pull they had to her soul and she felt the youthful strength of conviction as she solemnly vowed a committment to the memory of these souls lost to a belief that they had broken a promise never made.

The old woman and the young were one yet could have been separate individuals learning together connected by a third.

(Copyright 2011 by Aradia LeCrone not to be reprinted without express written permission)