Ok so the title of this pieces comes from the stages of a woman’s life and once past menopause she can embrace being a Crone. Crone has bad connotations. She is seen as the wicked witch in fairy tales, as bad tempered and disappointed with life, as old and wrinkled. Well I am seeing myself and other friends as we move into this third stage of life finding our calling, being able to get on and do what we want. We have reach a point where our children are independant or becoming that way. They need us less and less. But also we are starting to be bold and to step out. The fear has gone. It’s like nothing can hold us back.
I know I will speak for myself because I can really only speak for me but with this whole Barefoot At The Kitchen Table stuff. I could not have done it 10 years ago. Why? Well not just because I was home schooling 2 children but because I would not have been brave 
enough. Today I was on local radio – blogged here Radio Tudno – so I won’t repeat it. A couple of weeks ago I went to a local arts community centre to talk about what I do. I spoke clearly and competently. I was not fazed by anything. I know a few years ago, even though I would have tried to be confident I would have been talking too fast and messing up what I was going to say. I do still talk fast. I’m a person who will always talk fast because I have a lot of words in my head that really only become sentences when they fall out of my mouth so I have to say them fast to give them chance to organise themselves 🙂 Tomorrow I’m off to talk about what I do with a local conference centre that’s opening in April. Again a few years ago I would not have been bold enough to do this.
But it’s not just me. A home schooling friend of mine, who’s children are flying the nest, has been able to get more and more involved in her passion for no-dig gardening and will 
be publishing a book about it all soon. Another person who not only found her passion as her children moved on but, like myself, the doors seemed to open then. And there is another friend of a similar age who is now off on mission journeys into India, to the Calais Jungle and on the streets of the town where she lives. Again like myself and my gardening friend she’s up and ready for it but like us both she is starting to make connections with the right people, move in the right circles, be bold enough to step out.
I am sure there are more who are reaching this third stage, this crone stage, who may not be embracing the name crone but are embracing the fact that now they are releasing their children they can fly too. It is exciting to be chasing dreams. I’m pleased it’s not just me but that I have some travelling companions, even if they are doing it their different fields.
Perhaps that is why crones were seen as witches – 
because now they can fly unhindered 🙂
So Sunday I was at the Open day for Gwrych Castle. The theme was Halloween, as it is at this time of the year. Something we can either accept, ignore or try to fight against. For me, as a Christian, I did get some flax about getting involved in something that was centred around Halloween. Did I think about that first of and pray hard? To be perfectly honest – No! I was so excited to be asked to go and do some story telling – something I love doing but haven’t had much opportunity to do ever. Yes I did read to my children when they were small and they loved it. I have read at times but not often enough. So for me the excitement of being asked over road anything deeper than that. :)
introduced to them because Mark, who heads up the Gwrych Trust likes people to know each other. Also these guys were planning on taking my photo at some point during my story telling to see if I had a ghost presence around me. So I chatted to them and asked what it was all about. Well it is all very spiritual and it gave me the opportunity to chat about being a Christian and the spirituality of that. Hey there’s a lot I don’t understand and who’s to say that all these spiritual things are evil?
judgemental Christian worse than the exploring spiritual person. And I’m just hoping God can do something with the words I was able to share.
well as wanting to put some other thoughts on paper/blog/laptop about our time in Iceland which I haven’t had time to do yet.
would try something new. I’m feeling a bit down. I had a bit of a not reprimand but just a feeling of screwing up when I sent out an advertising for my writing workshops on a new email group I’m part of. It left me a bit low. Also we are having our first long time Airbnb guests after the hard work guests of a couple of weeks ago. I am feeling apprehensive.
ages ago about how much easier it is to get down about something than up. The analogy was of someone standing on a chair and someone else reaches up to them and of how it is much easier for someone to pull the other person down off the chair than it is for the one on the chair to pull someone up. Down is an easier place to go.
Oh I’ve just given myself the pep talk I should have earlier on 🙂 I do need to remember that I am a writer and that is how I think. I love walking with the dog and talking to God as I go but actually when it comes to sorting out life, etc then I do need to write. Which brings me to the question of that self-belief but also self-knowledge. We all have to know how we can problem solve that works best for us as individuals. If I walk and talk and think I get somewhere but when I write I get answers. For other people it is the other way round. But again this comes from self-belief. In fact I walked out of a craft day put on by a lovely new friend of mine, Dee of 
Airbnb community forum. Well what an amazing bunch of people. No one made me feel daft for having let them stay and everyone who responded to my post was helpful. Airbnb said that unfortunately they could not take the review down because it didn’t quite break their guidelines. But with the help of the online community from around the world I was able to put up a succinct response to the review which actually, so the community said, took the sting out of the review and gave me the higher ground. And also helped others to see that here was someone just ranting. But it took me a while to potter through all this and come out feeling ok.
true and I did not like someone saying things that were untrue. As always timing is amazing and I was meeting with my spiritual director and so I told him all this. His response was that we all feel like that, which I sort of know to be true, and that it was ok.
glass and oscillate, as most of us do, between feeling like glass is half empty or half full. Or I can go to that total place of letting go where I am happy to give away everything in my glass and wait for the Holy Spirit to fill it.
helped as did various open and honest posts on Facebook from my daughter, from a friend whose total openness about his struggle with his sexuality was amazing, but not just that but the love with which his friends responded. As well as friends I have who are willing to let me be myself and my spiritual director, and my time being able to walk with my dog and think and ponder with God. And also we have just had two Airbnb guests who’ve stayed who have been totally lovely and have reminded me why we do this. So it is by community that we survive and can choose.
Oh I am so rubbish at setting boundaries. I find it so difficult. Maybe I wasn’t taught well as a child? Maybe very few of us get taught how to do it? Anyway it seems that this is the journey I am on at the moment – learning how to set boundaries calmly and firmly without losing it!
pickle being firm to people in my house. But it was so hard.
There are some amazing books out there about setting boundaries – which I have read – but actually it isn’t till you have to set them, and then have opposition to them that you realise how you are. Oh yes it is easy for me to set boundaries whether with the Airbnb rooms (yes we are up to 2 now) or with the writing workshops when people are playing ball with them, or even if they give them a bit of a push but when I say “No that’s it” they affirm me. The Airbnb guest being aggressive toward me upset me. Not because he had done it but because I realise how fragile I am about holding on to my boundaries.
publish something on my blog and so I that is also my boundary for me and my writing today.
What is enough? This fits in with my post on 
worked in well paid jobs, have a house with land in Surrey/Hampshire, must have pensions – probably salary linked ones – and yet they worry about their retirement that they will not have enough. Yes they do go on holiday and have nice things but they worry. They don’t have enough. I also know people on benefits who don’t have enough, who get into debt, who’s children go hungry.
have much or little. I’m not sure I am and sometimes when I have more then I worry about having enough more than when I have little.
down to other things I go by “feel”. So if someone asks to meet me I first of all go by gut instinct and only after I’ve met them and want to go further with what they have said, and actually only if I feel like I have connected, do I research the subject and then the person. I discovered that, for me, to try to research something beforehand leaves me jaded and uninterested. Something has to have piqued my interest first.
I should have known I was a researcher years ago. When I first became a Christian I read every book I could lay my hands on in regard to what I was now believing and read my Bible 2-3 times a year (not boasting, just showing what sort of researcher I am!) for the first few years, wanted to go on every course and conference, just wanted to know. When I had my children I bought nearly every child rearing book I could and then borrow from the library. And the same as they grew older. I think I’ve got lazier but maybe not.
For a while I have fancied running creative writing workshops, especially after I started the Creative Writing For Therapeutic Purposes MSc. I have loads of thoughts and plans and ideas written all over the place and half baked ideas for websites. It was some of the reason I started this blog; to get an online presence that I liked.
Aspirational Adventures 