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Ah, between the Mother and the Crone stage just feels like the exact right place to add the “extra years of longevity.”

Being a maiden and coming of age in the 60’s was wild and wonderful and wounding and disorienting as I felt the sacred power of sexuality in myself but was ill met by men for whom the sexual revolution just meant lots more of the same use of the female body for pleasure, not ecstasy nor sacred epiphany.

I certainly would not add the extra years to the Maiden stage.

Motherhood was a time to face again all the unconscious material in my past and psyche, so I didn’t bequeath my dysfunction to my daughters. It was a rich time of growth for me, of going inward to find my Self but staying grounded in the world, so I could love and guide my daughters. Single mother that I was, wounded woman that I was, motherless child that I was, becoming the Mother was a huge accomplishment for me. And I am grateful for the dearness of it, and grateful, too, that it continues in a part-time fashion as I try to figure out how to mother adult daughters.

Still, I would not add more years to the primary Mother stage of life. I lived it fully.

But the Crone came fast upon me. I welcomed the armored protection of my silver hair and visored invisibility granted by my wrinkles! I imagine many women do.

But I have been bewildered as my wisdom energy reached out into the world, as Joan notes, to mentor the younger ones while my crone energy of prayer and meditation and of sitting in the cave of my Self in the cauldron of the beginning and the ending competed with my out-in-world energy. I have begun to find some container, some organization for this stage of life through the Queen’s seven stages of the life journey of Mary Magdalene as presented in the prayer Margaret Starbird wrote for the Mary Magdalene rosary. It feels like the equivalent to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.

Now this new paradigm from you and the addition of the Queen phase to the former three-fold pattern feels gorgeous and confirming to me.

What beautiful, wise work you’ve done to bring this phase in, to bring back into consciousness what it is to be a Queen and not just a paramour. It’s like finding a secret door in my psyche, opening it, and discovering a gigantic light-filled throne room, full of queens and with room for all of us!

And as the maiden and the mother remain within the queen, the crone is present there also — ensconced and marvelous, peering out and peering in. She, too, will have her way with me in time, and I will welcome her.

But, “Eh, I’m not dead yet!” (Monty Python)

Thank you!
Sandra

Burl

I thought about using Sovereign rather than Queen, but others are already using Queen. It felt important to honor their work by keeping the same name.

Our current edition of Moondance — Winter, 2008 — highlights the Sovereign aspect in all of us. Here’s our definition of Sovereign, which is just another name for Queen:

SOVEREIGN – A woman who is not afraid to shoulder responsibilities and possesses the capability to make solid decisions on behalf of others. She assumes stewardship as a natural part of life, working earnestly to improve her family and her community. As a leader, she strives to lead her followers toward prosperity and fulfillment. She possesses the ability to create order out of chaos and often achieves the authority to implement personal values in myriad ways. When faced with jeopardy, she uses her wisdom to return order and harmony to life.

Every woman needs to embrace and celebrate this aspect of herself. Although Queen is discussed here as a stage of life, each of us embodies the Sovereign at every stage of our lives.

I like your idea of the “queen phase” of life, it feels very natural to the way women are feeling about ourselves these days. I’ve noticed that even when we don’t feel politically sympathetic to modern monarchy, the queens are still fascinating.The likely reason is that the sense of authority and respect and stature the queen has feel like something we know we deserve in our everyday life. And they also carry the aura of the spiritual authority that they once had “in days of yore”. Also, queens have a relationship to the Earth consciousness that is expressed in gems, their crowns enhancing their earthy connection to the energies of “the other world”. We know that from the way healers use gems to rebalance body energy systems towards a freer and more confident expression of one’s self. Maybe those queens knew a thing or two about their jewels!

I love Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book Crones Don’t Whine in which she identifies 13 attitudes and qualities of the crone stage. I won’t go through them all but the #1 is “Crones don’t whine” and I think that’s one of the hardest changes to accomplish in moving into the queen and crone time of life. As a therapist of many years I am so aware of the need to “whine” in earlier times of life when you’re trying to figure out your true self from the created self, whining can lead to good realizations about what you really want. But things change in mid-life when it’s time to carry a sense of wisdom and authority and to mentor younger women. It can become kind of poisoning to whine too much because we need to see “the queen” accepting her life and going forward confidently to more and more creative satisfaction.

The other rule about the “queen era” of life that I like is #4, “Crones trust what they know in their bones”. By the time we’re queen-age we’ve really learned the hard way to trust our instincts and intuition, haven’t we? How many times have you said, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that!” or ” I had a feeling about….”. Guiding our life by feeling and intuition become the only true path because we’ve generally figured out that doing things by society’s norms will only make us sick…literally. We become less shy about our intuition, don’t we? Such a relief.

I love the Queen stage. “Protector of her land and people”.

Thanks for creating the space to talk about Her.

Joan
http://www.MaryMagdaleneWithin.com