Fire and Water: Purifying the Fledgling Crone
While I've been playing around in peri-menopause for a while now, I hadn't been particularly bothered by hot flashes or night sweats. I'd get a little heat rash under my breasts that would move up to my face and be gone almost as quickly as it came on. I had one or two night sweats that ended in shivering. I thought I'd gotten off easy. I mean, sure, I was still having periods, but they were getting more and more irregular, so I thought I was lucky. My Mom experienced the worst of the worst in terms of the fire and water of peri-meno, and I said a prayer of gratitude that it wasn't my lot.
Flash forward (see what I did there?) to about 1 month ago. I looked at my calendar and realized I hadn't had a period in a few months. Longest space between that I'd really had so far. And I swear to you, within a day of that calendar check, I experienced my first full hot-flash. It started at my belly and crawled up over my face and right up to the roots of my hair. Pulse. Pulse and.....gone. A sheen of sweat layered my skin. That night, I had another one. It woke me up and had me kicking off covers and stripping off my tank-top. Pulse. Pulse and...gone. Another sheen of sweat. And the shivers. Suddenly I was freezing.
Morning came.
And another burning. And then another drowning and freezing.
And they haven't stopped. I have, since that first biggie, had about 6 of these a day - fairly evenly split between waking and sleeping. It doesn't help even a tiny bit to be living in a camper that is currently parked in Texas, which is experiencing unseasonably hot days and nights. I feel like I haven't been able to regulate my temperature in ages, and I'm so sticky, I'm sure I'd make a nice glue-stick. It's awful.
And weird. Wyrd.
And kind of interesting to think about when I'm not in the middle of stripping or piling on clothes.
And for me, because I'm me, it's a spiritual thing. How could it not be?
It is Fire. It is Water. It is the 2 great purifiers working in concert. On me. On my body. On my fledgling Crone self.
Now, look. I'm an educated person who understands that this is hormonal. My reproductive years are at a close (which is fine - I didn't do much with them anyway), and the hormone balance in my body is currently way off center. I get it.
But I just can't leave it there.
You see, I am driven. I am driven to shed. I am driven to get down to the core of the thing. I am driven to burn all the way to the deepest nature of being and to wash away the residual goo that blurs my vision. I have always been driven this way. Everything has meaning. Everything is a part of the process of getting more open, more intuitive, more connected, more Wise, and when things don't seem to be a part of this process, I make them a part of it. It's how I move in the world. And so this.... This time between that time and the next time. This time between my Queendom and my Cronedom is the burning time. It is the washing, rinsing, drowning time.
Maybe looking at it this way sounds a little crazy to you. That's okay. For me, it's actually about NOT being crazy. Finding meaning in the discomfort and discovering the magic in the heat and the slick oily sweat helps me navigate. I believe that knowing what we need...whether it's meaning making, synthetic hormones, or a nice bit of holy basil tea is a piece of what makes us wise. It is a part of what helps us Become...Come into Being the wise elders, the magical crone-witches, the medicine womyn that we need in our lives and that our world community needs us to be.
If you are interested in talking about and discovering what it means to become and to be a Wise Crone, I hope you'll join our new community, Midwifing the Crone on the Mighty Network. Registration opens on October 31, 2022. You can read more about the community HERE, and you are welcome to reach out with questions HERE. I'd love to hear from you.