Returning at the Turning: Autumn, Grief, and the Wisdom of the Crone

Sep 24

6 min read

It has been many months since I last wrote here. For a time, I took down not only this blog, but my website as well. I needed the quiet and to step away from the impulse to speak, teach, and make visible what was happening within me. I needed to listen. There are times when the most sacred thing we can do is become silent.

Silence helps to access something deeper that is trying to be heard, and we cannot hear Her if we are always filling the silence with our own words. So, I withdrew for a while. And in that time of withdrawal I listened, let go and grieved.

In recent weeks, I have been grieving the death of my beloved Lucy, my soul-dog, my faithful companion, and for so many years, the small heartbeat beside my own. Her absence has changed the landscape of my days and the feeling of my home. Anyone who has deeply loved an animal knows the particular silence their leaving creates. Familiar sounds disappear, small rituals of care that shaped the hours are suddenly gone, the beloved body that moved through the rooms of our life, that slept beside us, followed us, waited for us, and quietly witnessed our days, is simply no longer there. The yearning is both physical and spiritual. The body reaches for what the heart cannot yet comprehend is gone.

Losing Lucy has been profound. There has been an agony in it, moments when I have succumbed completely to the wailing of loss, discovering sounds of grief I did not know my body could make. I still reach instinctively for a small, warm body that is no longer there. And then comes the remembering; she is gone. Each remembering arrives like another wave, carrying me more deeply into the truth of the loss.

I understand that this grief is not separate from our love. It is one of its expressions. The depth of the sorrow reveals the depth of the belonging we shared. Even the sacrifices that came with loving her, especially as she grew old and needed more from me, now feel sacred.

What an extraordinary gift it was to belong to one another and what a profound privilege it is, even now, to grieve a love like that.

Leaving Community

But Lucy's death has not been the only grief I have been carrying. This season of my life has held other losses as well, some of them difficult to name publicly and some still unfolding within me. Most particularly, I have been grieving the loss of community, and the relationships that were held within that community. Places where I once experienced belonging no longer feel like home. Relationships I believed would accompany me further along the path have changed, fractured, or fallen away.

There is a particular grief in losing community because we do not lose only people. We lose shared language, rituals, histories, expectations and imagined futures. Sometimes we lose parts of our identity that were woven into our belonging there. I have had to learn that leaving, or being called to step away from, what no longer feels aligned does not mean that we do not grieve it. Discernment does not protect us from heartbreak. A boundary can be necessary and still carry sorrow.

And yet, some of this loss has also been welcome because emptying has brought clarity. I have become much more discerning about who can meet me as I am, and who cannot. I have become clearer about what I need in relationship, what reciprocity and allyship mean to me, and what I am no longer willing to abandon within myself to remain connected to others. I have come to see where my values, ethics and safe practices are not reflected within certain communities and individuals. And of course, there is grief in discovering that some people and communities cannot meet us where we have arrived but there is also freedom in no longer asking them to.

Perhaps this, too, is Autumn medicine. The falling away reveals what remains. And perhaps that is why returning now, as the Wheel turns toward Autumn, feels right.

The Season of Descent

Autumn does not ask us to reach for anything; in fact Autumn asks us to let go. Autumn asks us, what are you willing to release?

We live in a culture that is often uncomfortable with letting go and descent. We celebrate beginnings, growth, youth, achievement and expansion. We are considerably less comfortable with endings, aging, grief, uncertainty, darkness and death. But Goddess has never belonged only to the light; She is seed and blossom, and She is decay. She is both the full and dark moon. She is birth and She is death, and She is the great mystery through which one becomes the other.

Our journey toward darkness is an initiation, asking us to deepen in intimacy with ourselves, our shadow and our beautiful wholeness. In doing so we come to understand what we have been carrying that has become too heavy, where we have been asked or required to become too small, what relationships have completed their season and what dreams need to be released. We are asked to embrace the grief that needs our attention, understanding that grief is love when love has released its physical form.

It is a brave question to ask: Who am I when there is nothing left to hold onto?

There are answers that can only be found in silence and parts of ourselves that will only approach when we stop chasing them. And there is wisdom that cannot be acquired through striving, it must be ripened into.

The Crone at the Threshold

Perhaps this is why I find myself thinking so deeply about the Crone. The Crone is the woman who has loved and lost. She has made mistakes. She has survived betrayals and endings. She has buried dreams and sometimes beloved beings. She has watched seasons turn enough times to understand that nothing remains unchanged. And, if she is willing to be shaped by what she has lived, rather than hardened by it, she becomes a keeper of something our communities desperately need...The one who can hold both grief and gratitude at the same time and can cultivate the wisdom that comes with doing so.

Perhaps this is one of the sacred responsibilities of the Crone; to develop a heart large enough to hold both and a voice strong enough to share this wisdom. To grieve what has been harmed and lost in our families, our communities, our bodies, our relationships and our Earth and still notice the geese crossing the autumn sky, the beauty of leaves turning from green to orange, and lean into the silence that descends at this time of year.

What I Am Learning to Carry

I am entering this Autumn differently than I entered the last. There are things I no longer wish to carry and things I cannot carry even if I wanted to. And there are things I will carry forever.

Lucy is one of them. Love does not disappear because the beloved does. And nothing loved deeply leaves us unchanged. I am sitting with grief and gratitude, letting go as well as deepening, becoming quieter in my retreat and finding clarity for what wants to come forward.

I am listening more carefully for what is mine to offer now.

This website (whisperingearth.ca) has returned from that listening. I have spent time reshaping it so that it reflects more truthfully the work I feel called to offer at this stage of my life. Not everything that belonged to an earlier season needs to come forward with me.

That, too, is Autumn wisdom.

Grandmother Wisdom: