The Wise Crones Sing Over My Bones

Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

Under the World Tree, my sister-crones, the narns, the weird sisters, the fates of every stripe close in, shoulder touching shoulder, circling my moldering corpse. I nestle my brittleness into the rounded bottom of the black cauldron, the Great Mother’s womb, and the weird sisters pour in the singing waters.

Through our single eye, I’ve watched this moment approach, a step closer every year. I’ve traced the threads of my life’s story through their tapestry with a finger, skimming the warp and weft of the weave. Still, I kicked and scratched against the inevitable, my heart filled with useless questions. But who will I be, once I’m dead?After 25 years of teaching high school English, I retired two years ago. I loved my kids, and mostly, they returned the favor by moving into my heart and making a mess in there. When I wasn’t big enough, they excavated, renovated, removed walls to create more light and space, dug a new basement, put in picture windows, and added a second floor. And like the young of every species, not all of them survived to adulthood.

Dear One, thank you for your love.

My whole career, I wanted to become someone else. In dreams, I’d transform into the Holy Grail: a writer with a pension. Graduation after graduation, I’d smile in tearful photos, hug my beloved kids, and nod my respect to proud parents who had managed to keep their teens off the streets, out of gangs, and otherwise protect them from the big bad wolf. “Hey!” I’d joke. “When can I graduate from high school?

“Come with us to college,” they’d say.

In 2010, Kay Ryan, then poet laureate, spoke at USC, and after school, I walked across Jefferson Boulevard to see her. She spoke about why she taught remedial English at a Community College rather than working at a prestigious University. “While my colleagues’ students are writing twenty-page research papers, we are working on,” and here she paused, “the paragraph.” In the back of the room, I gasped: Oh no! I’ve done this all wrong. Still, it took me ten more years to go. Children can be so sticky.

I have a word problem for you. If Susan has 1 section of AP Lit and 1 of AP Lang, and an additional AP Psych, plus 2 sections of senior Expository Comp and 1 of Creative Writing, with over 30 kids in each class, who is going to read all that shit?

Answer: No one. Susan finally let go.

Dear One, thank you for all you have done.

I spent the last four years at a continuation high school, the last chance saloon for all the at-risk kids who had slid through every crack like a Dali clock - the hurt ones who carry multiple wounds, refugees from the wars: civil, racism, misogyny, gang and cartel violence, and the familial domination whose chief weapon is shame. And yes, sometimes these traumas turned into behavior, but mostly, I could sit beside them, tell the truth, and they would meet me there - teacher, mom, social worker, grief or suicide prevention counselor, whomever they needed on the day.

As I’m sure you know, being with someone’s trauma isn’t about what you say. It’s about presence. And yes, we also worked on the paragraph, speaking, and reading in English. Those kids made even bigger messes in the heart. And when they graduated, it was an even bigger celebration. And no, they didn’t all survive their childhoods either.

Dear one, thank you for all you have given.

I finally obtained the Grail, but for two years after I retired, that fishhook easily yanked me back. Last semester, I resumed full responsibility for my old classroom as though I’d never left. They’d had one 30-day sub after another, and well, I couldn’t say no. I joked that subbing was all the best parts of teaching and none of the onerous ones - no meetings, no professional development, and no phone calls from administrators seeking to delegate their stress. Heaven, right?

But this August, when the phone rang, something in me refused. While my mind was adding up the extra money, my heart was saying, “No, no, no, no.” Finally, LAUSD got the message and stopped calling. In that silence, I began to decompose.

For weeks, I walked around sniffing the fear of death on the wind, recoiling from the stench of decay coming from my own flesh, watching the grief rise to my eyes without spilling over. I wrote about the Underworld, about being at the bottom of a muddy well, about eating my own shadow with a spoon. I offered my willingness to feel it all, to surrender to what is, to die to my old self. Nothing shifted. My surrender carried the expectation of liberation - too transactional. Okay, I whined toward those pesky Weird Sisters, but who doesn’t want suffering to end?

And the Fates sang over the loss of my beloved country, too, reducing us all to a gelatinous goo.

The view from inside the regenerative cauldron

One outrage after another shut down all our systems, our vital organs ceasing to function. We will never be the naive and complicit populace we once were. Even if we are reborn, it will be as a new expression, for surely the old one is dead.

I scrolled the cultural chemo. As we descended into autocracy, I read Christopher Armitage and watched Aaron Parnas. I marched, I prayed, I donated, I grieved. Still, the National Guard, the Marines, and the Paul Blart Gestapo occupied my city, then spread their malignancy to DC, now Chicago, coming soon to a civil war theater near you—corruption en plein air, tariffs metastasizing at the grocery store and everywhere else. Greedy bastards wink and nod over insider trading, because it’s not really about money; this is about domination. Money keeps score. And this, on top of two wars, a genocide or six, and the wanton destruction of agencies we depended on, the mining of Social Security data by people with no clearance, the cuts to Medicaid, the on and on and on and on.

Now, it’s your time to rest.

The Fates threw another log on the fire, then another. Notes stirred, and flames spat. Melodies twined through the root system of our World Tree. A fungal circle of magic sprouted. Harmonies clung to the branches, the breeze whispering unsentimental love. Between the worlds, at the bottom of the cauldron, a pile of bones in tattered rags lay, their marrow rendered. Bone soup.

The aroma tickled my nose. I sat up, wiped the tears, sniffled, and laughed.

And the Weird Sisters cackled, full-throated and kind, because they know the sweetness of the moment when fear and resistance finally give way to acceptance. The one with the all-seeing eye took my hand as I stepped over the lip and into her swaddling arms.

In the oldest stories about the end of the world, the last image is a green shoot ferning her head from the blackest soil. The world does not end. It dies and is reborn, just as we do.

If the weight of your world is heavy, here’s a link to the Santa Barbara Threshold Choir, singing to the presence of death in three-part harmony: Oohs and all. Lay back, nestle, a blanket is nice—press play. Curl into the fetal position. Close your eyes. Let the mother crones sing over your bones. Become bone soup.

If you read this far, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. Restack, please, if you were moved. Subscribe if you'd like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you are able to. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.