What If We Aspired to Become Crones?

Embracing Our Faces, Our Shapes, Our Elder Strength

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“Something yesterday made me want to draw a crone who is not trying to be younger in any way.”

That’s my friend Donna Druchunas describing her drawing, above: Elder Strength. Don’t you love the tiny dumbbells? They look like my weights nowadays.

“Maybe it was all of the ideas in our society on how to stay young longer and how aging is not normal,” she continues. “It’s normal. Every part of life is normal. I want to embrace my cronehood with abandon and not try to… pretend I’m still young on the outside or the inside.”

A comics artist, Donna writes and draws a delightful new Substack series called Musings of a Crone.

“I’m here for the warrior women, the wise old crones, the powerful witches, the ones who won’t go back,” she writes. “I’m here to imagine a better future so we can build it together.”

I want to surround myself with positive, visionary women like Donna who are committed to being and becoming our wise, strong, vulnerable, tiny-weight-lifting selves.

Fortunately, Donna is in my crone group. Are you in a crone group? It’s a thing. Or should be.

We call our group Just Us Crones. We are female artists and writers over age sixty. We’ve been meeting monthly (and almost daily, via text) for two years. It’s like the feminist consciousness raising groups of yore – but with a focus on female aging and, in our case, creativity. I’ll tell you more about Just Us Crones another time.

Speaking of time, the word crone comes from the word chronus, meaning time. Crones are people who have gained wisdom through life experiences.

Others say crone comes from the word crown or corona.

Still others say crone comes from the Anglo-French charoine, meaning dead flesh or carrion. While this definition sounds suspiciously like an ageist/sexist insult depicting old women as bitter, sinister, and ugly — and probably is — the truth is, old women are in fact approaching a time when their flesh will disintegrate.

Many ancient religious practices involve meditating on skulls or skeletons to absorb the reality of one’s own inevitable death. If crones are women who develop wisdom over time, human mortality is surely one thing they (we?) come to understand.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, redefines crone as "the one who sees far, who looks into the spaces between the worlds and can… see what is coming, what has been, and what is now."¹

Crones come in all colors. This one, below, painted by

Debra Lee Babcock

, is wearing a bird crown or headdress as depicted in ancient images of queens, goddesses and other leaders from Egypt, Greece, the Americas, and elsewhere.

Solstice Crone by Debra Lee Babcock

Now, back to Donna. Here’s a self-portrait:

Note the similarity to her first image: the “crone who is not trying to be younger.” Note the unsmiling mouth, lined skin, distant stare, messy hair, fancy, gold “Crone” necklace. How can you not love this person?

Here’s one of my own crone self-portraits. I’m standing on the edge of a pool, covered only by a bathing suit. If you’re a swimmer, you know this vulnerability: almost naked in public, imperfect body on display.

The red kickboards on the far side of the pool: things we can lean on – even when we go “kicking and screaming” toward old age.

The life preserver on the right: the desire to stay afloat.

The clock in the middle: a pace clock, to help swimmers maintain the same speed over certain distances, even as they tire. The clock’s promise? That if a swimmer stays on pace, she will be rewarded with rest.

Spoiler alert: Over time, one’s pace slows down, and one needs more rest.

A white-haired, wrinkly crone contemplates all of that as she faces the water, goggles in hand.

Soon, she will jump in.

Then, at whatever pace suits her ever-evolving body, she’ll immerse herself in the eternal buoyancy of water. And swim.

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• More about Donna’s Substack and Donna’s artwork.

• More about

  Debra Lee Babcock
  ’s artwork.

• More crone artwork by Maria Lassnig in Rona Maynard’s

  Amazement Seeker

• “What it means to travel through time in a human body — at every phase of life”: Oldster Magazine by Sari Botton.

• Alice Neel’s famous self-portrait at age 80

Related Stronger Women essays:

• Recovery: A Love Story: Swimming Through Rough Waters with a Lifelong Friend

  A lifeguard saw us as two old, frail women. We knew better.

• Dear Reader: On Strength and Vulnerability: When combined, these qualities can become a north star guiding us through life.

• Do I Look Like a Water Aerobics Person? &
  A Funny Thing Happened When I Stopped Resisting
  A two-part story of my athletic identity crisis at the pool.

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1. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola (2011). The Power of the Crone: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype