AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I was born Ann Renee Kreilkamp at 8:02 am CWT, on December 19, 1942 in a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas, the first-born and first-daughter of a tall, young Army flight surgeon and his attractive wife who had trained as a nurse. Nine months later, my father shipped out to the Phillippines. That abruptly left me and my weeping, pregnant mother with her parents in Minnesota.
I came into this life a headbanging “double Sagittarian” (Sun and Ascendant in Sagittarius), extremely fiery and high-spirited. My grandfather actually had to nail the crib to the floor, to prevent me from scooting it around the room. The contrast between my robust, exuberant nature and my mother’s continued fear and depression must have felt excruciating for both of us. She has often told me that I would laugh and sing to try to make her happy. I needed her to mother me, but she felt too preoccupied and dispirited.
In my early 20s I would experience my mother’s side of this poignant family dynamic, when I felt isolated, depressed, and preoccupied, and unable to wholeheartedly mother my own two children.
On August 6, 1945, a month prior to my father’s return, and at not quite three-years-old, I awakened to a global perspective. Later I would imagine that this epiphany occurred to me while a toddler on my mother’s lap, watching adults respond with shock, joy, and relief to a radio report of the bombing of Hiroshima. For them the war was over. For me, it had just begun.
From then on, night terrors and crimson explosions filled my nights. During the day I only pretended to play. Whenever a large plane rumbled overhead my little body steeled in fright under a weight that I knew would end my life as the world itself ended — unless I personally could prevent it.
I did not release this childish and magical thinking until November, 1998, in a little temple on the outskirts of Karnak, Egypt, where the ancient goddess Sekhmet summarily informed me that I was a “puny human” and that war was her problem, not mine. I was 55 years old and, as dawn broke over the Nile the next morning, I realized that I had been reborn. (See Essays, under Travel, “Meeting Sekhmet”).
Then, on Dad’s return in September, 1945, my world suddenly changed. Within six months he had broken my spirit as he reasserted his position as “the boss.” This darkening of the light lasted until, at 26-years-old and a graduate student in philosophy, I reawakened to a sense of my own unique self and instigated an open, terrible and festering, 30-year war between us.
In 1948, we left Minnesota for Twin Falls, Idaho, a straight-laced desert community at the outer edge of the influence of the Mormon Church in far-away Salt Lake City. Our town’s streets, surrounded by irrigated fields of grain, sugar beets and potatoes, interrupted the flat desert with a pre-set, criss-crossed paved grid capped with infinite blue sky. There, where social life mainlined through churches, I grew up the eldest of eight children in a strict Roman Catholic family.
At nine years old in 1951, my overworked and preoccupied father agreed in a rare moment of weakness to get me a horse, but only after a full year of begging — and then only if I did the dishes for one whole year without reminders or complaint (he probably thought I couldn’t keep the bargain). I immediately made a large chart with 365 squares and proceeded to cross them off, one day at a time.
My father kept his promise and my horse, “Goldie,” saved my life. She reconnected me to my instincts and created space for my unique individuality within our large family. Goldie and I would ride out bareback as the sun rose, illuminating fields of golden grain. I would urge her to run, hands clutching her mane, body locked into her pounding muscles. As we galloped headlong into the wind, my spirit literally soared into the sun.
Though marked by my terror of nuclear armageddon and my father’s demand for obedience, Goldie re-ignited my essential fiery and high-spirited nature. Freedom was short-lived, however; because within a few years the pervasive social conditioning that pubescent girls of that era were subject to turned me inexorably into a typical role-bound, obedient, and perfectionist 1950s female who hated her body.
In one sense, my father’s strict training seemed to pay off, at least academically. I graduated from high school as co-valedictorian. Then, in 1964, I received a B.A. in Philosophy from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Magna cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa — while I nursed a newborn son (I “had to get married” the summer before my senior year). Shortly after Sean’s birth we moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my husband entered architectural graduate school at Harvard. In early 1966 I birthed our second son, Colin.
What I remember most about this time is that I felt terrifically frustrated, alienated from myself and my husband, strangely detached from my children, and in danger of abusing them. I had been sleepwalking since high school. Now, as “progressed Mars crossed my fiery natal Ascendant and progressed Sun opposed my natal Jupiter — my internal embers re-ignited. I could no longer tolerate the deadly daily tedium of my early marriage and full-time motherhood (see Essays, under Other, “Personal Processing”).
I reached a turning point nine months after Colin’s birth, in 1966, when I entered graduate school at Boston University, to obtain a Doctorate in Philosophy and unwittingly begin a transformational Plutonian process that literally burned off all that I had known before. At Boston University I met a professor who ultimately became my mentor and who triggered a six-year sea-change in my life, at first gradually, then like a crashing wave. (Parts of the story of my initial awakening as an adult are offered in many of the archived articles. See, for example, Essays, under Other, “Touchdown to the Stars.”)
My early religious training had been fundamentalist, Catholic, with no room for argument. The glue that held my family together was theological, teleological. Be good, and you go to heaven. I had been very, very good. Now I was about to turn bad.
My professor-mentor introduced me to the idea of thinking critically about my own thinking process. As I began to look at what had held me in place intellectually, the emotions that bonded me to my family grew strained. Soon, I openly questioned the tenets of my religion; this provoked the huge rift with my father that quickly mushroomed into a dominant family dynamic as I flipped from first-born-model-child to scapegoat. For decades thereafter, when visiting my parents’ home I would play the fool; that way we could all ignore my apostasy. Privately, over the decades, an accumulation of letters to and from my father reeked with recriminations.
Letting go of the faith of my father seemed easy in comparison to what came next —a project to uncover my own personal, basic philosophical assumptions. This project transformed into obsession, as I dove ever deeper into increasingly murky layers of my own unconscious and then, deeper still, into the uncanny reach of our collective unconscious.
Motivated by a demanding internal drive to free myself intellectually (besides my family, I had also freed myself from my marriage, and was about to leave my children with their father), and initiated by reading (against the advice of my mentor) the late works of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I began to develop an inner awareness of my own center and to separate myself consciously from others in a new, remarkable way. (See Essays, “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Dane Rudhyar and Me”).
The “wave” of this sea-change began to form when along the way I had a near-death experience that brought me to the realization that I alone was responsible for my life; that the Big Daddy God in the sky of my childish imagination did not watch my every move; that if I wanted to live I must choose to take charge. A few months later, as I drifted on the verge of sleep, the wave crested and crashed as I suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted out of my body into the starry night sky. This experience taught me that 1) the world really is mysterious and full of wonders, and 2) I am not my body.
Through these and other mind-altering experiences, coupled with my continuous probing and expanding of inner boundaries of my conscious awareness, I generated what others whispered about as a “nervous breakdown.” Even then I knew that my “nervous breakdown” was more a remarkable nervous “breakthrough.” I had broken through to a larger awareness than that of those around me.
My mind, long accustomed to investigation of its own boundaries, had somehow pushed the horizon back in all directions so that I no longer felt subject to the kind of conditioning that I saw in others. What others called “sanity,” I now saw as an unconscious social agreement that kept us locked inside our own small heads with no way out.
Internal doors began to open that I had not known were there. My awareness began to expand outward into the universe. In a very real sense, I felt free. Free to be. Free to be me. Free, once again, to soar into the sun as I had in those years when Goldie and I galloped across wheat fields — and far, far beyond.
This process began to climax when I turned in my Ph.D. dissertation, “This Is Not A book About Wittgenstein” (archived in Dissertation Abstracts under the title “Language as Wittgenstein’s Way of Life”), which flew out of me in six weeks and which I then dropped on my mentor’s desk, saying “Here. Take it or leave it.”
In my dissertation I identified the history of western philosophy as an abstraction of the history of the collective consciousness in western culture, one in which the philosophical “mind/body split” of Descartes has become a psychological reality, and where our “so-called ‘common-sense’ is one in which we have no senses in common.”
The dissertation ricocheted like a political football throughout the Boston University philosophy department and gossip about its contents attracted professors from the departments of physics, mathematics, sociology and psychology to my oral examination. This event promised, and delivered, a dramatic confrontation between the usual positivistic philosophical bias and my newly awakened intuitive and emotional intelligence. (See Essays: “A Philosopher’s Journey into Astrology.”)
In the end, they reluctantly granted me the Ph.D., demanding only that I change the title.
These were the creative and formative events of my first thirty years and the formative events of my first Saturn cycle. By the time Saturn — the planet that defines and upholds our cultural rules and roles — had returned for the first time to the place it occupied at my birth, I had, at least in my own mind, separated out from the culture and the collective mind and stepped onto my own path.
Whereas I saw others still fascinated by shadows on the wall, taking them for reality, I had walked out of Plato’s cave towards the light of the sun and the sun warmed and illumined my larger self. Filled with the joy of discovery, I wanted to let others know. However, to tell them meant to re-enter the cave and convince them to turn around and follow me out. This I did not know how to do, and my first attempts ended in disaster.
I realize now that the task of my second Saturn cycle (the years from 30 to 60 years of age) was to learn how to live simultaneously in the cave (with others) and outside in the sun (as my larger Self).
During that next thirty years of my second Saturn cycle, I transformed into an experimentalist, married three more times, began and ran three different publications, studied, practiced and worked as an astrologer, and embarked on a healing journey with my abandoned children. But first, I had to undergo Persephone’s descent into Pluto’s realm once again, this time not into my own unconscious, but into the “real world.”
This drama began the day after I had successfully defended my dissertation when I abruptly flew to California and began my first job as a “philosophy professor.” I had been chosen for a full-time position over hundreds of others at New College of California, then a year-old experimental college in Sausalito (now in San Francisco) for the school year 1972-73. Fresh from my first big academic battle at Boston University, I felt invincible.
The year that followed marked a terrific philosophical, pedagogical and personal struggle between me and another teacher that polarized the college and brought it to a near standstill. We engaged our conflict in public at the weekly “community council” meetings, with half the students and faculty in my camp, the other half in his.
I took the intuitionist, Socratic ground, based on the idea that education, from the Latin “educare” (meaning: “to draw out from within”), was exactly that, a Platonic discovery process, where the student searched his own inner life to bring forth what he or she already knew.
My antagonist had been trained in the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, and believed that learning proceeds in a manner according to John Locke: by filling minds which, before they were trained, were “blank tablets.”
My position was experimental and unusual: with trust in the wisdom buried within the unconscious of each individual I sought techniques that would coax this wisdom to the surface. His position was traditional — and you may want to know that the entire educational system of the western world is based upon the ideas of John Locke. “Students know nothing; it is our job to inform them.”
Both of us were arrogant, stubborn, and determined to win — a recipe for disaster, as I discovered when summarily fired from New College a week before the start of my second year of teaching, in September, 1973. The president, with tears in his eyes, told me I was “too experimental” for that experimental college.
I still contemplate and feel grateful for the enduring lessons hidden within this humiliating experience. Back then, however, my stunned shock and dismay quickly mutated into hate and blame, as I sought to cushion the profound effects of this near-fatal wound to my brash young ego.
Several months later, despite cultural inoculation against the subject, I began to study astrology. Within three years, beginning in 1976, I began my work as an astrological consultant and over 20 years built a local and national clientele. I also worked as a teacher, workshop leader, and conference presenter in astrology. From 1986 through 1995 I published over 60 articles, primarily for the astrological magazine, Welcome to Planet Earth, some of which were translated and reprinted by European publications.
| For 18 of these years I lived in a 20-foot diameter yurt directly across the valley from the Grand Teton in Kelly, Wyoming. (A yurt is a round, tent-like structure indigenous to the nomadic tribes of Mongolia.) I spent 12 of those years with my fourth husband, Jeffrey Joel, a mathematician who moved to Wyoming to be with me from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and who played a key role in interrupting the vitriol between my father and me. |  |
In 1986, prior to meeting Jeff, I wrote an autobiography of my first 30 years (A Soul’s Journey, to be published in early 2007), and in the middle of that year-long writing project, decided that I had to pay a special visit to my father. Writing the autobiography encouraged me to review my life; I needed to make peace with my father. But how? On the five-hour drive from Wyoming to Idaho I felt so nervous and unsure that I prayed for guidance. In the next instant I intuitively knew that I must let go of control and surrender to the mystery of the present moment.
The result, when we finally sat together alone in the pre-dawn hours of the next day, felt divinely choreographed. I found myself telling him that I had begun to realize that in order for our relationship to heal, I would have to move into my heart. That, since our ideas were so opposed, then as long as I stayed in my head, we would continue to disagree. As these words shot out of my mouth, I was stunned to see him nod his head. “Yes,” he said, “that is the conclusion I have come to also.”
Many years later, looking back, I realized that our mutual decision, to move from head into heart, came at the half-way point of our 30-year separation, a point when we realized just how far apart we had grown, and what it would take to find our way back.
Even so, the bitter letter-writing feud between us died hard. A few years after Jeff arrived, I received another judgmental letter from my father, saying as usual, that astrology was bunk and this time he likened it to “black magic.” As I read the letter I could feel my entire body shut down, and it felt terrible. In that moment, I realized that all the other times I had received his letters I had also felt terrible, but that my anger had armored and numbed me against the pain.
Then in a movement that truly astonished me, Jeff, my usually passive, nonconfrontational husband, said he would like to write to my father. He did so, and stoutly defended me and my worldview to my father.
Jeff’s letter silenced Dad. I never received such a letter from him again. And, equally valuable to me, I realized that Jeff, in protecting me, helped me to continue on the path to my heart. In order to open my heart I needed to let go of my anger. Until then, my anger had been all that protected me from my father’s wrath. Without my anger, I would have felt helpless, humiliated, and likely, annihilated. Now, thanks to my husband’s loving protection, I could allow myself to continue to open and to soften and thus to further the healing process within myself, with my father, and with my own children.
Precisely as Saturn completed one full orbit from when I had originally broken off from the family religion, our mutual determination paid off. Fifteen years had passed since our agreement to move into our hearts. Dad and I met again, and as he came through the door, I could literally see the fire of the soul dancing through his eyes.
The moment felt exquisite, as if we were folded into the wings of an angel. In my inner ear I heard him whisper, “See, we did it! We agreed to come into this life as the ‘heavy’ for each other, so that our mutual pain would open us to love — and now our contract is complete.” My entire family has visibly and palpably relaxed since the dissolution of this seemingly intractable old karma.
In the midst of that drama with my father, in 1989, as a result of a powerful nighttime dream in which a giant black bird clawed on my shoulders from behind and cawed, “Wake Up! Wake Up! It’s Time! It’s Time!” I began my third experimental publication, Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging, with the intention to activate the ancient archetype of the Crone. I aimed to change the way our culture perceives the word “crone,” and in that manner to help women remember the power and the wisdom hidden within their own special aging process.
In print for 12 years, Crone Chronicles was featured in many big city dailies, on BBC radio in England, on ABC’s Good Morning America, and was nominated twice for an Utne Reader annual award. After issue #46, in the Spring of 2001, Crone Chronicles transformed into an e-zine (www.cronechronicles.com) and I turned it over to someone else.
In 1992, I initiated and co-founded the first Crones Counsel (www.cronescounsel.org), which has grown to become an annual gathering of elderwomen. Crones Counsel XIII met in San Diego in October, 2005, and will meet in Boulder, Colorado in September, 2006.
My philosophical essays, some of which utilize the language of astrology, have also appeared in Crone Chronicles and in SageWoman Magazine (www.sagewoman.com), where I am a regular columnist.
On September 10, 2001, I opened www.celestialnavigations.net on the web with a rather apocalyptic signature piece on current transits to the U.S. astrological chart that I wrote a month earlier. At the time I wondered and worried about the extreme catastrophic tone I took. How could I have known what would follow a day later on “9/11”?
I then began a series of astrological essays (CN “Bulletins”) that interweave philosophy, psychology, personal experience and astrology. See the current CN Bulletin #25, “Fundamentalism and the Soul.” These and many, many other essays are all archived on this site.
Jeff took charge of the legal, technical, and circulation aspects of Crone Chronicles, and in turn, I told him that when we closed the magazine the next move would be his. He chose to go to law school, and we bought a home in Bloomington, Indiana, in August 2002, near Indiana University. But after one semester, on January 3, 2003, Jeff died suddenly of a heart attack and left me shocked and alone in a new town.
The following year I went through a deep and formal mourning process shot through with both excruciating grief and exquisite beauty. Indeed I felt both intensely grateful for my solitude and gifted with an intimate communion with Jeff’s spirit. The series of essays that detail my experiences of conscious grieving during this sacred time will soon be published by my new micropress, Tendre Press, under the title This Vast Being: Reverberations Upon the Death of A Husband.
I continue to live in Bloomington, Indiana, where I write about my encounters with the real as it weaves together my inner and outer worlds. And I travel regularly to places near and far, including Boston, to be with my children and grandchildren.
In Bloomington, I have become a neighborhood activist. More and more of us now band together to help our little venue of approximately 400 small, post-World War II homes near the Indiana University campus think and act like a vital and sustainable village.
Click here if you would like to email her directly for other matters.
artist
|
Leea Gray’s first art teacher was her grandmother. Ethel Allen taught in her back yard under the weeping willow trees. The classes were a mix of all ages and experiences. Five year old artists sat next to sketching grandparents. The joy of this creative experience has followed Leea throughout her life to the point of the crone years. Now with innovative techniques, Leea expresses the creative impulse through illustration of the explosive cosmic creativity. You will see some of Leea's work throughout this site. Originals and prints are available. Contact Leea. |
 |
amateur astronomer, photographer
Dick and Ann have known each other since they were 13 years old. He is a newspaper reporter, editor, and now publisher, who, a few years ago, bought a telescope. That led to a bigger telescope, and an even bigger one, so that now he has to use a back brace to load it in the back of his car. On clear nights on or near the dark of the Moon he heads out, sometimes to the desert, more often to nearby Mount Palomar (at the top of which is the Mt. Palomar Observatory). On Mt Palomar there are campsites with telescope mounts and Dick sets up there, not coming home until 3 or 4 in the morning. He just bought a tent, so now he can stay the night. Dick: "This is an add-on passion that continues to snag me. As you know, I'm something of an introvert in an extrovert's profession. Late dark nights alone (or even with a few others around) offer me needed perspective and space--something akin to long drives across the open west. I find awe."
Dick lives with his wife Judy in Ocean side, California.
Dick's stellar photos are featured on the entry page and also throughout this site.
home
about us
what's CN
keynotes current
CN US charts
essays
archives books
workshops contact
© 2001-2006 Ann Kreilkamp.
All rights reserved.
Web site built by Proactive
Business Solutions LLC