New Art: Elder of the Scar Clan

She’s finished.  My portrait of the Crone of All Hallows, renamed “Elder of the Scar Clan.”

Actually I knew that was her name from the very beginning.  I just wasn’t ready to tell everyone until now.

This image of the Crone (the third face of the Goddess, the Old One, the Wise One) came to me as I meditated on the ancestors during the season of Hallowmas.  I ruminated on the women in my ancestral bloodlines who were wounded, and on my soul-sisters’ wounds, and on my own. We are all initiates of the Scar Clan.

Scar Clan is a term coined by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves, meaning “that timeless tribe of women of all colors, all nations, all languages, who down through the ages have lived through a great something, and yet who stood proud.”  (pg. 374)

“It is a good idea,” Estes writes, “for women to count their ages, not by years, but by battle scars. ‘How old are you?’ people sometimes ask me. ‘I am seventeen battle scars old,’ I say. . .

Make no mistake about it. If you are asked your nationality, ethnic origin, or blood line, smile enigmatically. Say, ‘Scar Clan.’ ”    (pg. 376)

You can see earlier posts on this piece as a work in progress, here and here and here.