Ann Kreilkamp

On the Journey through the Decades

Ann Kreilkamp received her doctorate in philosophy in 1972 from Boston University and taught for one year at an experimental college, New College of California, from which she was fired as “too experimental.” She then became a student of astrology, and has been teaching, consulting and writing in that field for nearly half a century.

Along the way, she founded and published three experimental magazines:

OpenSpace: 1978-80. A quarterly news and views tabloid publication with the vision of opening space within her home town, Twin Falls Idaho, then dominated socially by mainstream religions. This volunteer project attracted and gathered the “oddballs” in hiding, and gave them a format to express themselves as individuals. Forty years later, people still remember this wondrous experiment, and how it united and bloomed an alternative community within the dominant one.

Heartland: 1982-83. A quarterly newsprint tabloid compendium with the goal of sharing info, events, and perspectives from diverse and isolated peace groups living in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, in an effort to prevent the installation of the MX (“Peacekeeper”) missile near Cheyenne Wyoming. (This effort failed. The missile was installed and operational from 1985 through 1996.)

Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001), archived, with original copies for sale at sagewoman.com. This publication evolved from a tiny newsletter into a full color quarterly print magazine, with the goal of re-activating the ancient Crone archetype, in order to re-introduce the values gained from long experience into our society that worships youth and tries to ignore, deny or stave off the aging and dying process. This potent little periodical was featured on the BBC, in a number of front page articles in U.S. city newspapers, and earned two annual Utne Reader awards. In 1992, Crone Chronicles spawned the annual Crones Counsel (cronescounsel.org), which has been alive and thriving ever since.

Life Purpose

Ann realizes now, at the age of 78, that her entire life has been an attempt to demonstrate and integrate both individual expression and community life, with the goal of cultural transformation, whether it be at the local, regional, or global level. Furthermore, she now realizes that her main thrust in life has been to learn and to share her overall philosophy of recognizing, absorbing, and integrating paradox, the tension between opposites polarities, wherever they are found.

The aim of this overall life purpose is Peace on Earth, not as the absence of war, but as the vibrating presence of an energy field that continuously allows and equilibrates the powerful dynamics between any two opposites. Culture vs. Nature, AI vs. Organic, Socialism (Communism) vs. Capitalism, Light vs. Shadow, Individual vs. Community. Inside each person, inside any group, between any group and another, nation to nation, all are grist for this alchemical dance of the opposites, in which we learn, ultimately, to play with polarities, rather than identifying with one side while denying or projecting the “Other” out as bad, evil, wrong.

In other words: 3D to 5D — and beyond.

Recapitulation Project 

Tendre Press published This Vast Being in 2007.  It was the first title to appear on this website. During the past two years, she has been absorbed in gathering, and at times, retyping, archiving and sharing, that portion (about 85%) of her written corpus that might still be of value to others, beginning when she was 29 years old. She calls this her Recapitulation Project, and when completed, in the spring of 2023, it will have absorbed nearly four years.

Beginning in April, 2021, she will be gradually placing materials into the Archive.

At this point, most of the Project has been identified, and entered into a barebones Excel sheet, with over 400 titles, both essays and book length. About a third of the materials in the Project were previously published in various venues, local, national, and international.

Home Life

After 20 years living Jackson Hole, Wyoming, most of them in a 20-foot diameter yurt across the valley from the base of the Tetons in Wyoming, in 2002 she moved with her husband Jeff Joel to a small ranch house in a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana, so that he could go to Indiana University Law School. Three months later, on January 4, 2003, he died of a heart attack. See This Vast Being.

A few years later, she added a screened front porch, a solar heated hydroponic greenhouse, and an inviting little bench surrounded by shrubs and flowers for people who walk her street. Working with her Green Acres Neighborhood Association, they aimed to transform their suburban neighborhood into a sustainable village through the practice and principles of permaculture.

Her work has now evolved to encompass two main thrusts, one extremely local, the other ranging far and wide.

Locally, she founded, lives in, and is helping to evolve Green Acres Permaculture Village, now a potent little three-home intentional community with the motto “Growing Community from the Ground Up.”

Her other thrust, aside from the ongoing Recapitulation Project, has been to continue to share her own writing, but this time in a near-daily blog, exopermaculture.com, which has the motto: Bridging and Blending Above and Below. In this blog, which she began in January 2011, she documents her own internal process while attempting to integrate her continuously opening perspective on “what is really going on” (politically, exopolitically, culturally, spiritually and astrologically, in the world at large).

3d book display image of This Vast Being

Looking for a Great Book to Read? Look No Further!

This book invites the reader into the rich inner journey of a woman whose husband died of a heart attack and left her, bereft and alone, in a brand new town. Unlike many who suffer sudden, unimaginable loss, Kreilkamp, 60, did not fall into depression. She describes, in detail, her “year of conscious grieving” during which she formally attended to new widowhood as a precious and short-lived mine of information and inner expansion. Interweaving the many dimensions—visible and invisible, literal and spiritual—to which she was privy during the initial stages of her mourning process, she shares both poignant remembrances and the shocking transformations that moved her and moved through her like squalls. This Vast Being plunges the reader into the dynamics of a difficult marriage that gradually evolved into a union of equals and opened both their hearts. And it reveals the complex inner reality of Jeffrey Joel, a mostly submerged Renaissance Man who, post-death, presented unusual phenomena to demonstrate his existence in a realm that she sensed only a hair-breath from ours; who continued to impart his wisdom after he died and, to her surprise and delight, who invited her into a deeper intimacy than he could afford while embodied. Finally, This Vast Being invites the reader into certain interior spaces of which most of us are not normally aware, and to explore them. As we open to this vast being inside us, we access an expansive awareness that transforms what appears as irreplaceable loss into a magnificent cache of hidden significance. In so doing, this book creates a down-to-earth and unusually inclusive template for human healing.

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