About the Author
Born in December 1942 as the first of eight children, Ann Kreilkamp grew up as a shy, fearful, obedient, straight-A student who married young, had two children, and went to graduate school in philosophy.
When she was 26 years old, a near-death experience shook her loose. Overnight, her strict, fundamentalist Catholic world-view and conditioning collapsed and she transformed from “good, uptight graduate student” (one professor’s assessment) into someone wild and strange.
Due to sheer luck and astute political maneuvering, she did manage to receive her doctorate in philosophy from Boston University in 1972 despite, as her major professor pointed out, “asking us to certify you as one of us while kicking us in the shins.” Her dissertation, which flew out in just six weeks, utilized the suffering of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a foil to indict the entire history of western philosophy for promoting the split of her mind from her body and all humans from each other and the natural world.
On the basis of her revolutionary attitude, proclaiming that she “wanted to help undo what was done to me,” in 1972 she was hired over hundreds of other applicants to teach at the nearly brand-new New College of California (then in Sausalito; it moved to San Francisco in 1974 and closed in 2009). One year later, she was fired from that experimental college as “too experimental.”
Being fired was a great gift, saving her and others from further mayhem. Her sea-change at 26 had shifted her out of Catholic fundamentalism, but her success in graduate school had fostered arrogance and left her dogmatic attitude intact. She needed to be brought to her knees. As one of her New College colleagues put it: “You are the most intuitive person in this school. But what you have to teach, you are too young to know.”
Desperate to understand herself and the apparently dead-end path she had been furiously pursuing, Ann dived into astrology, a subject she had formerly despised, and found there, what she had been looking for as a philosopher: a comprehensive mystical language to help her explore, integrate, and amplify her own evolutionary journey.
Three years later, she opened her practice as a professional astrologer, teaching, consulting and writing in that field for over two decades (see www.celestialnavigations.net) [I receintly discovered that this link is not working — and don't yet know why]. After a ten-year sabbatical, she once again offers her services as an astrologer, on a very limited basis.
Along the way, Ann founded and published three experimental magazines, one of which, Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001), was twice nominated for Utne Reader’s annual small press awards.
In early 2003, Ann’s husband of twelve years, the mathematician Jeffrey Joel, died of a heart attack. She spent her first year as a widow in solitude. Her award-winning 2007 book, This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation, documents that year’s exquisite and multidimensional process of conscious grieving.
In early 2009, in cooperation with Anne Niven of BBI Media and an editorial circle of elder women, Ann launched Crone: Women Coming of Age as the successor publication to Crone Chronicles. Crone magazine “features the gifts and concerns of women who seek to fully embrace Earth’s cycles of life, death and transformation in a collaborative literary process that honors the wisdom of long experience and the compassion of an open heart.”
After nearly two decades in a 20-foot diameter yurt in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the past eight years Ann has lived in a small ranch house in Bloomington, Indiana, to which she has 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. She is a co-founder of Transition Bloomington and works with her Green Acres Neighborhood Association to transform their suburban neighborhood into a sustainable village through the principles and practices of permaculture.
In December 2008, Ann bought the property next door to hers. Together with neighbors, Indiana University students and teachers, and permaculture teachers, practitioners and students, including one of her two sons, they are transforming its sunny south and west facing side lawn into a garden commons. (see Urban Farmstead blog on this site). The GANG (Green Acres Neighborhood Garden) functions not only to grow, harvest, and preserve food, but to teach gardening, to inspire community spirit, and to model the seeds of a gift economy via a pioneering private/public template for increasing and enhancing the commons.
Ann’s work to invoke and promote various aspects of permaculture is balanced by continuing philosophical exploration of her own evolving nature within the endless, mysterious, multidimensional field of oneness with all being (M’Entendre blog, also on this site).
Her hundreds of current, featured, and archived Essays offer further rich food for thought in an increasingly paradoxical world that has literally gone mad with unprocessed grief while simultaneously glimpsing the quantum field of eternal presence and infinite possibility.
In January, 2011, she launched a new website: www.exopermaculture.com, “Bridging Above and Below,” on which she aims to harmonize and unify body (her earthly work as a permaculturist) and mind (her interest in all things astrological, mystical, inter- and extra-dimensional, extraterrestrial).
Every day she eats well, walks her little dog Emma three miles, and practices one hour of yoga, chi kung and tai chi. Viewing this crone phase of her life as that of witness and midwife, she asks that she may help to tenderly assist the birth of the new, fragile, inclusive, and joyfully regenerative culture springing up from within the collapse of the old industrial civilization that so tragically separated us from our inner lives, from one another, from the natural world, and from our larger cosmic home.
