Born on December 19, 1942 (see astrology chart), during World War II, I snapped into awareness suddenly at the age of two years, nine months: the news, over the radio, as I sat in my mother’s lap, of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. This traumatic experience set the direction of my life. I was to help bring the whole world to peace, or die trying.
Growing up in Twin Falls Idaho as the first of eight children, I served as a smart, obedient, saintly, Roman Catholic role model. Father a medical doctor, mother a nurse. Co-Valedictorian, class of 1960. BA Philosophy, National Honor Society, Magma Cum Laude, Catholic University of America 1964. PhD Philosophy, Boston University 1972.
Though, so far, this sounds like the trajectory of any bright young woman back then, it’s not.
First of all, I got pregnant at 20, just prior to my senior year in college, and ended up marrying the father, whom I did not love. Living in Cambridge, MA, we had two children, both boys, during an increasingly contentious six years (1963-1970), during which I morphed into a man-hating “feminist.”
Post-divorce, during my final year at Boston University, I endured a mental/emotional/spiritual breakdown/breakthrough that left me CHANGED, and my PhD dissertation — composed in only six weeks, as a moment by moment revelation to myself — both reflected that change, and offered an alternative perspective on the entire history of western philosophy.
No longer a good girl turned rebel. Now I had opened to the universe. (It would take me several decades to learn how to center myself inside infinity and remain there, no matter what happens next.)
Having successfully defended my outrageous dissertation, I was then hired by a year-old experimental college, New College of California, as the first over 560 other candidates, chosen by the students because of the opening statement to my applcation: “I want to help undo what was done to me.”
One year later, just prior to the next school year, the president, a Jesuit priest, who himself appreciated me, fired me as “too experimental,” as per order of the largely Catholic New College Board of Trustees.
This “failure” left me flummoxed; and thrust me into the study of astrology as one possible way of comprehending my own abruptly terminated situation in life. Fascination took hold. I ended up teaching, consulting and writing in that field for over two decades.
But my professional failure paled in the face of another one — personal, and much more painful. When I moved to California from Cambridge, I left my children (then 6 and 8) behind with their father who, hating me, refused to let them go. For the next nine years I saw them only during the summers, and for six years after that, not at all. During the final three years, not even a phone call. (I had told them that they were old enough to make their own decision now: Did they want to stay with me, or go back to their Dad for the school year. I assured them I would love them, either way. He found out about it, and was furious.). Agonizing.
Then, while Sufi twirling with 30 others in a giant ceremonial yurt in the Tetons during Harmonic Convergence, August 1987, I heard a distinct voice: “You must finish your personal karma by the end of the year.”
I knew instantly what the Voice referred to: I must find a way to reunite with my children. The story of how this reunion took place is both miraculous and too long to tell here. Just know that by the end of that year I had reunited with both my children, having successfully reconciled with their father who had hated me for 15 years.
During all these years I had led a peripatetic life, feeling like a bird on a tree. I did manage to perch in one place, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for nearly 21 years, moving from apartment to apartment until I landed in a 20-foot yurt. Treating the yurt like a launching pad, I traveled widely and often. In 2003 I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where, for the first time in my wandering life — and much to my surprise! — I felt at home. Where I finally discovered what “feeling at home” feels like!
In Bloomington, my visionary capacity kicked in to material manifestation: Over the past 21 years, I founded and continue to nourish the ongoing retrofit Green Acres Permaculture Village (see https://www.greenacresvillage.org/ ) as a template for transformation of suburban life to include growing and sharing both food and community.
As an activist, my specialty has been to work with the individual/community polarity, as a dynamic dance of opposites.
For example, along the way I founded and published three experimental magazines:
OpenSpace: 1978-80. A quarterly news and views tabloid publication with the vision of opening space within my 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. Over forty years later, locals still remember this wondrous experiment, how it united and bloomed an alternative community within the dominant one.
Heartland: 1982-83. A quarterly newsprint cut-and-paste tabloid compendium with the goal of sharing info, events, and perspectives from diverse and isolated Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming peace activist groups, in a failed effort to prevent the installation of Reagan’s MX (“Peacekeeper”) missile near Cheyenne Wyoming. (The missile was installed and operational from 1985 through 1996.)
Crone Chronicles:
A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001), archived, and with original copies for sale at sagewoman.com. This publication quickly 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 materialistic society that worships youth and tends 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, held in various U.S. locations for 30 years. In 2023, a group of crones decided to begin again, this time with an organization that aims to awaken women of all ages to the wisdom of the consciously aging process. See CAW, Crone Awakening Wisdom
(croneawakeningwisdom.wildapricot.org ).
After 21 years in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, most of them in a 20-foot diameter yurt across the valley from the base of the Grand Teton, in 2002 I moved with husband Jeff Joel (whom I married in 1992) to a small ranch house in a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana, so that he could attend 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, I added a screened front porch, a solar heated hydroponic greenhouse, and an inviting little bench surrounded by shrubs and flowers for people who walk my street. Working with my Green Acres Neighborhood Association, we aimed to gradually transform our suburban neighborhood into a network of sustainable villages through the principles and practice of permaculture.
My work has now evolved to encompass two main thrusts, one extremely local, the other ranging far and wide.
Locally, I founded, live in, and am helping to evolve Green Acres Permaculture Village, a potent little three-home intentional community with the motto “Growing Community from the Ground Up.”
My other thrust, aside from working to archive my entire life’s written work, has been to continue to share my current writing, starting in 2011 with a near-daily blog, exopermaculture.com, and its motto: Bridging and Blending Above and Below. In August 2021, I turned that website into an archive and started the even more personal site, annkreilkamp.net.
I realize now, at the age of 82, that my 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 household, local, regional, or global level. Furthermore, I now recognize that my main thrust in life has been to learn and to share my overall philosophy of recognizing, absorbing, and integrating paradox, the tension between polarities, wherever they are found.
The aim of this overall life purpose is the instantiation of my original goal at two years, nine months: to help create Peace on Earth, not as the absence of war, but as the vibrating presence of a frequency field that continuously allows and equilibrates the powerful dynamics between any two opposites as found in 3D: Culture vs. Nature, AI vs. Organic, Socialism (Communism) vs. Capitalism, Light vs. Shadow, Individual vs. Community, Conscious vs. Unconscious. 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.
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“Ann, explorer and witness to psychic, synchronistic, astrological and psychological links between inner psyche, outer reality and invisible realms, portrays a marriage that continued after death to encompass these realms and their differences. A remarkable narrative.”
— Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jungian analyst, well-known author and speaker.
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.
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.
Finally, This Vast Being gathers journal writings from the first year after my husband Jeff died into book chapters that hopefully, may assist, console, and even illuminate others who are undergoing the profound inner process that accompanies the death of a loved one.
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