For the eight months leading up to the creation of A Cauldron of Crones, Meghan and I were travelling through our Gene Keys Golden Path together. We are part of a glorious group of women from all around the world, who are being guided on a year-long exploration of our Gene Keys by Hayley Curtis, who is a Gene Keys wizard. Our year-long container is called Devoted, and it is the deepest inner work I have ever done.

We had reached the very heart of our Venus Sequence, the Sphere of our SQ – our Spiritual Quotient, which Richard Rudd describes as the “energetic hub of the entire journey along the Golden Path”.

The SQ Sphere is all about the first seven years of our lives. As Richard says, “It is in the first 7 years of our lives that our physical body learns to live in the world.”

Hayley told us … “This is a mystical journey!! It is your Spiritual Quotient after all! The measure of your ability to remain spiritually connected to the heart of life!”

She also told us that this is where Delight lives in our Gene Keys chart, and through her Devoted retreats, her workbook, her guided visualisation and her constant support, she had been encouraging each of us to play, to dive deep into the sheer joy of being that young child again.

And oh my goodness, we had been having fun! You see, Meghan and I talk every single day, and we were sharing our discoveries and our breakthroughs, all the joy and the sadness and the grief, all the deep feelings that were coming up. And we were sharing a great sense of play. We may have shared tears, but we also laughed together every day.

Since we started our Conversations With A Couple Of Crones Podcast inside the GKU* membership a few months earlier, we had been approaching this collaborative work as if it were play. We were two children, best friends, heading out to the barn to play together. This was an analogy that really worked for us to conjure that essence of our inner children, because we both grew up on farms. Playing in the barn felt natural to both of us.

We have experienced a glorious uncovering and unwrapping of our deeper feelings, as Meghan and I have played in barn. As we have talked each day, we have found that under our stories, and woven through our lives, there are so many common threads. We may have grown up thousands of miles apart, in different family dynamics, but there is a commonality there that has made our kinship all the stronger.

Using Our Word Wizardry

We’d already come up with the fun idea of Wizardly Word of the Week, a regular column in the GKU membership, where we could explore the language and lexicon of the Gene Keys. We both have Gene Key 62 in our charts (Meghan has it in her SQ), and it is the “glossary of the Gene Keys”; it’s all about language. And since we both love language and words and story-telling, the Wizardly Words was a great wheeze for us to throw ourselves into!

When Meghan suggested we write a blog together, I responded with a resounding YES! Our “blog” very quickly morphed into this website. Within a couple of days of the idea being hatched, we’d come up with the name, A Cauldron of Crones, Meghan had bought the domain name, and she had launched herself into creating this glorious space.

Meghan took to WordPress like a duck to water, and all of her old skills from being an avid blogger years ago quickly resurfaced, as she got to grips with the new software. She wasn’t a bit daunted by new features, and she kept the spirit of play, and the energy of ease front and centre, and her enthusiasm couldn’t help but pull me along with her. It was electrifying!

A couple of days into the creation, I had a bit of a wobble over my technical abilities; my Shadow of Inadequacy that sits in my Purpose Sphere was stirring, making me feel off-kilter; and the Shadow of Victimisation right there in the SQ that was birthing our Cauldron, was goading me into feeling useless and weak.

Our Home in the Æther

A Cauldron of Crones is our home on the internet, it’s where we’re putting down roots and building an enduring realm for all that we are learning on this inner journey. How perfect that we created this home while we were in our SQ … for as well as being about that inner child energy, that delight, that playful, open-hearted spirit, the SQ is also all about coming home. Coming home to ourselves.

Our Cauldron of Creativity

This website we’ve been creating, this cauldron of creativity that we have just conjured up out of the æther between us, is the spiritual home for our hearts. And it is the most delicious culmination of the Venus Sequence journey through the Gene Keys which govern our development from birth to 21.

For me, the creation of A Cauldron of Crones is the culmination of me bringing that Gifts of my IQ, EQ and SQ together in one delicious concoction.

The Gift of the Discrimination in my IQ, which is the Sphere that governs the years 14 to 21, is all about finding what it is you love and doing it; as well as knowing what is right for you and following that, following your own truth.

Layer on the Gift of Imagination in my EQ, which is the Sphere that is all about those crucial 8 to 14 years, and you have a heady brew! My Imagination literally knows no bounds. My Imagination is just incredible. It was in those 8 to 14 years, and it still is now, nearly 50 years later!

Wrap all of that up in my SQ Gift of Freedom, and what you have is vast, limitless, boundless!

And this Cauldron of Crones was birthed here; this creative project was birthed in Freedom and Imagination and Discrimination. And to be doing all of this with Meghan, my best friend, who has so many incredible Gifts, has opened up so much in me. Meghan’s IQ, EQ and SQ Gifts are Equilibrium, Humanity, and Precision! What a combo!! I feel that there is nothing holding us back. We just can’t get this wrong, because the energy that is birthing it is so pure and so fair and so free. It’s just us being the natural, everyday, magical humans we are.

Hayley is always reminding us, “There’s no such thing as making a mistake.”

We can’t make a mistake. And I do not say that in an arrogant way. I know that we might try things that don’t work out, but that will only mean that there’s something better or something more or something different, waiting to work out for us further down the line. I just have to look at this Cauldron of Crones to see the truth of that. As I write this article, I know that this entity that is our Cauldron of Crones didn’t even exist a week or so ago, and that now is the most exciting place for me to play and grow, to work and share.

It’s a Playground … It’s Home … It’s an Open Door

This is our playground. This is our home on the internet, and we can plant any seeds we want to here. We can grow not just a garden, but a whole forest here. As I was thinking about this glorious forest we are growing, I could not help but think of a vision Meghan shared in our GKU community, where she had the most beautiful flowers growing out of her throat … she said, “Nature is reclaiming its voice, MY voice, as Intelligence speaks through me.“

Isn’t that exactly what this website is for us? We want to bring all that beauty to the world.

We dearly hope that people will come and visit a while with us, here in our cauldron of creativity. We hope that we will be an example to crones of all ages, to own their creativity and to own their own power, to see that age is just a number and you can damn well share your voice if you’ve got something to say. In fact, sharing your voice opens you up so much, that you find you have a lot to say!

We dearly hope that fellow travellers and crones will stop by, pull up a chair by our hearth, and listen to our stories. But honestly, even if no one visits us here, it won’t make any difference to how much I love what we are doing. It wouldn’t detract from how much pure joy I am getting out of creating this with my best friend. Because this is so much fun; this is high play; and this is our cauldron. And we are Crones, who are embracing our Cronish ways!

This is the receptacle we get to stir our creativity up in. This is the receptacle we get to fill with all those delicious ingredients, all of those glorious, insightful, wisdom-filled treasures that we are learning on our Gene Keys journey and on our broader inner work journey. We can take all of those ingredients and drop them in the cauldron. And who knows what potions we can conjure up for the world?

I’ve got an image of us curating the works in our own art gallery and library …

And, of course, I shall forever have that image of me and Meghan as those six-year-olds, sitting down making mud pies.

My mind and heart are so full of delicious images and ideas for what Meghan and I can create here. And it is making me really, really happy. I mean really, really happy. This is unplugging joy pipes all over the place.

This is Work. This is Play. This is Living the Inner Work.

And I am just totally and utterly in awe of my BFF Meghan; she has just thrown yourself into this creative project. “Let’s have a blog. Let’s have a website,” she said. And here we are. We got an actual blog and a website. And I love it.

I love how seamlessly this has flowed into, and is flowing through, our lives. There’s been no compartmentalizing; no feeling of I do the inner work here, and I have my creativity there, whether that’s writing or art journaling or photography or AI generated images; no feeling of I have the website all the way over here, separate from the inner work.

The inner work weaves through our creativity, it weaves through the website; and our creativity and the website augment the inner work we’re doing. It feels like the most perfect puzzle that is all just clicking into place and all the right pieces are fitting; we’re moving things around and everything just works. Everything is connected and works together in this beautiful whole, which is amazing.

This is our Cauldron … it is where we stir in the ingredients of our inner work … the Gene Keys, our contemplations, our pauses and our insights.

We stir in compassion and forgiveness, sadness and joy, understanding and deep knowing.

We stir in the unknown and the magic and our mundane, ordinary lives.

And what does the Cauldron give back?

Delicious aromas of open hearts; fresh insights and wisdom curl up from it in tendrils of steam that wrap around the words we share on these pages.

The Cauldron is where our creativity is birthed and we pour it out onto the pages and words and images here, so that other women might see them and feel them, and think, I can do that! And then maybe they will pull their own cauldrons out from under the detritus of their lives and start stirring up their own elixirs and potions to take them forward in life … strong, self-assured, owning their own power and staking their claim on Cronedom!

* GKU is Gene Keys Unleashed with Hayley Curtis