Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

for. This is seasoned with practical and insightful guidance, rituals, and meditations that enable us to ground and empower the wisdom we glean in these pages.

      I invite you to savor this enchanting brew of stories and spells; Danielle’s work is a rare and potent balm for the modern soul: bold, exquisite, empowering, and healing in its concoction and execution. Seasons of Moon and Flame is an exceptional achievement and an essential read for anyone seeking to honor the mysteries of one of the most powerful archetypes in both modern Witchcraft and folkloric Witchcraft — that of the wild crone. It is a key addition to the libraries of all Witches and the Witch-curious alike.

      — Mat Auryn,

      author of Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation,Magick & Manifestation

       Prologue

      We — the stubborn dreamers, the raging Witches, and the seer-poets — live in a world where our prophets are few and our fears are many. We seek to remedy our brokenness, repair our severed lineages, and heal over our long-bleeding wounds with return-to-the-earth ceremonies, the medicinal smoke of old stories, and the thick salve of unbridled, collective songs born of old ways and even older lands. We dig for deeper meaning. We re-wild what has been tamed. With great urgency we struggle to grasp what it means to live with care, to belong to a place and a people. In our hungry moments, we aim to master slow living by taking a weekend course; pursuing certification; passing some seemingly great test written by someone we never met in a language we never learned; or finding an authority figure apparently more experienced and educated to grant us permission to reclaim what is already ours, to tell us we are being good, and even to share with us precisely what being good means on this ailing planet.

      While this thirst for external validation is upheld and reinforced by a hard-hearted culture that depends on hierarchy and speed in order to survive, I have come to believe that maybe, just maybe, this ache for approval emerges from something else: from a painfully persistent understanding of our particular tenderness — from our simultaneously knowing that we need communities where elders are valued and knowing that we are so profoundly divorced from such social contexts where aged wisdom is alchemized in the minds of younger generations and used to shape a new world, a world that not only sees the bleeding wounds of individualism, colonization, and capitalism but can make extraordinary art out of the scars. In what we might still call “the West,” there is an in-the-joints longing for that unique sort of relationship between elder and seeker, grandparent and babe, hag and maiden, hunter and youth, but there is also an embodied resistance to such an unfamiliar relationship. What if what we long for is a true teacher who can show us what it means to belong to an ever-widening, ever-healing collective, who can temper our zeal and our certainty just a bit, who can remind us that the dark moon of death awaits us all and that somewhere on the great fabric of space and time are those who are already grieving our absence, already sharing the small and glorious stories of our lives around kitchen tables and campfires?

      Stories are the medicine, and time poverty is the enemy of story. In our world, we need our lessons delivered quickly and through few words. We need to be spoon-fed our knowledge in easily swallowed bites and eye-catching captions, and stories leave too much up for interpretation and require too much of our precious time to be told true and well. Like our most potent dreams, stories provide a rich and fertile ground on which to sit and consider, never to solve, the great dilemmas of relationship and mystery, love and the sacred, magick and the emerging brilliance of this wild world. It is the tales that leave us with more questions than we had before we heard them that are the world shapers — and, yes, that is the power of story. Visionary stories can shift perspectives; evoke a discomfort necessary in order to encourage changes being made; and reforge a vital connection to land, creatures, and people. In my life, I feel the imperative of story as primary, as integral to my Witchcraft, my art, my ancestral healing, and my way of being in the world.

      The art of living slowly, of taking time to listen to the earth speak and breathe in a rhythm that allows for an appreciation of place, is not taught but rather shared. We long not for those spiritual teachers who will offer us an escape from the real work of transforming this slow-to-heal world or, worse, numb us to the realities that surround us; what we yearn for, what we are willing to wander for, what we wake at midnight having dreamed of, are the elders who will bring us home to ourselves, who will inspire us into collective movements, who will share with us what they know and, in so doing, help us remember what we have never truly forgotten.

      Our bones want belonging.

      My personal journey of becoming reached a pivotal apex of sorts when I realized that — for all my certificates and feverish pursuits; for all my faraway searching for belonging and esoteric knowledge that might, if I only worked hard enough, grant me some missing piece of the puzzle that was my precious life, the life of a white woman raised in a beautiful boneyard land — I had learned my most nourishing, useful lessons from my grandmother. Grace Dulsky was a woman of strong roots, beloved by many in life and still missed sorely years after her death. Like me, she walked close to the earth, stout and sturdy crone that she was, and her demeanor would waver between a practical, no-nonsense busybodiedness and a softer, stiller, contemplative silence; it was in these moments that her forename made sense, when she was staring long from the window of her mountain cabin at the wind-rocked lake or when she spent the day from dawn to dusk baking with a patience I have never known.

      This book is partly structured in accordance with the unintentional and yet somehow quite predictable pattern of visits to her home during what was a volatile, hormonal, and rebellious time in my life, as it is for many young ones, of course. Greeting me in her house slippers, she would first feed me like only a grandmother can feed her granddaughter, with that deeper understanding of exactly what tastes I needed on my tongue to heal whatever wounds were aching that day. My teenage anorexia had no home in Grace’s kitchen, and her otherworldly black cat would nose itself against my jutting ribs and wait for crumbs.

      In time would come that conversational bite. Never would I see it coming, though it happened so regularly, that small and sharp-edged question that would make me rethink all my plans, prompt me to question my relationships, and stun me into silence. This was the challenge, the piercing sting. This was the precise upset I needed, as if that old woman had flipped over my psychic table and sent all my carefully prepared notes spilling onto the ground. Sometimes, it would be as simple as a raised brow that showed the very skepticism I needed, or sometimes it would be a few poignant words spit out of nowhere, as if all 4’10” of Grace Elizabeth was channeling some dark-winged and long-tongued old Germanic Goddess of destruction. Whatever its form, it was never long-winded or enduring, never a tirade or a scolding — just a bite.

      The wisdom would inevitably follow then. After she’d bitten me, after she’d made me wonder what I was doing with that small life of mine, she’d somehow always seal up our visit in a neater package, offering warm-armed support and the softest, most maternal love I had — and indeed have — ever known. At the end of our visits, she would speak like spirit speaks, with a mysterious, innocent, so-subtle tone that, regardless of the precise shape her words were taking, always said Yes, dear child. These small moments are what life is made of.

      And right you still are, Grace.

      My visits to Grace’s house were my Crone School, and her curriculum was not easily learned, nor was it, I am sure, easily shared. If there was a single vision statement for her elder academy, it was this: A more holy gift than the regular enjoyment of — than the daily and embodied kinship with — those fleeting moments of contentment and peace does not exist. Living slowly is activism, too. Taking time to listen to the stories of our elder-teachers is the stuff of rebellion, but it is not the stories alone that will shape the emerging future. Find that hallowed meeting place where your life — where your lived experience, passions, wounds, and infinite hope — encounters the story; this is the edge of wildness, the fringe on which the greatest transformation can occur.

      Here, we are beyond