Seasons of Moon and Flame. Danielle Dulsky

living shrines to who we used to be and who we will become. Here, we are both hopeful prayer and mournful keening.

      May we walk the way we hope our ghosts will walk. May we conceive of time as friend and the seasons as elder-teachers; they have been spiral-dancing since long before we were born, after all. May we learn to find sovereignty in our humility, and may we remember the magick of our long-gone ancestors. The hag has much healing wisdom to share with us, if we only listen, so let us build twig-and-stone shrines in the woods to those gray-haired ones who taught us well.

      All blessings be.

       The Hag’s Song

       I fell into sleep and dreamt of a hag

       She leapt like a youth and crouched on a crag

       I know you, I said. Her face was my own

       I’ll show you, I said, and ran for the crone

       Just look! I am you, you wild-boned thing!

       She shook and turned blue, then started to sing

       Her prayer was so old, bewailing the trees

       A keening so bold, for rough times like these

       I licked a tear from her eye, the salt from her hair

       Then she was I, her hymn mine to share

       My bones — how they ached! But my songs were so rich

       My voice, how it quaked with the howl of that Witch

       I sang for the elders, the dead, and the snow

       I moaned for the yew trees, the wolf, and the crow

       In time, I grew soft, a soul sopped in song

       A Cailleach lost in a rhyme gone too long

       I woke in the dark, nudged up by a ghost

      The song left its mark, but the hag I loved most.

       INTRODUCTION

       Our Year of the Wild

      Nestled somewhere within the untamed psyche of every wild soul is a wise elder with a salty sense of humor. If we listen, we can hear that cunning hag share her potent medicine with us, singing us songs of haunted autumns, deep winters, and lush-blooming springs. That old one has a long memory, and she speaks the lost rebel language of the wilds with a primal intonation. She helps us make sense of these ever-unraveling and eternally restitched stories of ours, continually offering us an invitation back to those hallowed, heathen lands our deepest selves have never forgotten.

      Without the voice of our inner crone, without our well-aged wilderness guide, these flourishing and fertile lands, these ancestral dreamscapes that bud and bloom in our hearts and beyond our walls, rarely offer us definitive answers to our many questions about love, loss, or the sacred. Even gifted with her elusive guidance, we still inevitably struggle to discern what messages the natural world holds for us. Our minds howl for certainty. We want concrete answers. We resist the discomfort of a mystery-riddled life, but the wilds whisper only the softest songs, speaking in a slower and less predictable rhythm than our many screaming, fast-talking screens. The hag tells us of our inextricable belonging to the world, to the wild unseen. The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: “This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.” We are creaturely. We are cocreated and dismembered by these wilds over and over again. What persistent unknowns our modern, overbright technologies struggle to illuminate, those holy wilds embrace in moon and flame.

      To remember how to hear that inner hag’s voice often seems a near-impossible task, an arduous journey home after being away too long, when the comforts of certainty are begging us to rest and stay with all things known. The old ones are whispering, but the devices are shrieking. The haunting lure of the forest beckons, but so does the softness of our beds. We long to remember to listen, but our lives are full of contradictions. Remembering how to hear the hag’s voice means making peace with, though rarely resolving, these many beautiful and bizarre conflicts that show us our chaotic complexity, our magickal and messy humanness.

       Hag Lesson #1

      The best stories are not heard but met.

      For some, the remembering happens only in dreams, in those subconscious spaces where that primal tongue is spoken through monstrous imagery, overgrown landscapes, or otherworldly spirits. For others, the remembering occurs by light of day, as they take notice of synchronicities, nods from nature, and suddenly realized patterns within their personal myths of wounding and healing. For all, the task is to fall in love with the liminal: the place between the illusion of our separateness and the unnamed sparking and numinous spirit evident in all — the cosmic dance between our feeling flesh, the beloved dead, and the yet-to-be-born; between the human and the beast; and between the stories we live and the stories we share.

       Sovereign within the Collective

      To walk with our inner hag requires such remembering, and this remembering is hardly a finite goal to be attained or permanent plateau to be reached; it is a journey of eternal becoming, of a constant and ever-weaving dance between our singular sovereignty and our intimacy with the collective. Regardless of context, the remembering sparks a subtle stirring in the blood — an ignition, of sorts — that can turn an everyday person first into a mystic and then later, perhaps, into a Witch. To be a mystic is to come home to that fog-filled space of not knowing, time and time again, and to be a Witch is to not only regularly return to liminal space but continually open to those many seasons of confusion and certainty, of shadow and fire, of chaos and order. To be a Witch is not only to acknowledge these many seasons but to humbly and humorously live of them, to cocreate a life worth living with time as partner-lover and transformation as teacher-friend. To be a Witch is to have begun learning the greatest lesson the wilds have to teach their human children: Time is a spiral dance of eternal becoming, and to move in that age-old rhythm is to remember the wisdom of not only those crones who have come before us but those yetto-be-born babes who will be inherited by the new world we leave behind.

      To me, the wilds speak in the ancient tongue of the elder-storyteller, and that primal terrain is a burly and resilient beast. In this language of treespeak and crow poetry, there are few words denoting the definite and many words for mystery. Ours is a lexicon of feeling, of beauty, and of the space between. This language includes no concrete truths but favors that pivotal and sacred encounter between the inquiry and the answer. Within these hallowed lands blessed by mist and lit by moon, the Witch finds themselves on an epic journey that is always beginning and always ending. Every year is their wildest year yet. Day by day, they dream their worlds into being. Night by moonlit night, they learn all they can from the fertile dark.

       Hag Lesson #2

      The revolution will be wildcrafted.

      Their annual adventure around the sun is a thirteenseason living-and-breathing ceremony of honoring the wilds as they converge and dance within them. When their memory of magick falls short, they slow their pace. They pay a visit to their inner wise one, and they revisit the stories of their ancestral lines. They feel into the shaping more than the shaper or the shape. Their springs are garden altars to healing the human ache, built with much love by the hands of the forebears, an annual mission to uncover the deep medicine of their lines that was carved out, hidden, burned, and demonized. A Witch’s summer