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My wild sister, I am pouring some spiced wine just for you. The charred heart of the Yule log is still burning, and I am tossing the sage and frankincense into the flames.

Come and sit with me, as a light snow falls under the Long Night’s Moon, for I have woven some story-medicine out of dream-visions, fire divination, and ancestral whispers. Come and sit now. Wrap the blanket my grandmother knitted around your shivering shoulders; it still smells of her soft-breasted comfort and Crone-Goddess warmth.

Come! Let us scry our futures from the glowing hearth, for the Year of the Witch is dawning.

You need not be skilled at pyromancy to see the blazing cornucopia of blessings awaiting you. Peer into the flames and let them lick the frozen places within your red, raw soul. Let your gaze go soft as if you were bidding your lover to come to bed, and know yourself as she-who-is-and-will-always-be. You are the shadow-walker and the far-seer.

You are the magick-maker, the holy Creatrix, and this January moon is beckoning you to claim your birthright.

This is your year, my love. Keep your wings folded no longer. Spread the beauteous, befeathered things wide and take a leap of faith. We cannot know what awaits us below in the darkness, but we can trust that the primal feminine will cushion our fall with her mossy, maternal love should our wings falter against the winds of ego-madness.

In perfect love and perfect trust, we will whisper-pray the wild language and bid the burned-women-turned-angels to fly with us, and fly we will.

Can you see them? Huddle closer to the hearth with me, for they are speaking to us now amidst the crackling wood. Watch these fire-dancers, these Maidens, Mothers, and Wise Ones. Watch them as they perform the ancient spiral dance of our ancestors. My love, they are honoring you on this night!

This is the birthday of your bravest heart, and they have choreographed the most mesmerizing, moving benediction just for you. Their flicker-flame dance is a firebird’s blessing, and it is their affirmation of your Witch’s destiny.

This is your year, mythic creature. The Witch is rising from the ashes like a sure-voiced, red-breasted Phoenix, and she is a woman who has grown too large for the life she used to live. She spent her last year burning her world to the mother-loving ground, setting her own skin aflame along with energy-depleting relationships, spiritual apathy, and soul-starved work.

Look into the flames now, my love! All you used to be is there, undergoing sacred transmutation. Last year was the crucible of soulful alchemy, but this year, this year, you are a woman unleashed. You have broken out of every cage they built for you long ago, but now you have also bent the bars of the cages you built for yourself. Watch the metal of your old world bubble and run in silver rivulets over the wood.

What beauteous art will be born from the molten iron of the too-small life? Let us ask the fire now, and bid the Holy Feminine to hear our plea.

Whisper-pray these words with me now, Sister-Witch, and permit the glowing hearth to illuminate our perpetual hope for a future so glorious our language is insufficient to describe its majesty:

May every being on our blessed planet awaken to their cyclical nature and know themselves as holy perfection. May they know themselves as pure divinity in the depths of depression, at the heights of joy, and everywhere in between. May they accept their darkness and their light equally and with the open arms of an unconditionally loving parent.

May they look their shadows straight into their black-water eyes and say “Come out! Come out, you imprisoned creatures, for the day of your liberation has come! Show me how to not feel shame, and I will swallow you whole as an invaluable part of me I sequestered during my wicked childhood. No longer will I subject others to my own pain, for I know a wounded animal exists within us all.”

May every being on our grand Earth write permission slips for their souls to grow as they will, and may everyone demand to be called by the names they have given themselves, looking to no external authority for plaudits. May everyone know themselves as God-Goddex-Goddess embodied, and thus let no one fill the spiritual void with misguided consumption.

Let these words echo somewhere in the abyss of the addicted ones’ psyche:

“Drink only the spirit-elixir of cosmic truth. Know yourself as star-stuff, and resist the urge to escape the pain of godlessness. There is a God, and it is you. The resolution to every great, galactic mystery resides within the soft pulse-beat of your still-living heart. Waste not your soulful gifts, for you are here to perform miracles that rival those written in even the holiest book.”

May no one fear abandonment, for the great pan-human orphaning is a collective wound we all share, and our Mother is ready to come home now. This is the Year of the Witch, and we must welcome Her home by inviting all of Her earthen kin to come sit at our table. Exclude no one, and become the compassionate medicine-keeper you wish you had known as a child.

May everyone find sanctuary within the temple of their own bodies, and may we share the nourishment of soulful authenticity. Let us build palaces fit for the She-Kings we are inside our fertile, feminine psyches, and may we handcraft the vibrant worlds we have dreamt of since we were fragile babes homesick for a life that was not yet ours to live.

Stop whispering now, my love, and howl this last bit moonward with all the holy fire you have in your belly:

May all beings in our wounded world know themselves to be tasked with the fulfillment of their soul’s mandate. The most profound and evolutionary impact any single person can have on the global collective is to live the life their soul has designed for them. Look to your gifts and your wounds. Look to your most sacred relationships.

Trace your cycles of abundance and scarcity, and use these clues to solve the most perplexing mystery of why you are here and now.

Tell me who you are, my Sister. I promise I will believe whatever you say. Gaze into the brightest parts of the belly-dancing flames and let the brilliance of this next year dazzle your vision. Close your eyes and peer into the blue-white shape that vibrates behind your lids in the absence of the light. What is it, dear one? Tell me. I want so much to know who you are, to see you as you want to be seen.

Open your eyes, my Sister, my Queen. Drink your warm wine before it cools. Let us talk of the future as if it has already happened, as if we are remembering the greatest yet-to-come epiphany we have ever had. Tell me of your dreams, as the fire dies out, and let us paint our faces with the ashes and run into the frozen night.

This is the Year of the Witch, and we will soar through this lonely Winter not on broomsticks but on the wings of the Holy Wild.

All is coming, Sister. So mote it be for you, and so mote it for us all.

***

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Danielle Dulsky

Danielle Dulsky is a heathen visionary, Aquarian mischief-maker, and word-witch. Author of 'Seasons of Moon and Flame: The Wild Dreamer’s Epic Journey of Becoming', 'The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman' and 'Woman Most Wild' (New World Library 2020, 2018, 2017), Danielle teaches internationally and has facilitated embodiment trainings, wild circles, communal spell-work, and seasonal rituals since 2007. She is the founder of The Hag School and the lead teacher for the school’s Flame-Tender Facilitator Training and online coven, The Hag Ways Collective, an E-RYT 500 and YACEP, a Fire-Keeper for Ord Brighideach, and a dedicant to Irish-Celtic spirituality. She believes in the power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning witches, and rebellious artists as well as the importance of ancestral healing, embodiment, and animism in fracturing the longstanding systems supporting environmental unconsciousness and social injustice. Parent to two beloved wildings and partner to a potter, Danielle fills her world with nature, family, art-making, poetry, and intentional awe.

Latest posts by Danielle Dulsky (see all)

• The Chicken-Witch of the Grove. {excerpt} - November 21, 2024
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• Joy Magick and Heathen Delights: The Wilds of the Summer Hags. - November 21, 2024