feminism

A Witch’s Bucket List: Shape-Shifting into Oblivion.

 

This moon just might rapture us all into oblivion, my lover!

Let’s not waste another second languishing in our doldrums, for these longer days are gifting us with sunlit immortality and an in-the-blood high that needs no drug but the intoxicating scent of sun-soaked skin and warm leaf-rot.

Don’t go searching for your to-do lists naming tiresome tasks and ho-hum busy work; I’ve burned them all and replaced them with a million handcrafted and home-strung spiral mobiles spinning and drifting about your over-sterile house.

Don’t fret! Squint and look at them close, my love, and you’ll see I’ve written the last to-do list you’ll ever need on these whimsical sculptures.

Tear one down and memorize it before moonrise tonight, before each and every one of these artful masterpieces turns into sticky cobwebs and poison ivy, before the diamond-milk moonbeams infuse every one of our cells with a homesickness for primal feminine grace and beckon us star-ward in a holy assumption of Witches and wild ones who never realized the breadth of their wings before now.

First, we must leave right this minute and take to the old beach road carrying every jewel we own inside our strongest knapsacks; we won’t need them where we’re going, and these humble offerings to the undersea creatures will ensure our last days will be blessed by the ancients and sanctioned by the most primeval, queenly selkies.

We’ll wrap them in seaweed, hold our breath, and swim to the deepest cavern where the sultriest, long-tailed succubi will greet us. Don’t be fooled. These mermaids are hardly the sweet, seashell-donned innocents dismissed as harmless in our superficially romantic tales.

These fanged ones are the dark Goddesses of the water element, siren temptresses who lured sailors to their deaths for the hell of it, and we will appease these vengeful rulers left over from a time long-gone with our grandmother’s diamonds and twin-pointed crystals. We best pray it’s enough, my love, lest they keep us caged in their depths until we sprout fins of our own and forget how to live in the light.

They will revel in our fear for a time; they always do, but in return for our so-precious gems, these demonesses will grant us a wish and turn us into black-feathered, loud-mouthed ravens.

We’ll ascend from the deep then in a four-winged eruption of breathlessness and sinewy, sharp-clawed grace, soaring into the setting sun with more purpose than we’ve ever known in the soft skin of our human bodies.

Over the most wounded parts of this world, we’ll fly, blessing the ground with our misshapen and ominous shadows and praying to the holy, slaughtered healers to arise from beneath the ground and demand vindication.

We’ll plant the smallest seeds of dissent inside the already awakened minds of the young, and, when these righteous ones grow to be tomorrow’s change-agents, they’ll recall that day when they were babes gazing up at the wide-winged ravens and wishing for a better world.

Into the fires raging from bombs dropped without warning, we’ll fly, becoming willing sacrifices and chanting rage-filled poetry while shielding the mothers with our small bodies. Our hollow bones will bleach in the last rays of the sinking sun streaming from the West, but we’ll ascend as a two-souled Phoenix just as the red moon rises.

In the time it takes for the sky to blacken after dusk, we’ll fly as that mythic creature into the most haunted forest, descending in our avian body but landing on all fours like the wolf-women we are.

The first Full Moon of Summer will grant us permission to pray-howl in honor of the Primal Feminine in us all, and we’ll take that task to heart, climbing to peaks without exhaustion, and crooning mournful punk rock anthems of rage and redemption, before bathing in the mountain spring and washing away our many lupine sins.

Our wet fur will reek of the Holy Wild, and we’ll share dirty secrets alongside our dreams for a compassionate, soft-breasted world.

We’ll roll on our backs then and float under the mossy ground until we find ourselves, yet again, swimming in Mother Ocean just as the apocalyptic sun is rising.

The choice will be ours then, to stay and keep fighting, watching all our blessed desires come to fruition as the Wheel of the Year turns to Solstice, but anguishing with the knowledge of their pending loss, or to swim soul-ward and surrender to the siren-temptresses who now drip with all of our beauteous gems, begging to become one of them and remain consumed by frivolity and fragile, fickle power while the world goes up in smoke.

I should think I’d like to ride the waves and see what awaits me on the shore with you, my Priestess, my world, at my side. In truth, I cannot know what choice I will make once these tasks are complete and I’ve wed my inner shape-shifter with more commitment than I’ve ever had to a lover, but, as sure as the Strong Sun Moon rises, I will know when the time comes.

***

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Danielle Dulsky

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.
Danielle Dulsky
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