feminism

Memories That Haunt, I Thank You: Begrudged Grace Under the Blessing Moon.

 

Come over if you like, my love, but my garden is full of snakes tonight.

It’s far too warm for a fire, and the mountain wolf inside me grows weary of Summer’s usual mayhem and beer-soaked revelry.

Should you be seeking some substance as the Blessing Moon rises, should your solitary craving be for begrudged grace and sour spoken word charms, come stand with me amongst the blooming wildflowers while these serpentine memories that still haunt us slither over our bare feet and climb our legs like black, scaled ivy.

I’ve got some Vitamin W for you, an annual dose of strong Witch nutrition and the antidote to the forgive-and-forget and just-move-on poison spat upon our selfhood every mother-loving day.

This is our Blessing Moon invocation, our greatest and most necessary chore, and our lone task as the Wheel of the Year turns just past fruition. Hold both my hands while I howl-pray these verses I’ve written in memoriam of She Who I Used to Be.

Cradle me close when I fear I’ve said too much, and pull me to my feet should I surrender to these cold-skinned and diamond-eyed shadows that want to poison me with the venom of my youthful patterns and lick up every ounce of fortitude I’ve got with their parasitic, forked tongues.

Thank you to the memories that still haunt, for you remind us our flesh can be raised in places with the scar tissue left by words used as weapons, hurled at just the right time to leave permanent marks on our soft skin, and yet our souls remain whole and unruined.

Thank you to the lovers, the sisters, the gurus, the mothers, and the kings who cut at our bleeding hearts not with blades but with malice and bitterness, for our deepest and most functional muscles are now toned by lifting the heavy weights of intuition, empathy, and instinct.

To the lover who left us behind to go wandering, thank you for leaving a black-hole void in our bellies that ached so persistently we had no choice but to fill it with our own molten power poured straight down from the heart-crucible where self-love still bubbled.

Tonight, wayward creature, we remember you for your fickle commitments and tortured, half-hearted philosophies, and we offer gratitude not to you, but to the memory of waking the first fateful morning after your departure and seeing still-beating courage pulse behind our own swollen eyes and salt-stained cheeks.

To the sister-friend who plugged into our personal power sources and sought to drain our energetic wells dry, thank you for showing us that patriarchal consumption and narcissistic, uninitiated masculinity know no gender boundaries. Tonight, you boring vampire, we remember you for your feigned sisterhood, constant behind-the-back betrayals, and never-ending, always tiresome boundary violations.

We offer gratitude not to you, but to the memory of our own sly smile when we mustered-up the sufficient sass to call you out and walk away.

To the guru who claimed sovereignty over our souls and bid us embrace our abusers, bury our darkness, and rise to a blinding and blissful enlightenment, thank you for showing us spiritual oppression embodied in a wise-eyed and wounded manipulator. Tonight, bloodthirsty leader, we remember you for your twisted New Age dogma and hungry hands.

We offer gratitude not to you, but to the memory of our own realization that you were nothing more than an unethical business owner peddling ascension as if it were frozen meat and masking all manner of perversion with pitiful proverbs and over-rehearsed sales pitches.

To the mother who escaped into a life of addiction and carelessness, thank you for pushing your orphaned daughters out of the dust-filled nest of neglect and onto the red road of soul-quest and wild communion with nature. Tonight, fragile woman, we remember you for your time-poverty and pill-popping numbness.

We offer gratitude not to you, but to the memory of how warm the embrace of our found mothers felt when our blood mother was sound asleep.

To the collective king who rules over our wounded world, thank you for reminding us how heavy the shadow’s hands can be. Tonight, short-sighted puppet-master, we remember you for every bomb dropped for dollars and closed-door deal signed in the blood of righteous rebels who have seen under your golden mask.

We offer gratitude not to you, but to the rising, wide-winged hope whose wild wail will echo in every house once this long and painful labor has ended, once the dark Queen has amassed her sure-footed and cat-like army, once the gags have been stripped from those who have been silenced for too long, and once the holy many take their planet back from the wicked few.

The snakes are covering us now, sister. Chant with me while these memories that haunt wrap their wily tails around our limbs. Blessed be our feminine instinct, for now we can see the energies of those who wound rolling toward us like a dank, spectral mist.

Blessed be our empathy, for now we can forgive our most brutal teachers not to condone what they have done but to liberate ourselves from their many-knotted binds. Lastly, my love, blessed be our divinely mandated intuition, for now I see how every dark night spent weeping has led me to stand right here, under this Blessing Moon, grateful and unbroken with someone who sees me as I am.

I offer the truest and un-begrudged gratitude to you, dearest, for you let me speak and be heard amongst the snakes when others bade me be silent and take cover from the serpentine wild.

***

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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