Her fruits still abundant, plump, deliciously sweet, she feeds a chattering of starlings and wasps, and soothes my heart each night as I maneuver my tongue around their pits and wipe the juice from my lips after I spit them back into the earth beneath the nettle.

This month in Awaken the Druid, we have arrived at the moment to allow a tree to choose us to diet and connect with for the month. We will receive their medicine, their wisdom, their sacred symbol, their magic, and the role they play in the ecosystem and in the history and culture of us humans through lore and myth.

Cherry reached out her arms to me, and I am in deep gratitude for all she’s shared thus far. When the time is right, I will write an essay about the journey.

Simultaneously, Mother Myth and Memoir is already two months in, and we’ve been letting the Tiamat and Marduk creation myth, and now Persephone work on us.

Something profound has cracked open and planted itself within this group to grow, and we are all in awe, nurturing its beauty.

We are also feeling into the grief so many of us carry as mothers, as men and women, as children, for the lost village, for the ways we couldn’t always reach or protect our children from darkness, for the strange duality of beauty that holds both wound and wonder at once.

I keep marveling at how telling these old myths in circle works on us like medicine, not metaphorically, but actually, in the body. They move and transform us. They hand us a map for our own spiraling, long stories.

The Great Mother is so present, I could feel the brush of her soft hand on my cheek some nights. Amy and I laugh as we quickly realized that she and our ancestors are truly the ones teaching the class.

One of the dear women in our circle shared some beautiful wisdom that’s stuck with me since:

Our longing is our prayer, and it is calling back what was stolen from us. Perhaps that is why I am still here, just to add my longing.

The crone knows she is not in control of this world, she is here to bear witness, and to still laugh and find joy despite all the terrible and heartbreaking things we have no choice but to go through.

Isn’t that true?

Amy and I have been greatly inspired by the wisdom shared in this container already, and plan to create an additional monthly offering to bring more spaces that seek to rebuild that safe cabin in the middle of the wood where women can gather and be witnessed, as this is where our magic returns.

Until then, I have a two NEW Introduction to Tree Magic workshops coming up this season, the first is this Saturday. We will explore the alphabet of the Ogham, and how this language of the trees can guide and transform. We also have our monthly New Moon Gathering with my husband, , a special one for this Sunday to honor the solstice, marking our first harvest here in France.

All of these events live here:

Upcoming Gatherings & Circles

Furthermore, two long form essays are in the oven. My apologies, especially to my paid subscribers for the delay. With treatment and motherhood, they’ve needed some extra time to bake.

One is on the Ash Tree with a recorded shamanic drum journey to the Norns and a rune reading.

One is a deeper dive into the Celtic Myths of Land Stewardship — what they ask of us now, and how we might become the leaders of our own small green worlds, the ones right outside our back doors.

Now. A more intimate message I’d like to share with you…

For This is Love, Too

I started chemotherapy last week. One down, thirteen more ahead of me.

I went into my first session feeling good, at ease, happy even, my hypnotherapy tape at the ready, despite all my fears and denial leading up to it,

despite the naivety I knew I carried like a child walking into the orthodontist’s office as a new patient, delighted by the aquarium in the waiting room.

Though, by the time I got home, the anti-nausea medication had started to wear off, and it hit me all at once like a giant hoof to the ass.

Everything in me wanted to resist that medicine.

I wanted to expel, rip, eject everything that had been dripped into me, tear a fat hole in this reality,

but there was my husband by the bedside, medicine man that he is, with the prescriptions, and the condor feather, a bit of burning sage, a Tibetan singing bowl, and a particular phrasing of words that got me to laugh and settle down.

Somehow, we got through it.

Over the last several years I’ve journeyed with medicine, there is one thing I’ve learned without a doubt.

Don’t fight it. Trust.

And I’ve also come to learn that how I walk with medicine is very much like how I walk with life, and life and its medicines respond accordingly.

Am I surrendering? Am I speaking to it with respect and gratitude? Do I have a clear prayer? Am I humble, welcome, or am I closed off, tight and gritted, hiding in the corner with my nightmares whispering their way into my goose-pimpled flesh?

No. By some miraculous grace, not this time.

I was prepared for this one even though I begged and prayed for any other possible scenario.

And to my surprise, there on my knees, I received the gifts of presence, self-forgiveness, a heart cracked wide open, and for the first time was able to embrace the incredible life I fought so hard to have without the guilt, the shame, the utter torture I could put myself through being so far apart from my little boy.

On my nightly walk, the crescent moon cozied up with Venus, listening to the crickets sing among the meadow grass, the wheat rippling in the soft breeze like the golden fur of that hare that jumped out and paused to look at me before disappearing once more, I smiled. I understood, and placed my hand over the tumor that had formed in the canal that once fed life to my babies.

Oh, Goddess.

This is love, too.

My husband spends hours every night making sure our fragile saplings have enough water to survive.

I see the stress he carries over it in his shoulders, and hear the worry in his breath, the outrage in his heavy sighs.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why don’t they see me? Why Don’t they care? I can hear the little boy in him somewhere whisper through his furled eyebrows.

And then it struck me.

Here we are, working overtime to keep me alive, as we fight to keep the trees and plants alive at the same time, and I realized we’ve already arrived.

Spiraling down deeper into the dark caverns of collapse, of death, as the climate rises unprecedentedly, vacillating without rhyme, decimating harvest yields and unseen populations of so many little creatures.

We are all in this fight for life together, whether we realize it yet or not.

Whether we are still resisting the medicine.

Those saplings are my body, and my body are those saplings.

In old Irish tradition, there was a conviction that ruled over the land which was that the health and abundance of our fields, forests, water, were never separate from the character of its leaders.

Justice and right relationship with the the living world ensured abundance, while greed and disorder brought famine and barrenness.

Sovereignty itself was imagined as a sacred marriage between the king and the land goddess, reminding rulers that they served the land rather than owned it.

When this relationship was broken, Ireland’s myths tell of a slide toward scarcity, oppression, and the Fomorian forces of extraction and domination.

And here we are.

Yet, I still hold optimism and hope in my heart.

I still choose to trust. I know we will heal.

But, perhaps it’s like children when their mother tells them repeatedly not to touch the hot stove.

Sometimes, the only way they’ll learn is through a burnt hand.

Sometimes, we have to journey through these terrible portals of death to finally remember who we are, and still remember to laugh, and hold each other tightly again.

And, this is love too.

So thank you for receiving me in my share of all of this that his been moving in me.

I feel that my words have failed to express it all, but it has helped me simply to place them here, raw and a bit messy, and I hope they’ve moved something in you too.

And I want you to remember this as well:

You are the one we’ve been waiting for.

We are the leaders that can fall in love,

and marry the land,

our bodies,

once more.

More soon on these old ancestral land myths from Ireland, and the Ash Trees teachings on life & death.

But for now, I leave you to go on my walk with a heart full of gratitude, and a bowl of sweet cherries.

With love from Burgundy,

Rose

For my paid subscribers, I am offering you a recording of the most recent journey I guided in my Mother, Myth & Memoir container. It is a rune journey to the ancestors in response to the grief of Demeter.

Read more

If you’re not familiar with this folktale, I’ll offer it in a brief telling.

It opens with a poor single mother living down the dusty road on a small farm with her seven children, each named after a day of the week. One morning she leaves for the market, and before she goes, she tells them:

“Because you are such good children, you may ask for anything you want, and I will bring it home.”

The children each make their request. But before she sets off, she gives them two instructions. First, don’t let strangers in. Second, don’t play with fire.

Shortly after she leaves, an old woman pulling a cart of straw rolls up and knocks at the window. “I’m Heckedy Peg, I’ve lost my leg, let me in.”

The children are cautious. Their mother told them not to let strangers in. But Heckedy Peg reassures them their mother won’t mind as she reaches into her cart to reveal a sack of gold. The children, starry-eyed, accept her offer. They let her in. They light her pipe. They break both rules at once, dancing wildly around the house with burning straw.

And as you might have already guessed, the old woman becomes the witch and transforms them each into food, packs them into her cart, and steals off over the bridge, through the village, deep into the dark woods to her hut.

When their mother returns home to an empty house, a black bird, who witnessed the whole thing, lands at the windowsill and tells her what happened and where to find them.

As quickly as her legs could carry her, the mother storms off over the bridge and through the woods to the witch’s hut.

She bangs on the door demanding, “Let me in. I want my children back.”

Heckedy Peg answers, “I can’t let you in, your shoes are too dirty.” So, the mother replies, “then I’ll take them off.”

She knocked again, and the second time, it was the filth of her socks, so she took those off. On the third try, it was her very feet that were too dirty, so finally, the mother declared, “then I’ll cut them off.” She hides her feet beneath her dress and enters the hut.

Inside, a great banquet table is set with a feast. “Here are your children,” croaks Heckedy Peg, pointing to the dishes.

She then offers an ultimatum: guess which child is which food the first time, and they go free. The mother looks down at her market basket — at the gifts she had purchased for each of them — and understands. I know my children by what they want.

She pairs each item to each dish or child. “Milk wants pitcher. That’s Wednesday,” and so on.

One by one, her children are returned.

Then she chases the witch out of the hut, through the woods, across the field, over the bridge, and Heckedy Peg jumps into the water and is never seen again.

This story has lived in my psyche for as long as I can remember. Yet it wasn’t until recently that I understood how deeply its archetypes and patterns had woven themselves into the tapestry of my own life’s story, or that my own mother who read it to us so lovingly all those years, would in fact, one day, devour me.

Who Is the Devouring Mother?

The moment I realized my mother consumed me, like Jonah fumbling in the dark, and by the grace of god finding a match inside the belly of the whale, I didn’t have a term for where I found myself.

But one day, in meditation, in the middle of my life’s storm on the difficult path of individuation, it came to my awareness that my every judgement, decision, and way of relating to myself and everything and everyone else was first filtered through her lens, her voice, her fear, her very strict judgmental parameters of what was “good” and what was “bad.” At the time, following my intuition, my truth, my inner knowing felt dangerous and wrong. If she didn’t support it, or didn’t approve of it, my fear of that would put me in a perpetual state of doubt. It was far easier to be controlled.

This is common for any of us who’ve grown up alongside or been enmeshed with this archetype. The Devouring Mother can show up in our parents, an older sibling, a spouse, an in-law, a boss, an institution, a religion, etc.

So who is she?

In Jungian terms, The Devouring Mother is one of the aspects of The Terrible Mother, which is a face of The Great Mother archetype.

An archetype is an energy, a pattern of consciousness that exists in what Jung called, “the collective unconscious.” Which is something that all of us share throughout time and culture as humans.

This is why the same patterns and themes arise in myth and dreams from all around the world.

The Devouring Mother is just one of these patterns. And, we have all grown up with her—- in our bedtime stories, in our own mother’s desire to eat our little feet because her love has become too violent to bear, or in her cautionary lectures: I know what’s best for you, do and be as I say.

And while this is normal of a mother to very young children still learning to navigate the world, the devouring mother never lets go. Her very sense of worthiness and the hunger of her insecurity is fed by her children.

So when they begin to grow up, and if they dare try to individuate, she reasserts her control.

She does this either subconsciously or consciously by depriving her children of the very skills they need to obtain to become sovereign adults on their own. This could be through constant criticism, control, emasculation, perfectionism, judgement, and a communicated lack of trust despite that child’s efforts to live up to her standards.

And the adult child gets trapped in her stomach, never really able to grow up, trust themselves, or engage with the world through their own souls’ desire and lens without fear, doubt and the echo of their mother’s cautionary judgement or criticism, or a low sense of self-worth.

In other examples, this figure may show up as the desire to always be “the fairest of them all.” Like the step-mother in Snow White, she wants to keep the child down, so that she will always been seen as the top.

But this shadow side of the Great Mother rarely announces herself. She doesn’t often appear as the monster in the hollow well, or the fiery serpentine demon with terrible claws and fangs. She is subtle, undercover, even to herself.

She might be wearing a perfectly pressed pair of white pants, a cardigan draped over her shoulders, standing in a magazine-worthy living room with a plate of cookies, offering you a bit of gossip, and a glass of freshly squeezed juice that she clutches between her manicured fingernails.

She is attentive, caring, deeply involved in all aspects of her children’s lives. She sacrifices. She protects. She gives endlessly. On the surface, she looks like the perfect parent, the martyr who has done everything for the sake of her kids.

But what Jung saw in this archetype is something that each of us would prefer to overlook. There is a quiet darkness that slowly eats at your soul, a nightmare that is easier to ignore than face.

The truth is that the devouring mother’s giving is not selfless. It is feeding her wound. She does not nourish in order to release. She nourishes in order to keep, to smother, to have power and control.

She withholds the very life skills that would make independence possible because a child who can navigate the world alone no longer needs her. And she has built her entire identity and sense of self worth around being needed.

She mistakes her child’s dependency for closeness. She mistakes her fear for love. She mistakes control for protection, and she performs it so convincingly that the child, and often the mother herself, cannot tell the difference for a very long time.

For some, they will never become conscious of this dynamic. They will continue to carry it over to their own mothering, and call it love, wear it like a badge of honor believing that enmeshment without boundary is what closeness in a family, and parent-child relationship should look like.

However, with the devouring mother, there is an unspoken contract you’ve signed onto related to their devotion. They will provide it for you and give so long as you continue allowing them to be in control, to steer the narrative of your life, to influence every judgement that will lead you to making the decisions they want you to make.

So, what happens when their child tries to truly grow up, individuate, take the unique path of their soul? What if their desires trigger her unprocessed trauma, fears, prejudice, or shame?

The devouring mother will say, Oh no you don’t! She will make herself the victim of your becoming because your sovereignty is a threat, abandonment, ungratefulness, insanity.

And as you try to swim out from her insatiable, wrathful belly, you will be met with her scorn, silent treatments, manipulation tactics that include nightmarish theories and judgments aimed to crumble your sense of reality and self.

And she can turn the whole ocean against you, cutting you off from the rest of the family, isolating you to prove her point. You are the problem. She conjures the waves against you, praying for your failure, or that you’ll just “see the light” again, return to the fold, starving, begging to be fed, so that she can tuck you away into the safety of her shell once again, feeding you spoonfuls of shame everyday to remind you that you need her, and can’t be trusted on your own.

And when you refuse this? Choose to claw yourself away anyway, bleeding as the unforgiving ocean slices into you, you only want to cry out for your mother, and ache harder as you remember that she never really had the capacity to hold you, and going back would be like re-entering Ursula’s layer.

This is just one example.

However, universally, for those of us who have become conscious of being devoured, the path out of the belly is not easy. In fact, it can be excruciatingly painful, disorienting, and lonely.

We have to rebuild our sense of self, learn to set boundaries we never had permission to set, retune our internal voice to listen to our soul versus our fear, and learn how to make it in the world without the support we relied on for years.

And, if the Devouring Mother showed up as your mother, relinquishing or refiguring that attachment goes against our very biology.

It can be easy to get swept back up into another belly to survive.

What Can We Learn By Being Devoured?

If we stick with the path, if we find good support, a gifted therapist, teachers who have walked this terrain themselves, a community of safe people who can hold us while we remember who we are, there are profound gifts waiting on the other side of being devoured.

The first is the gift of yourself. Not the self that was shaped to fit her world, assigned a role, trained to seek approval before trusting your own knowing. Your actual self, the one with its own aesthetic, its own desires, its own instinctive sense of what is true and what is not. For many of us, meeting this person for the first time in adulthood is simultaneously disorienting and like coming home. You begin to notice what you actually find beautiful. What actually nourishes you. What your body says yes to before your conditioning has a chance to override it. This re-membering — and I use that word deliberately, as a putting-back-together of something that was always whole — is one of the most quietly radical things a person can do.

The second gift is discernment. Having been consumed, you learn to recognize the taste of the gingerbread house. You develop a finely tuned sense for the difference between love that wants to free you and conditional love that wants to smother you. For the conditions buried inside apparent generosity, the control dressed up as care. This is not cynicism, it is wisdom, hard-won and genuinely useful. It makes you a better partner, a better friend, a better parent. It means the pattern does not have to continue. It can end with you, not because you are exceptional, but because you chose to become conscious of it.

And the third gift, perhaps the most unexpected, is compassion. Not the kind that excuses what was done, or rushes to make peace before the wound has been honestly named. But the deeper kind, the understanding that she was devoured by something too. That she holds a deep fear of abandonment and a deep seated wound of self-hatred she doesn’t have to tools or courage to access.

That the hunger she turned on you was first turned on her, by someone who was also afraid, also grasping, also building a gingerbread house because the forest felt too terrifying to trust. This does not make it right. It makes it human. And in understanding it as human, as a pattern, not a verdict, we find that we are not defined by having been inside it. We were always more than what that fear made of us.

When we meet this archetype consciously, in myth, in our dreams, in the memoir of our own lives, she stops driving us from the shadows. We can receive what she actually carries: the initiation, the fierce clarifying grief, and underneath it all, the invitation to become someone who knows herself so completely that no one can ever again convince her she is food.

We can begin to make this terrifying force right-sized in our psyche, calling on the support of our higher selves, our spiritual guardians and guides, and the parts of us that are stronger than the fear could ever be. To use a Disney reference, we can restore the heart of Te Fiti.

Why this work is crucial in bringing us back from a motherless patriarchy…

The reason the Devouring Mother has been able to reign like a quiet epidemic throughout our culture is because we have gone unconscious of her. We have normalized what she does. Many of us shrug off enmeshment and unhealthy attachment as simply how close families should feel. We make entire sitcoms that emanate the dynamic.

We mistake the absence of boundaries for love, and the presence of control for safety because that is what we were taught, and because naming it otherwise would require us to grieve something enormous.

And the devouring dynamic does not just exist in the family home. It scales. It becomes the template through which we relate to institutions, to governments, to the economy, to the earth itself. Capitalism, at its most voracious, is the supreme devouring mother writ large, a system that feeds us comfort and convenience and the glittering promise of gold, in exchange for our sovereignty, our connection to the land, the beautiful land itself, our health, our ability to survive by our own hands and our own instincts. We have traded genuine nourishment for algorithms engineered to hijack our dopamine the way a drug does — keeping us hungry, keeping us scrolling, keeping us just fed enough that we don't notice we are being consumed.

We have lost our connection to nature. To our own nature. To the cycles of the body and the earth that once oriented us, that once told us what was real. And in that disconnection, the devouring pattern finds its most fertile ground because a person cut off from their own instincts is a person who cannot tell the difference between nourishment and consumption. Between love and control. Between a home and a hut deep in the dark wood.

On the personal level, the cost of remaining unconscious of this is steep. When we don't realize we have been devoured, we live inside a low hum of insecurity we cannot name. We mistake the voice of our conditioning for the voice of our own soul and follow it into the wrong life, the wrong partner, the wrong work, the wrong version of ourselves, and wonder why nothing quite fits.

Some of us become controlling ourselves, passing the hunger on. Some of us reach crisis point: the weight of carrying a life that was never truly ours finally becomes too much to hold, and we find ourselves numbed into manageable dysfunction, medicated out of the very feelings that were trying to show us the way out.

And the deeper cost, the one that grieves me most, is the medicine that goes unshared. Each of us came here carrying something specific: a gift, a knowing, a particular quality of presence or creativity or truth that the world actually needs. When we remain inside the belly, that medicine stays locked. We make wrong turns away from it. We diminish it to fit the shape we were assigned. We do not become who we came here to be, and the world is genuinely poorer for it.

Look around. We can see, writ enormous on the political stage, what an unexamined devouring wound produces at scale: countries run by insecure men who never individuated, who never separated from the mother or the system that consumed them, who learned that the only way to feel safe was to keep everyone else small. The man-child kings that rape young girls and go on scot free without consequence.

This about that for a moment. They rape little girls. They literally consume everything they are, spitting them out like they’re nothing.

And this atrocity is not a new archetype. He is what happens when the work of becoming a true self is bypassed entirely, when power is grasped in place of growth, and dominance is mistaken for sovereignty.

This is the Devouring Mother's most devastating legacy.

This is why the work is not optional. Not a luxury. Not something to get to eventually, once life settles down. The personal and the political are the same wound at different scales, and they will not heal until we are willing to go into the belly consciously, to name what consumed us, to grieve it honestly, and to emerge with the hard-won knowledge of what it means to be truly free.

We also must meet with courage and an open heart the real force of the Devouring Earth. Our fear of that reality, that the earth devours everything, recycling it to create new life in a continuous cycle, is what causes us to go unconscious of her in the first place, and what allows her shadow to grow larger and larger in the background. We keep trying to outrun her by either becoming her or crouching down beneath her, but we must alchemize her wisdom and relate differently to her truth through ritual, through grief, through connection.

When we see this archetype in our myths, in our dreams, in the memoir of our own lives, she loses her power to operate from the shadows. She becomes a teacher rather than a captor. And we become, finally, the authors of our own story, sovereign, rooted, and alive to the particular medicine only we can offer.

The Gift in My Journey

I come back to that couch.

The smallness of us on it. My sisters and me pressed against my mother in the lamplight, her arm around us, the book open across her lap. We knew every word before she said it. We’d mouth them along with her, delighted, terrified in the safe way that children can be terrified when they know they are held. And when she dropped her voice low and croaky for the witch, I’m Heckedy Peg, I’ve lost my leg, we’d grip each other tighter and shriek and beg her to keep going.

She loved us. There was no doubt about it. She loved us the way she knew how to love, which was fierce and consuming and entirely sincere. The story she chose to read us over and over again, the one we memorized until it lived in our bodies, she did not know it would also become her own story. She did not know she was both women in it. Neither did I, not for a very long time.

That is the nature of the unconscious. It speaks to us constantly, in the stories we are drawn to, in the dreams that wake us, in the myths that have survived for thousands of years because something in them will not let us go. Heckedy Peg was trying to tell us something, all those evenings on the sofa. It was laying down a map inside us for a journey none of us knew we would one day have to take.

I am grateful for the map. I am grateful, even now, for the story, and for the voice that read it to me, dark and croaky and full of love, not knowing that one day I would have to follow it all the way into the dark wood and find out what was waiting there for me. I also didn’t know that the finding out would cost us both so much heartbreak.

But here is what I also know. Heckedy Peg ends with the children coming home, home to themselves, to their mother who keeps them from being eaten by having an intimate knowledge of their true desires and uniqueness, and on the other side of the dark wood, they may not end up with gold, but they end up with the love of each other.

May we all come to know ourselves with such intimacy, compassion and love that we make it off of Heckedy Peg’s table. May we walk out of every belly we have been swallowed by, and may we find, on the other side, that we remember exactly who we are and the power we hold.

The biggest gift the Devouring Mother offered me was courage. The courage to live my life fully and completely in the face of any horrors that would try to swallow me whole.

With love,

Rose

An Offering

If something in this essay stirred in you, please share in the comments.

If you’d like to go deeper into this work and feel it calling you, I present to you a course, Mother, Myth & Memoir. It is a nine-month journey through the many archetypes of the Great Mother, as an entry point into our own stories and life’s experiences. We read myth, fairytales, go on shamanic, somatic journeys to meet these archetypes within ourselves, and write together as an act of sacred alchemy.

Together, we make the unconscious, conscious through dreamwork, story, and being held and witnessed in an intimate, safe container.

This is for writers and non-writers alike. For anyone whose ever been born from a mother and feels called to do this work.

We begin Friday, May 16th

Learn More & Join Us

For My Paid Subscribers

For my paid subscribers, I am offering you the replay to our recent live workshop My Mother, She Ate Me, where we explored and journeyed to the Devouring Mother. I hope you receive as much nourishment from it as we did, and feel free to reach out to me to share anything you experience during your journey.

*You also receive a 10% discount code for the course if you feel called to sign up.*

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Join us on May 9th @ 2:00 PM EST, 4:00 PM PST for our by donation introductory workshop on The Devouring Mother.

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Motherhood Myth & Memoir: A 9 Month Transformational Journey Beginning May 16th

If this is the work that calls to your soul right now, or a part of you is whispering yes to this work, we hope you will take the journey through our 9-month container, Motherhood Myth & Memoir, where we will unveil the mother archetype through our collective myths, dreamwork, shamanic somatic journeying, and write our personal stories through the structure of memoir.

This sacred work is meant to awaken creativity, consciousness, and the alchemy required to transform your story, reclaim your voice, and start living your most authentic truth.

It is for all of us who have ever been born to a mother.

Early-Bird Discount Active Through April

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Thank you , , Machell, , and the many others for tuning into my live video with !

We send you many blessings along your path.

xo,

Rose

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It was a joyful time connecting with Lucy Grabe-Watson, founder of Ancient Woodlands UK. We touch on our stories that led us to our love and connection with trees, the work we do with them, and why they are so important to all of us. I also share a few ways that you can begin communing with a tree, working with tree magic and receiving the wisdom it has to share for your life.

We’d love to hear your experiences!

To help support Old Growth Forests through Ancient Woodlands UK, the link below will direct you to the organization’s site where you can learn more about their advocacy project.

Support UK Old Growth Forests

If you’re interested in learning more about tree magic, ancient traditions and tree connection with me, I have a “pay what you can” by-donation workshop coming up on Saturday, May 2nd.

You’ll take your first steps into the practice of tree magic: learning to sense a tree’s presence, recognize when a tree is calling to you, and begin building a relationship with a tree as a living spiritual ally. No prior experience is required, only an open heart and a willingness to be received by the green world.

This workshop stands alone as a meaningful and complete experience, and also serves as a natural doorway into the deeper work of my “Awaken the Druid” two year deep dive for those who feel the call.

Listen to the Trees

Thank you so much for your big beautiful courageous and wild hearts, and for sharing our love for trees. May the work we do together help steer the world towards tender care and a regeneration of the animate, green world.

With all our love,

Rose & Lucy

When I sit with my heart and question what the world needs now, I turn to the wisdom of trees, and I turn to the love of the mother in all her wild complexities, shadow and light.

This coming week and next, I am excited to share that I will be going Live for two deeply rich conversations, and I would love for you to join me!

Tree Talks

Today, March 24th @ 7pm GMT, 3PM EST, I will be going Live with , founder of Ancient Woodlands UK, advocate and protector of old growth forests and ecology.

We are looking forward to exploring our mutual connection to trees, woodlands, forest schooling and how to forge a relationship through the old traditions and ancient tree magic.

Mother Speaks

On Tuesday, March 31st @ 7pm GMT, 2PM EST, I will be joined by , jungian analyst trainee, Emmy Award Winning creative producer, and long time soul sister to have a conversation about the Mother archetype, exploring the way she lives within the collective unconscious as well as our bodies and personal life stories, the intersection between myth and memoir, and why this exploration is necessary at this time for birthing the future and communities of our dreams, reclaiming the Mother from the patriarchy.

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You’re Invited to my Upcoming Mini Workshops

Did something move you from these conversations? You are exclusively invited to my upcoming workshops on tree magic and the mother archetype in our myths and life stories.

*They are both “pay what you can” by donation to support you during these times.*

I hope to meet you around the virtual fire.

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Every month for the last two years, I’ve been “dieting” trees in the Celtic Ogham. I use my drum to journey to the tree in the otherworld. I study its ancient lore, myth, ecology, history, and ancestral uses for both magic and medicine.

Each day, I create sacred space to connect with a piece of the tree I’m relating to either through bark teas, flower essences, placing seeds, leaves and/or flowers beneath my pillow, sipping sacraments in tonics and tinctures, trying out old druid magic and divination practices, or simply by sitting with the tree in this physical realm offering a daily song or prayer.

This is my second essay in a series where I share my experience, and what I’ve been receiving from these trees since I began my course, Awaken the Druid, an answer to a soul calling that inspired me to reach my hands through time like roots into the earth, and resurrect these ancestral seeds into my life.

In my last essay on Elder, I wrote about why we need to talk to the trees again. Not just to follow a cute wellness trend, or for a superficial kind of manifestation, but as a way to consult and consciously exchange with the living, breathing, animate world once more, to receive guidance and medicine during this time of collapse, and startling change.

If you haven’t read it, you can check it out here:

The separation of our bodies from the natural world has left us with lineages scared by wounds and traumas that will take generations to heal.

Communing with the trees and the animate world is not only our birthright, but a doorway that opens us to the path of reconnection and remembrance.

What We’ll Explore Here

This essay is dedicated to Alder. An often forgotten hero of the tree realm.

A tree that absolutely holds the medicine for our time.

The outlaw of the green wood, Alder’s leaves lend their iconic dye to Robin Hood’s cloak. Like the famous folk hero, Alder holds firm against the current of conformity, is resistant to chaos, and stands up for truth and morality, while creating solid ground that allow other trees and species to grow and flourish.

The Alder, often found rooted in the middle of a raging mountain stream or a marshy, flooded plane, teaches us how keep the chaos, the force of rushing water from toppling us over.

Instead, of getting swept up in the tide, or internally rotting and disintegrating over time, we learn to become strengthened by the storms that we find ourselves surrounded by.

Traditionally, an ally of wounded warriors, and a protector of all those who would fight for sovereignty, morality, equality and justice, Alder was said to bleed in our stead when used as a shield.

Alder also encourages us to seek honorable actions while helping us gain the discernment to answer a very important question: when do I use the shield, and when do I use the sword? What is my shield? What is my sword?

Associated with Bran the Blessed whose name means raven, Alder is also a tree that utters prophecy and can help us to take grounded action guided by hearing the voices of the otherworld and our ancestors during these destabilizing times.

In the essay that follows, I will share what I’ve learned about Alder’s ancient wisdom, magic and medicine as well as the way this tree has made an impact on my own story, and how it might become an important ally or teacher in yours and for our time.

Paid subscribers will also receive…

• a recorded guided journey to meet the Alder tree in the otherworld to begin a relationship, conversation and receive any messages or guidance the tree spirit, otherworld, or your ancestors may have for you at this time.

• a 10% discount on my upcoming courses, Awaken the Druid (July 2026), a deeply held container where we commune with trees and their magic, & Motherhood Myth and Memoir (May 2026), exploring the archetype of the mother, and her role in our collective stories, the land, and the intersection of our individual lives by writing a memoir that centers on this theme.

• Recipes for medicines, and wellness products like essences and teas

• Magical tools and rituals using the Alder tree from antiquity.

  Your paid subscription and support means more to me than you know. It helps me continue this work while caring for my two young children, and nurturing our 20 acre land rewinding project.

  If you enjoy my writing, and find these essays nourishing along the path, I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber if it is within your means to so. Let’s keep these fires alive.

  We thank you from the depth of our hearts!

If you’re interested in diving deeper into tree communication with me, my two-year long course, Awaken the Druid, begins this July and is open for early-bird registration (a 15% discount).

Together, we will go on a life-changing adventure to speak with the trees in a supportive container, remembering the magic of the druids and the wisdom of our ancestors.

Learn More

Now, let’s dive in…

The Robin Hood of Trees

For at least six centuries, the outlaw in the green hood has haunted the oaks in the Sherwood Forest and in our collective unconscious, inspiring children, stewards, honorable brave hearts, and believers in sovereign living in nature outside of corrupt and exploitive governments and laws.

There have been many renditions of the tale written and told overtime, but one thing remains consistent, Robin Hood is a skilled archer and warrior whose morality and chivalry has cast him out of a system run by men who lie, cheat, extort, and abuse their power.

Some of us might be wondering, where is our Robin Hood now? The hour is getting late and we need something to radically change.

Alder is here to tell you: you are the one you’ve been waiting for.

Robin Hood wears the dye of the Alder Tree not just because it allows him to camouflage in the forest canopy, but because it lends a very potent magic.

Read more

This past month, I’ve been on a diet with Elder.

By “diet,” I don’t mean to say that I am making all my meals with bark, leaves and dried berries, or that the tree and I are restricting our energy input in tandem, but I am referring to the sacred and traditional practice of forging a disciplined relationship with a specific plant through daily ritual, communication and devotion.

Across cultures, this is one of humanity’s oldest technologies for making the self quieter, so we can hear the plant speak, communing with her spirit again, receiving guidance, stories, and wisdom through deep time and roots that stretch and weave across worlds.

A being that remembers, and can help us find our way out of the fog of amnesia.

Every year, my husband makes us a potent syrup with elderberries that we forage in autumn to protect us from the bugs and viruses that will inevitably reach for us in winter.

Each day of this “diet,” of this courtship I’ve walked with the Elder, I’ve taken the syrup like a daily sacrament, quietly whispering a prayer of gratitude, and making room for her messages with a few moments of silence. I’ve brought tobacco to the elder trees that stand beside my home, and sometimes offer a song or prayer on my shruti box.

I’m getting to know that the Elder is a stern, unrelenting grandmother who loves you in that fierce way that prevents her from sugar coating things. She points you to the blunt truth that’s right under your nose, and she’ll keep mentioning it until you take the time to look and address it.

Nearly two years ago, I made a commitment to the trees, creating a course called, Awaken the Druid, to hold to it. The calling for this class came in a dream, an instructional message, to recall their magic, and learn to speak with them again.

I also desired to reach my own hands through time to bring back this ancient knowledge of the dead, of my ancestors who knew and worshipped these trees so well that they were able to translate their wisdom into a magical alphabet that followed them through moons and seasons: the Ogham.

My first experiences of trees as spiritual, magical creatures, was when I was just a little girl. We had a giant umbrella tree leaning on the garden gate of my childhood home in South Florida.

I’m not sure if it is because her leaves looked like hands reaching down for me to hold, or that her shade created a perfectly breezy, cool reprieve and hideaway from the heat and the rest of the world, but I remember her as a dear friend, a safe haven, a storyteller. I knew there was something magical and sacred beneath her arms.

I would lose hours there, making up my own stories and entering that limitless world of mystery and pretend. She brought me comfort, the felt sense of home.

When we moved away, I remember grieving the tree, as well as the nature preserve we played “witches” in across the street, our very own otherworldly cauldron, standing with Cypress, Date Palms, and Live Oak, the moss dripping from great gnarled branches like wisps of ancient fairy hair.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started this journey with the trees. Of course, the rationally trained part of my mind doubted if anything would come from it other than the potential physical health benefits of some of their medicinal fruits, flowers, and bark.

However, something beyond my analytical expectations occurred. I am not even sure how to describe it accurately in words yet, other than to say that this experience, this courting of the trees has changed my life in the most profound ways, and I’ve only just begun.

Elder Wisdom

Trees are true elders, and we need not wonder so much about how they operate, as it’s apparent in the way they stand in the world. They are deeply rooted and stretch up to the heavens, providing us a ladder to both the upper and lower worlds.

They are slow, supportive, solid, protective, life giving. And, while their medicine is not overly boisterous or dazzling as their entheogenic cousins that are more traditionally ingested in Amazonian “dietas,” it is just as transformative, revealing, way showing and healing.

I could perhaps even argue that it is even more potent, as the trees walk slowly, quietly and consistently beside you in regular daily life and consciousness. You have to slow down with them in order to be able to hear their voices.

Many trees in the Celtic Ogham take and embody the form of the triple goddess. In tune with the Nature Goddess’s seasons, they offer themselves as dainty flower girls, sultry mothers bearing their irresistible fruits, and then fall into dormancy casting chilling shadows in the moonlight.

This axis they spin on as our Great Mother journeys around the sun, lives within us too, within our stories, our deities, and the riddles we were sent here to solve.

Elder is not an exception to this pattern as she too is a goddess tree.

And thus, walking and speaking with the trees, learning from and intimately working or partnering with nature spirits is not “woo woo,” or bordering insanity, but our birthright. It is a relationship and practice so powerful that for centuries there have been great efforts to have us forget, despite our soul’s eternal yearning to find it again.

It began with domineering churches creating laws that punished and executed us for praying with water, land, and nature spirits.

They mowed down sacred groves and waged character assassinations on those “heathens” who refused to forget.

We tell children it’s just their “imagination” now.

This set us up for an age of extraction, clear cutting in the name of industry, where plants and nonhumans are assumed lacking of consciousness by science, just material matter, natural resource, devoid of memory and feeling.

Yet, before this time, the druids and our indigenous ancestors all over the world held these beings so sacred that, in Ireland, for example, one could even incur the death penalty for felling certain trees under Brehon law.

We danced around them, made tools for magic, sought their counsel, healed our sick with their medicine, and enchanted groves and forests for centuries before this disease spread.

And, science is only just catching up, proving that trees do communicate with one another through mycelial networks and root systems, are aware of changes in their environment, the presence of other beings, are incredibly sensitive, and respond.

The holly tree, for example, makes sharper leaves in places where deer are present and rounded leaves where they are safe and untouched.

They walk for miles over years to receive more sunlight or solid ground, or to save themselves from climate related stress. They offer us chemical compounds that balance our blood pressure and harmonize our hearts.

As a way of honoring the standing ones once more, I am beginning to write about some of my experiences while dieting the Ogham trees along with the teachings I’ve gained from each I’ve walked beside.

I will start here with Elder as sitting with the grief of our current world, my own extended family, at the elderly man-baby leading my home country, I feel how parched we are of her waters.

True eldership is a scarce resource in our “rational” culture.

Ready to Walk with Me Further?

If you’re interested in learning more and would like to continue here, supporting the work of a stay-at-home writer mom, paid subscribers will receive:

• These teachings I’ve received from my diet with Elder

• Elder’s presence in folklore, her unique magic, and how to read her when using the Ogham for divination.

• A guided shamanic drum journey to meet the spirit of the Elder tree in the enchanted forest between the worlds to receive your own messages, communication, and begin your own relationship.

Your paid subscription not only helps me to keep writing, but it also goes towards us planting more trees on our land we are rewilding, so we are eternally grateful for the support!

If not, I appreciate you being here anyway, and I encourage you to befriend a tree near you this new year.

It could be a tree that you admire, or one that dominates your garden, or maybe you will hear a still small whisper calling you to a particular trunk.

Either way, you will have an inner knowing or sense, so don’t question it.

Besides, I don’t think it matters so much as to which tree you choose as they are all special in their own right.

During the times we are facing, having the trees as allies, teachers, and guides is so deeply needed. Their strength, wisdom and love will have our backs as we travel through to the other side.

There was a time I used to wonder if humans weren’t merely a parasite living on this planet who would inevitably bring everything into extinction, requiring the earth to start over without us.

While I do still feel that is a possible plot line in our collective story, being in communion with the trees showed me a different reality.

One where humans are here as stewards, magicians, wizards, nurturers, song carriers, dreamers, storytellers, weavers. We listen, exchange, and live in a loving reciprocity with the wisdom and tools to protect this creation.

The trees would have us remember that, slowing us down and holding us through our journeys of reclamation.

How do We Begin?

When you visit the tree, you may first introduce yourself like you would a new teacher, or companion, share gratitude if it is on your heart, announce that you’d like to get to know them, ask if they could show you how you might work together, or if you have something specific you’d like their help with.

You may also ask permission to take a branch or a leaf or a berry to place beneath your pillow or at your bedside each night to get to know them more closely.

In my experience thus far, the trees are excited and very happy to be acknowledged again, and to support us and communicate with us in this way. We have a unique and special symbiotic exchange with trees, whether we are conscious of it or not. We exchange breath, shelter, and our hands lend life to one another.

You may even want to create a dedicated altar somewhere outside or in your home to honor this truth, and leave a daily offering to connect. It could be water that you’ve prayed over, or a song, story, tobacco or stones. Even just your presence and breath for a few moments is a powerful gift.

You could also journal while sitting against her trunk, or while gazing at her from your window, and start to notice the subtle changes in your life, the messages or perspectives that may begin to enter your awareness and thoughts.

You may even make a new bird or other creature friend connected to the same tree.

Join us for a two-year journey with the trees

Awaken the Druid

And, if you feel called to make this a full-blown commitment within a supportive container, and would like to learn the Ogham and remember the ways of our ancestors, we will begin our next two-year adventure with the trees this July, beginning with Birch. Two years may seem like a long time, but for the trees, it is merely minutes. My current students and I have all shared that we will continue this journey with them for a lifetime. I hope you will join us somewhere along the way!

Message me if you have questions, and if you are interested to learn more,

visit: https://www.rosewollf.com/druid

The Ancient Wisdom of Elder

“Lady Elhorn, please give me of thy wood, and I will give thee of mine when I become a tree.”

The women once whispered as they knelt and bowed at the roots of the Elder Tree that stretched along the stone walls of their gardens. In full spring bloom, her dainty white blossoms clustered above their heads, their sweet hypnotic scent traveling through their ears in the cool breeze.

Their daughters knelt beside them, tugging at their kirtles, prattling spiritedly with the fairies, while joyously picking her flowers and placing them in their baskets and pockets for potions.

In the old folk traditions across northern Europe, from Britain and Germany to Scandinavia, a dryad, or tree spirit, was known to live within the Elder tree. She was called Lady Elhorn in Britain, Hylde-umoer in Denmark, and Frau Holda in the Germanic lands.

Mother of the elves, protectress of women’s crafts, a goddess who holds the sacred pool where the souls of unborn children dwell, brings babies to their mother’s womb and rocks their cradles at night to keep the house asleep after their birth.

As an old crone, she’s a guardian and protectress not only of the Elder Tree and it’s powerful medicines, but also of the homes she grew beside.

Read more

She was golden, swirled with black, white and all shades of brown.

“A tabby.” The woman emerging from behind the stacked cages of the PetSmart adoption center announced upon witnessing our connection.

“Ohhhh. That’s a kitty cat. Can you say kitty cat? Meoooww.”

I sucked in my cheeks after my impression, overwhelmed by my son’s edible, toothless grin and, withholding a bite, gave him an eskimo kiss instead.

We were killing time. Meandering through the isles of this pet superstore oohing and ahhing at exotic birds neurotic in their cages, tiny schools of technicolor swirling behind aquarium glass, and fluffy bunnies twitching their noses, spacing out behind the bars.

My fiancé at the time—my baby’s father—was getting his teeth cleaned around the corner. We only had one car, not because we couldn’t afford a second, but because it was fiscally irresponsible. He insisted we must make do with just one.

So here we were, rounding the corners, stopping to coo at the little cages within our very own big cage, until we saw her.

Serene, yet piercing in her Tabby costume, she looked at me as if she wished to convey an urgent message.

I had this uncanny desire to take her home. So much so that I felt I couldn’t bring myself to leave the PetSmart that day without adoption papers.

This was very strange because, up until this moment, I never liked cats. In fact, they made me uneasy, squeamish, and I was highly allergic. I didn’t appreciate the way they were skittish or aloof, or even that they rubbed their bodies up against you without consent. If I succumbed to just one stroke, one lick of that sandpaper tongue, I would fall ill and rub my itchy watery eyes that felt as if a hair had embedded itself in my corneas.

My ex shared the same aversion. I knew it would be impossible to take this beauty home, and yet I couldn’t leave without feeling such a pang of regret and grief.

I thought quickly about the ways in which I may be able to convince him to let me adopt. Perhaps, I could say things like, “We will just leave her outside. She’d help with the squirrels. I would buy all her food and take care of everything.”

I knew there was no amount of convincing, but when his appointment finished, I still led him back to the cat cages just to show him how excited our son became watching them.

He was uninterested, and wanted to get home, started steering me towards the exit. And then, it slipped. Behind all my covert attempts to get him to notice the Tabby, there was the truth: I desired her. I felt a connection beyond any rational sense.

When I finally admitted it, he laughed with that over exaggerated, high pitched gasp, that said, are you taking the piss, are you mad?

I laughed back. He was right, but I eventually resorted to pleading in that whine I carried through childhood.

“Buttt….ugh, fine, but just look at her. She needs me.”

He ignored my ridiculous pout with the roll of his eyes.

A few days later, I thought I would’ve forgotten all about that caged, majestic, queen, but her essence lingered. I couldn’t shake the feeling of remorse, or the deep knowing that somehow, without a shred of doubt, she belonged with me.

I wondered often if she was still back in that PetSmart, if someone else had taken her home, or whether I could work up the courage to just go pick her up, sign the papers, and deal with the consequences later.

Then, the impossible occurred.

I was sitting in my sunroom that looked out onto our back deck and garden, the place where I had began my awakening, where I slowly built my courage. It was here I started writing poetry once more, seeing clients after leaving my 9-5 without permission to steal back time with my baby boy. I hung bundles of foraged herbs to dry over the window sills, spoke my first prayers to the gods of soil, water, air and fire. I journeyed to the underworld, learned meditation and mantra, animism and ancient cosmology, practiced kundalini yoga and breathwork, all the tools that kept me grounded and connected to my truth and heart as my world reshaped itself.

All within my little terrarium, where in the wee hours, before my little one stirred, I’d watch the glass vanish and the Milky Way spill into a river I could be carried along.

I was sitting for meditation at dawn when it happened.

The tabby.

I opened my eyes and there she was perched on the deck right outside my window, staring straight at me.

She was identical to the one in the shop. It had to be her. There could be no other explanation, but, how could she have gotten out, or made it all the way here?

By then, strange things had already begun to occur around me. Odd yet undeniable synchronicities, coincidences, flashes of magic and spirit communication had started to appear in a kind of mysterious, shimmering procession. Like Dorothy wearily skipping along on the yellow brick road, or Alice wandering along the winding paths of enchanted flowers, since my initiation into motherhood, I had prayed to find the poet in me I thought I’d lost. That somatic memory, that vow and calling, was answered in ways I could’ve never imagined.

So, I wondered if it could really be the same cat. I told my ex in breathless, excited shock.

He shrugged and said she was probably the neighbor’s cat just coming around for food. Then he looked at me suspicious.

“Have you been feeding her?”

Of course I hadn’t.

Why She Came

At this time, we were just weeks away from the Covid Quarantine. I had already begun seeing clients at home. Most of them were children struggling emotionally and academically.

One ten-year-old boy in particular, I will never forget. He was especially gifted, labeled “on the spectrum” with a small host of co-occuring diagnoses from the DSM that grew as he became more aware. He struggled in ways that made heartbreaking sense in a culture like ours. He didn’t trust leaving his bedroom much, and when he did, he needed noise-cancelling headphones, a hood, layers of protection between himself and the world.

Eventually, he started opening up to me. He taught me Dungeons and Dragons, and how he survived by experiencing reality through its lore. One day, he asked me what I thought I’d be, in terms of class.

“Hmmm, that’s an easy one.” I replied. “I’d be a Wizard.”

(By then, I had just started a small creative writing school in the park for kids called The Wizard School—the first iteration of a dream I received many years before).

He considered this, looked at me perplexed and shook his head.

“No, not a wizard.” Then mater-of-factly stated, “You’d be a Druid.”

I was pleasantly taken aback by his certainty. I wouldn’t understand it for a few more years, and I am still learning what it asks of me. (Now, I find myself teaching a course Awaken the Druid, “dieting” trees and speaking with them through the ogham, listening to how their bodies root themselves through our breath, into our days, and the parts they play in our stories, eventually guiding me to a new home whose land is haunted by the druid’s ghost).

Not long after that, this wise lad trusted me enough to share the truth about why he couldn’t attend school or return to his outpatient treatment program.

He said, “It’s like everyone’s true self is hidden behind so many layers.”

There was nothing wrong with this child. His refusal was not a diagnosable defect, but a wise act of self preservation in a world he had good reason not to trust. He was in fact, the sane one, unable to play along in the theater of masks. If only I could have listened to him more deeply then.

When we sat together in that sunroom, him teaching me more than I could ever teach him, the tabby cat would often appear. She would settle somewhere just before us, on the railing, the deck, the edge of the garden beneath the dogwood, as if she was holding space or standing guard over our session.

He asked me about her and wondered if she was my cat.

I explained that she was not, and told him the bizarre story of the PetSmart Tabby and the uncanny resemblance.

Thinking out loud I expressed, “I wonder why she’s come here.”

He didn’t hesitate to answer. “She’s come to tell you change is coming.”

Actual photo taken of the cat who kept showing up.

The Tabby at the Threshold

Before long, grocery store shelves were barren and we were forced to adjust to a drastic new rhythm inside the cage of our home. Yet the world shutting down, the illness stealing the breath of millions, my cancelled wedding, was not the greatest change I would live through, nor the only one he had foretold.

My ex and I had already weathered a rough couple of years. Resentment, dissonance, and disconnection quietly began to fray the threads of the life we’d hoped to have together.

What I first named as his neglect, my grief, that hollowed-out feeling of being unseen, unappreciated or loved, compared to women I was not, became the doorway to my healing journey.

What I found along the way was the truth. I had been the one abandoning myself for so much of my life. I realized that I could not change him, nor anyone, but I could take that path through the dark harrowing wood to find and relight the hearth at my center, gathering the lost and cast-off parts of me, wrapping them in warmth, offering them an ear and a cup of medicinal tea. From that circle of light, I choose my intuition to lead, my voice to sing and whisper, you are enough, my heart to carry compassion, and my vision to hold the horizon steady.

The goddess, that ancient cat woman, scattered breadcrumbs and signs. They eventually led me to a little gingerbread house in the forest, where I gathered with others who became close companions. We saw each other, learned to pray with fire again, guided by a man who’d answered the same summons to reclaim his soul from the machinery of life, from the false suits he wore to prove he was worthy of love and belonging.

He had a black tuxedo cat, a little fluff of a shaman who had found him in the days he said yes to this path. That night the cat chose my lap and stayed through the whole ceremony. I braced for the familiar itch, the swelling eyes, but none came. My body stayed calm. I told myself it must be this one cat, this one evening, but from that night on, my allergy never returned. Later I would laugh at the simple grace of it, the little healer preparing me for a union neither of us could have predicted.

Still, I was torn for a long time. My parents, people I had leaned on for discernment, that I had placed on a pedestal, grew angry and afraid. They spoke with my ex behind my back, and suspicion filled the rooms where I had once felt safe. Panic began waking me in the night. I could not make sense of how following what felt deeply right, my own knowing, my joy and health, my vow to be a better relative, could provoke such resistance from those who said they wanted my happiness and whom I loved. The betrayal split me open, but it also gave me the distance to see, the map out of my cage.

I exhausted the gods for signs and guidance. I left an offering to Freya in the forest of a state park, and the cats kept showing up. We even drove by a dead male lion on the median of a highway on a roadtrip to visit my parents as if it were ordinary roadkill. It was unmistakable.

Then, one night, as my ex was going up to bed, leaving me downstairs to begin whatever it was he thought I did alone in that sunroom at night, he stopped on the stairwell and said:

“I’ve changed my mind. I think we should have another baby. I am seeing now how it could be good for him to have a sibling.”

I smiled without teeth and gently shook my head.

“Oh. Wow. Hm. Okay.”

After he continued his ascent up the stairs and into the bedroom, I felt that strain in my neck, overcome with guilt and confusion. How could I leave now? Am I making the wrong decision? What if I never get a chance to have another child, to give my son a sibling?

My mind spun over these questions as I began to take out the trash. When I flicked the light on to the back deck, there she was. The tabby. She stared directly at me from the bench below the sycamore tree. Her message was silent, but clear.

From Temple to Pyre: The Cat as the Divine Feminine Familiar

For millions of years, the cat has maintained her form. She is a rare stillness in a world where most creatures must diversify or perish. From an evolutionary perspective, she is nearly perfect. Our ancestors from around the globe seemed to recognize this.

In Ancient Egypt, she was worshipped as an outright goddess, from Japan to Northern Europe, depicted as her sacred companion. The domestic cat’s wild sisters—the jaguar, bobcat, cougar, lynx—were honored as deeply powerful spirit-beings embodying sacred feminine aspects in the indigenous traditions of the Americas and play crucial roles in ceremony and cosmology.

Throughout all these cultures, the cat weaves a golden thread through the goddess tradition and the divine feminine. In Egypt, she was known as Bastet, in Greece, Ailuros, in Rome, Artemis and Diana, in Scandinavia, Freya. In Japan, the cat is maneki neko, the globally recognized symbol for good luck, prosperity and protection from evil.

However, as the church, an empire of fear and control, swept through, exercising its dominion to stamp out the goddess, suppress and demonize women, making all forms of feminine or earth worship punishable by death, the symbol of the cat was twisted with her. They went from symbols of divinity, life and guardianship to omens of bad luck, death and darkness.

By the late Middle Ages and early modern period, Church and folk belief in much of Europe had fused the image of the cat with the figure of the witch. Cats were known as “familiars,” accused of carrying messages from the Devil, drinking blood, or serving as the witch’s other form.

Having a cat, especially a black one, could be enough to draw suspicion or put you on trial, and cats were sometimes tortured or killed alongside women accused of witchcraft.

Across roughly three centuries of European witch hunts, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed, the vast majority of them women, out of many more who were accused, interrogated, and imprisoned, or tortured as a result of being someone who didn’t fall in line, held onto their truth, or refused meekness.

While we don’t have precise numbers for how many cats died with them, there are records and later accounts of communities destroying cats in an effort to “root out” evil. Some popular histories suggest that these persecutions, by reducing cat populations, may have indirectly worsened outbreaks of bubonic plague by allowing rat populations to surge.

This tragic pairing of fate between women and cats is not surprising. Like the “witch,” the cat bears the mark of the divine feminine. She is independent, watchful, resistant to control, discerning, protective and sensual, fertile and fierce. She moves and hunts in the dark, led by intuition, answering to energies beyond our sight. She can be soft and loving, yet a fierce predator, and she can be utterly unforgiving when her boundaries are crossed.

Trials, Threads, and a Key

So, when she appeared beneath the sycamore, waiting, quiet as the moonlight, I sensed she was more than just a cat. In that fierce stillness, centuries of ancestors standing behind her piercing green eyes, my mind made room for her questions: Will you follow your knowing this time, will you not abandon yourself again, even if it costs you?

Saying yes did not usher me into a gentle, pastel empowerment. The map out of the cage I’d made for myself was smudged with shadow and traps. If I had seen what nightmares waited around its curves and corners, I don’t know that I would’ve had the courage to follow it out.

Eventually, I became the defendant in my own modern-day witch trial. My practices, new love, and dreams were demonized. Manipulation and attempts at control pressed hard against my heart as my child was played like a chess piece, and everything built on false belonging and ego began to fall apart. Betrayal felt like my head hitting the ground after the rug was pulled out, again and again.

This is the part we don’t find in oracle decks, the scenes our visioning meditations skip. Initiations, especially those of the feminine, are not designed to be soft. They strip us. They take us through trial and dark night until the truth beneath our roles and stories, our years of self abandonment, can finally be seen with a compassionate heart.

I thought of the boy’s truth, “Everyone’s true self is hidden behind so many layers.” What I didn’t know to teach him then was that the work to peel them back is daunting, and can leave us bare and alone, confused and heart broken, our survival scaffolding ruptured. Most of us do not even know such a path exists, are not aware of the false layers we wear, never mind have the courage or resources to navigate such a quest.

As the costumes I wore unraveled, my life rewove itself. The goddess stitched gifts into the new threads: a steadier love for myself, friends who loved without condition, the return of my voice, a school under the trees where I could do beautiful work, the joy of watching my son in his full imagination outside of the cage of a classroom, my medicine, true connection, and the wise elders who helped me find my way back to myself, to look at my life through the lens of a different story, one not ruled by shame or fear.

Even with trust and family foundations shattered, I began, for the first time, to trust myself, to trust the feminine, to surrender to her dark flowing waters. My anxiety eased. I rooted more deeply than ever. I found belonging from within, and my outer life began to reflect what was truly meant for me: a life in resonance with my soul rather than the rules of other people’s expectations or fears. I was no longer the dog rolling over for treats. I was the cat lady I had always been. After all, my nickname growing up was Kitty. I should’ve known.

I had my wedding in spite of everything. Not at the grand Chateau in my gown fit for royalty that once filled my Pinterest boards, where I imagined my family and guests watching in awe and envy, blessing our worth with their tears of joy. Instead, it was a quiet ceremony in a small chapel in the forest dedicated to the Great Mother Goddess, Mary.

I stood and held the hands of the man from the gingerbread house, with only our cat and a few witnesses. He was the man I’d never have allowed myself to choose before. I was sad my family could not be there, but I knew, standing beneath the pines, that I had finally reached the cage door.

The Familiar in the Forsythia

There were many days my son and I walked the mountain streams behind our home and daydreamed about a kitty of our own. He’d ask for one, and I’d answer, “We already have a cat, but I would like a kitty too. If one is meant for us, she’ll find us at the right moment.”

A couple of years later, I was cradling his baby sister while he played with the forest school kids, and we heard it. Tiny mews escaped from the forsythia bramble like bells. We knelt, breath held, and peered beneath. A small green-eyed tabby inched into the open while her sister stayed hidden. We could hardly believe it.

She arrived, like a gift from the chariot of Freya, an extra bundle of love we didn’t know we needed. While other pets kept their distance from small hands, this tabby chose my children. She curls into my son’s lap, watches over the baby, they rub their foreheads together as a greeting, and she keeps an eye out on the perimeter, eliminating rodents—our sweet, fierce guardian.

I was hurting when she found us. Alongside the miracle and blessing of our baby girl, I had to surrender the custody battle after years of giving it all I had. My son would attend school full-time with his father, too far for us to share half our weeks. Weekends would slip away to soccer schedules.

Our tabby, and the reassurance she brought, carried me through the next unraveling and the next call to move forward through my grief: as the forest-school dream no longer served me, the next set of layers peeled back, and the goddess knocked on our hearts once more. Her river flowed towards a new land to rewild in France. We knew it was the answer to so many things, but came with difficult sacrifices. We had to surrender our beloved Catskills sanctuary and face the reality that my son could not move with us permanently.

When he’s not here, our tabby curls up on his bed each afternoon as if sending our love across the ocean, warming his place, calling him home.

Reflections at Samhain

As I began writing this piece, I was back in the U.S. spending my weeks with my son around Halloween. As we trick-or-treated, I saw the familiar black cat, arched in a hiss, standing beside her witch, etched into plastic.

The history behind those silhouettes still haunts the soil beneath our raked lawns. It keeps feeding our children its poison by the bucketload. Most of us forget why the cat is even fixed there, stunned beneath the plastic moon. We tell ourselves that witches, magic, curses, animal omens are figments of the imagination, relics of a time before “common sense.”

And yet, our culture still flinches at what this image represents. We do not grieve its brutal origins. We are still allergic to the wild feminine, scrub her off like a black mold, silence her voice to numb our pain, pathologize her wisdom, deny her cries for change. We blame her raging storms on cloud seeding conspiracies because we can’t slow down to listen.

The very Church, the patriarchal empire, who hysterically hunted wise women and their cats, struck fear of the wild like a match, and lit an age of disconnection. It severed our ties to the old gods of soil, water, and air, the living phenomena in our bodies and the body of our Mother. It justified the genocide, rape and kidnapping of Indigenous peoples, still occupies land on broken treaties, and names ceremonies that keep us humble in the Great Mother’s arms—tied to all our relations—illegal, dangerous, and “barbaric.”

It sold us on a vertical story of ascension and demonized descent, split us from nature, sliced our bodies into neatly segregated compartments, and offered us tight fitting costumes to belong in the mechanical cage it forged to keep us “safe” from our own truth.

It crowned a sky-father whose judgement grants “happily ever afters” spun into purchasable distractions. So, it is not a wonder to me that in our modern world, our judges and family court systems are not designed to protect mothers or their children. They would let witch hunts drag on, hear arguments that claim a child is in grave danger because his mother went from “party girl” to “thinking she’s one with mother Earth,” failing to condemn abuse time after time.

I am learning now that I am my only judge, the only blacksmith who can unlock my cage door. My suffering eases when I accept myself within it and set down my shame, when I remember that hell and heaven, light and dark, are not neatly severed by sky or piety, but braided like caves through seaside mountains.

It is in those dark places, the womb of the goddess, that she asks us for our faith, to lay our sacrifices at the threshold, as we are swallowed and remade. Crossing that treacherous ground offers us gifts we could never purchase from anyone: sovereignty, wisdom, self-knowing, soul integrity and a wider heart. We emerge with more layers shed, fur slicked by dripping stalagmite, night vision, and the courage to keep returning, guiding others through these mountain portals.

And when we take our first breaths under the sun again, we realize that the goddess was never “out there.” She is not some distant deity in a cloud palace. She is that still small voice inside, that deep inner knowing, that true self beneath so many layers. She is the pulse that beats through all of creation. She sends humble messengers in fur and feather, scrawls letters in our dreams, and when we won’t listen, taps us with the two-by-four of circumstance.

This is the face of the feminine we were taught to fear: the old hag at the edge of the wood, black cat threading her striped stockings, poison apple resting in her palm. We fight her decay, villainize her alchemy, and idolize the chaste child bride, as if Spring was the only acceptable part of her story.

Yet, Samhain will keep coming, asking us to move like a cat through the dark, to trust the felt sense over the sales pitch, to value rest as much as action, create from stillness rather than force, to believe in the imagination again.

Our ancestors guised as this veil grew thin and the boundaries between the worlds blurred, the breath of winter sending gooseflesh down their spines. They did this to hide their children from malefic spirits. They went door to door exchanging offerings, set a place for the dead, and asked the goddess for mercy and safe passage through her dark half.

Whether we remember this or not, we still enact the ritual. Now it is one driven by conformity, and dopamine hits—the real poison apples we keep biting into.

We’ve lost our formal ties to the unseen, but not the instinct to mask ourselves for belonging in a world overrun by the very malign forces our ancestors tried to assuage.

They may have sold us safe keeping from hunger, cold, decay and scapegoated the cat women to seal the deal. Still, the story of lack keeps us compliant, coaxing us back into our cages, hiding behind costumes. I know now my truth was twisted, my heart betrayed because my path rattled the bolts they couldn’t bear to have loosen.

I run a hand along my tabby’s back as she purrs at my neck each evening, rebelling against those nightmares that would capture me again. I tend the land, let compassion and prayer soothe the pain of separation, and continue threading the caves. I keep the faith that this map of deep inner knowing, of listening to soul, to the soft whispers of willow leaves as they sweep across the water, has a way of healing what it touches, bringing what is truly needed, in its right time.

It us up to us now to answer the cat’s call, as we step over this threshold to the feminine half of the cycle. Can we listen to our dreams once more, allow our intuition to guide our steps even if it means sacrifice or pain, make space for the still small voice weighted down beneath the layers of uniforms to be heard, to say yes to the goddess waiting at the door?

Like the cats thrown onto the pyre, if we keep trading jungle and river, forest and ocean, mother and child for the comfort of our cages, a spiritual, cultural and ecological illness deadlier than the plague will keep spreading, leaving us with no story at all.

We at least owe our children a truer version of ourselves. One offering real safety that teaches belonging from within, connection in this great mysterious web, makes space for their imaginations to bloom, their hands to dig, to believe and practice good magic again, and breathe the fresh air of our Great Mother free from the cages built from control.

When I look back through the bars at the Petsmart adoption center, and feel the grief of walking away from those green eyes, I realize it was me, staring back at me, waiting to come home.

A Paw

If this finds you at a threshold, and you could use support walking through the dark, or listening to that voice from within, this is the work I love, walking with you as you relearn the seasons of your body, and gather the parts of you waiting to be reclaimed.

I offer one-to-one sessions woven from the same threads that changed my life: dreamwork, mythic mapping, intuitive coaching, guided journeys, ritual and season-guided practices, and gentle, practical steps for co-parenting realities, creative work, daily rhythms, nervous-system steadiness.

Together we move like the cat, slowly, surely, toward our calling.

If you’d like support on your path, send me a message. I’m here.

A Samhain Ceremony with a Rune Journey

For my paid subscribers, I offer you the recording of the Samhain Ceremony I led this month. It includes a rune journey at the end to receive guidance and connect with the unseen worlds, the wisdom of our imaginations, at this time of the year. If you feel called to share, or have any questions about what you received, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, or post in the subscriber chat.

If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, I hope you will consider supporting my work. It helps me to keep writing while mothering, and I am so grateful for you.

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Lately, I’ve become aware that I am dwelling in the liminal. A space between selves, lives, lands, languages, roles. All my dreams at night include travel, packing, transition. I wake disoriented, remembering that we’ve already settled into our new home.

In one dream, I’m at an airport, searching for an obscure gate that’s hard to locate, pulling a precious tool—a white, futuristic motorcycle my husband and I own jointly—collapsed and packed into two hard suitcases. The gate agents classify it as a weapon, so I have to pass special security checks with it. When I finally arrive and board, I don’t step onto a plane but into a lounge, a waiting room. We’ll take off “at some point,” they say, but for now we must wait here for an undefined amount of time. The gate closes. We can’t go back to the terminal, and we haven’t yet departed. Eventually, I surrender to that place, greeting the newcomers and showing them where to put their luggage, how to get temporarily comfortable.

As I let this dream work on me, I meet the part of myself who knows the rules of the liminal. She can make it easeful, can organize it, can guide others who arrive there. Yet in waking life, I don’t always find the same comfort.

Beyond my personal in-between, I sense a collective one. A new world feels near, just past the horizon, and the waiting can be bewildering, restless. We want to land, root, and name our purpose. But as I discovered in our own personal relocation, even when the outer landscape changes, even after you hang your clothes in a new closet, parts of you lag behind. Our bodies and rhythms, our thoughts and habits, our relations and connections need time to arrive and reform, and often need support in order to do so.

The waiting room is sacred

That dream reassured me: I have the right tools with me. They’re “weapons” only in the sense that they protect what’s tender and true, and have the ability to bring us into our power. In the “waiting room” just past the gate, you don’t get to unpack them yet, but their potential is intact, and this is where you will become version of you who knows how to wield and assemble them. They will unfold the moment you land.

If you, too, are hanging in the space between realities, or selves, consider this a sacred interval. The liminal is a real place in the soul’s ecology, a chamber for integration, somatic healing, remembering, listening, stillness. In a culture famished for ritual, this space can feel like a vacuum that pulls us toward confusion and despair. Gathering together and calling on the wisdom of the ancestors allows the in-between to become a cradle for becoming, and grief to be an important sacrament.

Here’s how I can accompany and support you there:

1) Rune Journeying

As I explored in my last essay on journeying with the runes, this practice allows us to reclaim the imagination, the faculty that lets us build a new world from the inside out. When we drum and step across the threshold into the subconcious otherworld, we invite our magical child back to the drawing table, restoring our creative spark and joy. Journeying helps us to arrive by meeting and reclaiming fractured parts of ourselves, remembering our medicine, meeting the guides who travel with us, and receiving new tools for the path ahead. It’s where we touch the version of ourselves who already knows the moss of enchanted grounds, and can resurrect her knowledge for our own path ahead.

This month, I am opening this portal, and hope to see you around the virtual fire. As the veil thins, we will consult the runes for a message guiding us into the dark half of the year. I will then drum and lead you into the otherworld and back out, giving us space for gentle processing and sharing at the end. We will also connect with Samhain’s themes and ancient wisdom. It’s by donation, live & recorded. You may register here.

Register

2) Writing as Alchemy

Words and the writing process helps us metabolize the in-between, and become.

Motherhood: Myth & Memoir: a guided course where we explore the mother archetype, the way our lives have been shaped by it, and craft the story that’s asking for breath.

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3) Awaken the Druid (tree dieting)

A slow practice with the wise, standing ones in the Celtic Ogham. Each month we attune to the magic, medicine and wisdom of the trees, bringing back ritual, ancient remembrance, and allowing the forest to re-pattern and guide us through the seasons.

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4) One-to-One Coaching (2 spots open)

For those midwifing something through the threshold—stepping into motherhood, writing a book, a vision, or a new self. I weave together hypnotherapy, dreamwork, ancient wisdom practices, the runes & ogham, and practical structures so you’re held both mythically and materially.

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5) Private Session Work

• Crystal Dreaming to clear blocks at their root and connect with the spirit realm.

• Hypnotherapy/RTT to shift patterns gently and fast.

• Ancestral + rune/ogham readings for direction and protection.

Explore

If any of these are intriguing your curiosity, or speak to your soul, please reach out and tell me where you are in your own waiting room. I’ll help you with your luggage.

With love from the threshold,
Rose

The meadow is damp, staining the hem of my dress as I wake against a dead ash blanketed in mist. It winds like smoke down through a grove of hazel, apple, and oak below me. I rub my eyes with cold fists and rise to my feet, stumbling a little, squinting through the tree branches. I hold my arms up to shield my eyes as if they could keep the fog from reaching my face.

Everything about this place seems familiar yet foreign at once.

In the distance, I catch a sweep of royal blue moving toward me against the gray blur. My heart quickens and drums in my chest; my sinuses clear, preparing me for a threat, but I’m unable to move even an inch. A soft, hypnotizing melody rings from within my head, snaking with the smoke across the field.

The figure’s slow procession reaches the hazy space before me. At first I see only soft, long fingers stretching out from the deep blue cloak as if to steal mine away. Without question, I give my hands up, welcoming the surprisingly warm touch as they’re captured in a slender grasp. The woman lifts her head to meet my gaze, the hood of her cloak slipping back behind her ears, revealing silk-strawberry hair and emerald eyes that pierce through lifetimes.

I lock eyes with her for a while. It seems we’ve met before, but I can’t place her face. I ask her name. She smirks, amused by my amnesia, then responds politely: Cerridwen. She doesn’t speak aloud, and yet somehow I hear the totality of her message in the slow movements of her eyelashes as she scans my face. Her lashes are thick and long, her skin like cream. Her face fluctuates through ages—maiden, mother, ancestress—without ever settling, and I am both soothed and weary.

The Price of Passage

She tells me there is somewhere I must go, and she has come to take me by boat—but that I owe her a sacrifice in return. I cast my eyes down; insecurity and confusion contort my expression. I don’t want to lose any more. She reassures me, placing her long, slender index finger beneath my chin to lift my eyes to hers once more. You know what it is that I must take from you.

Her furrowed forehead and stern eyes soften into a bright smile. She appears suddenly as a young mother, regarding me as her small, sullen child. To simplify things for my anxious mind, she taps my dress pocket, which now feels weighted, cumbersome. You have it just here. I reach in and feel the frame of my eyeglasses. I hesitate. But don’t I need these? I won’t be able to see. She shakes her head. It’s time.

My body shifts as I place them in her palms, yet part of me seems to drop into a void where the world hums along in alien patterns. There’s no time to linger; she places her warm hand on my back and leads me down through the grove. The mists begin to lift and dance with our every step while rays of the rising sun streak our faces. I sense profound magic here—something that has always been—but I’m not sure how to access it or whether I am worthy to see. It feels like returning to ancestral lands after a lifetime away. Will it accept me? I wonder.

We walk in silence past trees whose understories are littered with mushrooms in meandering rings, toward the sound of water running over stone. The ground softens; spongy moss pads our steps. A stream winds topaz through emerald-pelted mounds; we follow it as the water grows wider, louder, wilder. Sun, breaking through fog, glitters the ripples. I can’t stop watching the water; it seems to speak.

Eventually we reach a small boat moored to a willow leaning over an eddy where the river pools and sighs in a wide circle surrounded by stones. This is the sacred spring, she tells me, the source of all that’s flowing. She asks me to wash my face in it before we board.

Across the Willow Water

As we push off, my cheeks sting while the wind dries the cold from them. The sky darkens; fog thickens over the water, and I can barely make out my hands. When the mists part, it seems we are crossing a vast ocean. I can no longer see the mossy mounds we left nor the other bank. Time passes ambiguously as the melody rolls through my mind like waves beneath a full moon.

When we reach shore, I can’t tell if we’ve traveled a few minutes or many ages. The hull thuds once against hidden stone. I turn to ask Cerridwen where—and how far—we’ve come, but when I look around the small boat, I realize I am alone. My cheeks flush in shock; my skin prickles with pale goose pimples; grief swells in my throat.

Another willow at the edge of the shore brushes her soft branch along my cheek. I gather the long rope at the bow and toss it around her shaggy trunk. Stepping out, balancing between the boat’s rocky planks and the high shore grass, I feel timid—unsure where to go—yet filled with curious anticipation.

A hawk cries like a crack of lightning in the distance, bringing silence to my mind and everything around me. As I take small steps forward I realize my feet are confident here; they know this ground. I move through the high grass, following small signs—a cricket leaping ahead, the drop of an acorn, a shift of wind—until I land on a muddy path stamped with fallen crimson and gold leaves. It leads me to the base of a vast forest towering above.

I breathe deep and approach, hesitating at the plants who sting and stab at the edge, then find a path hammered by hooves and follow it into the wood. The part of me that would collapse into panic or turn back is felt, yet small.

The Path That Knows My Feet

Beneath the canopy the air shifts; sound grows dense; I feel the breath of the trees heavy on my chest. Moss-covered stones, ornately spun spiderwebs, ivy snaking the forest floor and climbing the trunks, and the chatter of songbirds announcing my arrival keep my feet moving forward. Though this place remains a mystery, I know the way—as if I’ve walked it a thousand times and widened it with my own gait.

The perfume of burning pine reaches my nose. A clearing opens. I leap toward it, swelling with wild relief. I’ve found my way home in this strange realm.

The Frithgarth Home — a hive of medicine and magic

In the clearing, my cottage of clay, straw, and stone wraps itself in concentric circles, resembling a giant beehive. I approach the rounded wooden door and trace a symbol carved into it: ᛟ Othala (ancestral home, inherited gifts).

I remember the way it swims like a fish upstream as I pull the door open. Inside, the space expands far beyond the diameter I saw from the forest. Everything is arranged with an intentionality that feels resonant to my hands and soul. At the entrance, a rug embroidered in bold salmons and royal blues curves and entwines in fractals. A small hearth with a low fire burns in the corner. By the door hang cloaks, leather satchels, and staves of twisted branches set with crystals, antlers, and feathers.

The walls stretch upward like honeycomb, carved with cubbies holding old books, vials, ceramic medicine pots, small shrines, bones, and tree parts. Across from the door stands a long white-oak farmhouse table on ornately carved, spindly legs. I run my hands over its ring stains and the small grooves of time. Candles, herbs, a brass sickle, a jeweled dagger, a fan of crow feathers, a crystal ball—offerings that shimmer and reappear as the light scatters across them through the window. An embroidered armchair rests behind it.

A place I dreamed as a child. I sit; my face folds open like a flower in awe of the sun. I look down for a moment at the table, a small scrap of parchment appears. I lift it, surprised I can hold it, and read:

I know those spells which a ruler’s wife doesn’t know,
nor any man’s son;
“Help” one is called, and that will help you
against accusations and sorrows
and every sort of anxiety.

I read it several times, wondering, what spells? Who is the ruler’s wife? The queen? Whose king is she? I think of my mother. I look more closely at the table and notice three small stones, each carved with a symbol like the one on the door.

Isa — ice, stillness; Ansuz — breath, message; Algiz — protection, the antlered gate.

I scoop them up and roll them in my palms, closing my eyes, hoping touch will provoke a memory.

The Kin-Fylgja — a guide from the ancestors

A soft scraping at the door. My hair stiffens; my arms rise in gooseflesh. The hinges creak. A black, twitching nose pokes through the crack.

I brace my hands on the chair arms, ready to hurl it if I must. The door swings wide to reveal a crimson, bushy tail. My body softens. As I watch him intently moving through the room. I have an uncanny sense. I know this fox.

He seems to know me too, as if he knows the placement of every floorboard. He stretches and leaps onto the table like a house cat. His ear flickers; a whisper enters the room a breath frozen between the ivory of midwinter, what does it hold?

His eyes are intimate emerald. As they meet mine, his riddling dissolves, and he speaks, genial and clear: I’ve been waiting for you for ages, you know. You’re finally back, eh?

I stumble from the chair in shock, nearly knocking myself to the floor. I steady my hands, breathe, sit again. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s speaking—and yet I am. He smirks, licking his paw, patient with my processing.

You say you’ve been waiting—why? I ask. Silence washes the room; he stares into the distance.

The memory is in me somewhere like a small key to a cupboard I’ve misplaced. When I retrace my steps, the moment is blacked out, and I question whether I ever held it at all.

He startles my thoughts with a chuckle. You’ll remember more each time you return here. It’s not important now. We must to go. He gestures with his paw to the stones still clasped in my hand.

My lips hesitate to ask.

He jumps from the table and sits beneath the rack of cloaks. That’s not the right question, dear. Tell me: which cloak will you put on?

I run my hands along the lengths and weights. Without thinking, I stop at a thick pelt of white wolf’s fur. The choice is obvious.

Excellent, he says as I place it on my shoulders. And the staff?

I reach for a staff of twisted applewood, quartz crystal set at its crown, blue jay feathers tied below. All the others seem to disappear.

Suddenly I move quickly, as if pretending not to know had been the only delay. I take a blue leather sack in the shape of a teardrop and return to the table. A crown of ivy and holly, a clear prism, and a small sack of purple corn appear; I place them in my bag.

I grip my staff. The fox grins, showing small, sharp teeth. Don’t squeeze your mind so tightly, or you’ll get lost in the wrong stories. Its unbecoming of you, really.

I can’t hold back a soft giggle. Crossing the threshold, I shift into an aspect of myself that exists outside time. My senses flare in the cool dusk. I follow the fox through gnarled trees, moss-covered stones, shimmering streams. In the distance, a giant, snow-capped mountain rises behind ornately forged gates of brass and gold. This is where we begin to solve the riddle set for us.

Will you come along to find out?

Why Journey?

This story describes the beginning of one of my first shamanic journeys with the runes—working through Óðinn’s “second charm” in the initiatory process of my shamanic work. My teacher, a true wizard living near the mists of Avalon in Glastonbury, passed down the honor of taking up the runes and the older, often-eroded wisdom traditions of Northern Europe.

I never set out to take this path, nor did I imagine I’d be going on such journeys—let alone leading them. Yet when the threads of destiny guided me to these mysteries, it felt like finding what I had been unknowingly searching for since birth.

This isn’t unique to me, either. The runes, the an ancient animist medicine wheel and mythic web that weaves them, run deep in many of our ancestries and DNA.

If we are lucky, courageous, and odd enough to set aside our purely rational conditioning and follow these paths through archetypes and the otherworld (Jung’s collective unconscious), something profound awakens. We’re offered a chance to reclaim our medicine in service to a mystery greater than we, one that reconnects us to land, community, integrity, grace, and the creativity our world so desperately needs.

You may recognize runes from Viking or fantasy films, yet they are far older. Recent archaeological work suggests runic symbols may be extraordinarily ancient. Nordic myths say the goddess Freyja (queen of the fair folk) holds their magic; Óðinn, the All-Father, hung on Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life, for nine nights to win the knowledge of the runes and the other worlds, sacrificing an eye.

At their simplest, the runes are an alphabet; more deeply, they are threads of existence, destiny, and spirit-communication. You can consult them in divination or learn them as living symbols that map the Nine Worlds and speak through plants, archetypes, and deities.

In practice, when I take them up—casting, singing, and weaving them into daily work—they speak with an honesty that exceeds my “rational” mind. They often arrive in dream-figures and riddles. When I listen and let the symbols work on me, a picture forms and messages come from a place distinct from analysis.

You may wonder: Why do this? Isn’t it make-believe, bullshit? We were raised in a culture that treats imagination as frivolous. Before that, centuries of rigid Christianity trained bodies to fear the imaginal. It demonized these ancient practices, making journeying, goddess worship, dream interpretation punishable by public death. After this time, logic and reason in service to industrialization and productivity reigned supreme.

And, while I’m not suggesting we abandon reason all together, I am recognizing that when rationalism bars us from our own interactions with the great mystery, something vital is lost.

If a part of you whispers yes—if there is a nameless longing or a curiosity that challenges your skepticism, journeying is a wonderful place to begin. As Toko-pa Turner writes in The Dreaming Way, “The price of forgetting is steep… But the otherworld will never stop trying to get your attention; to be remembered by you.”

The steady drum, the chanting of the runes, and guided prompts can usher us into an altered state where fractured parts return. Our ancestors knew this for centuries (while science is just now catching up). Journeying helped them navigate uncertainty, war, famine and pass wisdom like a torch through the village and the generations.

The runes and journeys speak in riddles that work somatically, reweaving broken threads or forming new ones. Slowly, steadily, they guide us back to gifts, essence, voice, and medicine.

Whether what we see is “real” matters less to me than its fruits—though I’ve known moments my rational mind can’t explain. Here’s one from my first encounter with Cerridwen.

Willow & Cerridwen

For two years I’ve dieted a different tree in the Celtic Ogham each month—journeying, working with medicine, drinking teas, carrying pieces with me and under my pillow—within my Awaken the Druid course.

We began with Oak, who opened the door to my move from New York to France while closing doors that would have impeded the journey (though I didn’t yet realize it).

By Willow a year later, my husband, our two children, and three pets were crossing the ocean to root in Bourgogne. Saille (Willow) is associated with crossing between realms and with medicine for grief and transition. (Willow bark, of course, is the ancestor of aspirin.)

In my initial journey to Willow, a cloaked figure stood by a boat moored on a canal behind the tree. Wild red hair, green eyes. Your name? I asked. Cerridwen, she replied. I hadn’t learned of her before. During our group share, several others had met her in the journey, too.

Later, I discovered her long association with Willow, and that she is the Welsh goddess of witches—the sorceress with the cauldron—often called “the white fairy.” A fierce ally for initiatory transformation, she guides us lovingly through the pain such paths entail.

When I arrived in France, I was grieving—grateful to have found the land and home of our dreams, and also aching with an impending separation from my son and displacement from our Catskills forest we had forged such a deep relation with. I doubted Spirit’s presence here.

On a walk along the village canal, I spotted a great willow, and, just beyond it, a blue boat moored on the water. I squinted at the name painted on the bow, thinking my mind must be playing tricks. It read Cerridwen.

This synchronicity restored my faith. I laughed at myself, how juvenile to think spirit only exists in certain places. After that, she visited my dreams with guidance for how to connect with this new land.

What the Imagination Repairs

Journeying restores the power of imagination and helps us remember the magic and relations empire tried to imprison. In remembering, we catch a vision for a world beyond this one. We welcome home the magical child—our original architect and dreamer—and give her a protected space to draw. To do this, we set down the hard hat of extraction, over-reason and judgement, letting a wiser knowing frame the door.

Our imaginations—and the children who preside over them—are crucial for the wellbeing of the next seven generations (human and non), preserving the remembrance of our kinship with the animate world.

An Invitation

If you’re called, join me. I include guided journeys for paid subscribers related to the themes that surface in my essays and stories. I also offer live group gatherings online around the sabbaths and seasonal shifts. I’ve placed a journey here for you as well.

Guided Rune Journey

LIVE RUNE JOURNEY

Join Me for a Samhain Rune Journey (Live + Recorded, by Donation)
When: Sunday, October 26, 7–8:30 PM (Eastern)
Where: Live on Zoom (recording provided within 24 hours)
Contribution: By donation (no one turned away)
Bring: A candle, eye covering, blanket, and notebook

We’ll open the circle, share Samhain themes and ritual, then I’ll drum and chant you across the threshold to meet the allies and gifts waiting for you. We’ll pull a communal rune for the dark half of the year and debrief in a gentle share. RSVP here

Consider Becoming a Supporting Subscriber

If this work nourishes you, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I spend real, loving hours crafting these journeys—writing, editing, recording, and tending the research so the paths are trustworthy. Paid support lets me publish more frequently, offer live journeys by donation, and create recordings for those who can’t attend. It also helps me, as a mother, tend my family and our land (where I hope to host live circles).

If that feels right, upgrade here, and/or share—your support keeps this work alive and generous. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Share The Wollf Den

Sending you many blessings. Thank you for being here, and please share anything from your journey. Our common threads are powerful to witness. I’m honored to serve as your guide.

xo,
Rose

The afternoon was cool, one of those typical spring days when the sun played tag with the rain. I kneeled there in damp dirt, a small shovel in hand, a garden glove warming the other, thumbing through the overgrown planter in our new front garden for the first time: Hairy stem, saw-toothed hearts curled upward, yellow lantern, green needles feathering thick, brown thorny branch, sticky stalks. It was a mess. The kind that speaks to visitors: I’ve been abandoned. Things are dirty and unkept here. There’s little to trust. The small rose bush, a cultivated Belle of the Ball, with her prudish seeding needs me to remove those weeds that would threaten her spotlight.

The quackgrass was easy, a mop of unbrushed hair, lack of symmetry, random static jamming the mulch. He seemed mean. However, the yellow avens were a more difficult choice. I hesitated. Her dainty canary petals like rays bursting from a lime star, renaissance queen in her ruff, frill collar, yet she still threatened the order. I identified her first, as if that could help me offer a memorial, or read the classification: weed, and justify my pulling.

I learned she’s also part of the rose family, sometimes mistaken for buttercup, but untamable, edible, pollinator magnet, she spreads her spiky seed balls with wild pleasure through forest, meadow, and river edge. She’s pulled for being aggressive. She threatens to choke out the more desirable, civilized, expensive flowers in the garden. So, like a tyrant, I threw her in the compost pile to rot and return, but stopped, looking at her wilted body out of slight remorse.

My grief led me to do further research and I learned of her intriguing ability to indicate heavy metal pollution in the soil. This inspired me: the courtesy of weeds. I had studied already their medicinal qualities, how they’ll pop up around your garden when you’re in need of their wisdom and the particular remedies they carry, how they were used for all kinds of illness, and magical purposes by our ancestors. I’ve chewed plantain into poultice in a pinched panic on the occasions one of my children were stung by a yellow jacket.

But, what I didn’t know about weeds is that they also tell us about the conditions of the soil they grow in. Like little, ruthless truth tellers, they let us know what’s off balance, what needs tending to beneath the surface where the eye is untrained and oblivious.

And yet, here we are, finding them beastly, worried that they’ll sully our perfectly manicured gardens or yards of clean-cut, pollution grass. We often miss the messages they carry. A whole industry of poison born just to eliminate their offensive savagery.

Then, it occurred to me. The way we relate to weeds is but a mirror reflecting how we relate to nearly everything in a superficial society ruled by eyesight and ego.

In that yellow avens, I saw myself, and the culture that raised me. It helped me to understand why my family could not contain me, and why for centuries the delicate, cultivated ego of civilized society has treated whole races of people like weeds—a nuisance to be tamed, feared, controlled, banished and plucked from the gracious garden of eden to protect a story that can not afford scrutiny.

We, like the weeds, tell the truth, simply by being. We indicate turmoil beneath the surface of families and post-colonial consumerism. It’s the burden we knew we’d have to bear when accepting the blessing of our nature here, and taking root in the story of this earth garden.

For paid subscribers:

In the pages that follow, I’ll trace the role of the truth teller in family systems and society, and why it so often leads to scapegoating. I will offer a slice of my own story, what I’ve gathered along my journey. Then, I will widen the lens to the collective, and offer a way through the wilderness: how to set down the scapegoat’s burden and reroot in a soil that can hold us.

This piece is for me. It’s for you, the black sheep, the middle children, the ones chosen to carry the messy, untamable seeds of truth in their roots; the scapegoats, the marginalized, the wild twins. It’s for the people of this world who have borne the harshest consequences of our sins—the ones looked upon as less than, the forgotten, the voiceless, whose very existence keeps serving a potent truth serum no matter how fiercely we try to banish it.

If this speaks to you, I am grateful for your support of my writing, and am also offering:

• An exploration of the Old Irish Immram (a hero’s sea journey to the other world) and how it might offer a map home

• A rune reading and guided shamanic rune journey for the scapegoat

I hope to meet you at the other end.

How I let the Weeds Teach Me to Tend

My parents do not approve of me.

Read more

Behold it!
Sole, shell-glittered in the sea field,
its illustrious canyons and mountains
like full-blown irises—dilated wheels
spun from the core of its creator. Heart-pounded,
little, wiggled fiercely in fine grit, a lost
hero on a near-missed journey inward
retreats backward into a fresh valley of exhaust.
And yet, destiny grows the circle broader—
the search for the center pushes forward
until his love-bloom cries into the rain-bowed sea
of lonely light debris. The little warrior, awkward,
wades into the unknown as the current frees
him, washes away his unseen beauty-born.
Never fear the passage in your outfit of thorns.

I wrote this poem years ago, some years after a time I’d written more than fifty sonnets in my MFA program. After graduation, I became one of those poets my professors prophesied—the kind who wouldn’t write a single line, let alone string them into sonnets or other forms, for years.

I fell out of practice. I was focused on obtaining the colonial white picket fence and on career aspirations, determined to open my own school one day—to disrupt education as my soul’s obligation to save the world.

So when I wrote this poem, I was working as an assistant principal in a unique private school. The principal asked if I could write something for the graduation ceremony, and although everything in me wanted to say:
No. I haven’t written in years. I am not worthy of this task.
I replied, maybe. I said I’d work on it.

Weeks passed. The deadline dug its knuckles into my shoulders. I didn’t know what to write or how to capture anything meaningful for an auditorium of high-school seniors, parents, and fellow teachers. I began regretting saying yes. I even considered backing out gracefully: Sorry, with all the end-of-year work, I couldn’t find the time to write anything—but I’ll read a favorite poem instead. It’ll still be great. Probably better anyway.

Still, that inner voice kept nagging. I couldn’t let it go.
Perhaps it was pride—
or the poet in me, begging to come back out of the dusty closet she was choking in.

And then, one afternoon, just as the deadline approached, I experienced that flash of awe I hadn’t felt in years: a glimpse into the sacred web the Great Mother Spider weaves in her silky metaphorical threads.

I’d seen a clip—a nature video—capturing the intricate, intimate wiggling of a Japanese pufferfish. He, in his soft body, was building a nest in the sands of the ocean floor to attract a mate— like a mandala of devotion. A calling. A temple for passion.

That tiny lover spun in spirals—toward the center and back out again—his efforts carving beauty into being. He does this not for fame (though he has millions of views), not for certainty, but because that impulse was written into his very being. It moved me.

I saw, in him, the journey every earth-warrior makes—seeking the center, circling back, finding new shells that seemed impossible to obtain—unaware of the divine artist choreographing the whole dance and, nevertheless:
an offering to love,
a devotion to the wild twin.

Reading this poem again ten years later, from my home in Burgundy, I see my own life’s journey mirrored in this pufferfish’s pattern.

And I can feel it now—that all the swimming, against the current and with it, inward and outward, letting the sea wash away the nests that could no longer nourish—the school, the impulse to save others, the ways I diminished myself out of a duty to please, and false belonging—has shaped a sacred mandala where my creations can finally flourish. A place where it is passion, an instinctual call from the wild depths—not obligation—that moves me forward.

Beyond my life’s metaphor, I see a deeper truth about art and writing, too. I think of what kept me away from creating—the industrial complex, the insecurity, the fear of judgment and rejection, the you’re not enough / you’re not safe / you have nothing meaningful to say static.

To reclaim the gift of writing and song, I had to surrender to the unknown—to that dark place born of loss and moving on. I had to lay down the programming that said art must be useful, marketable, productive; the imagined audience holding rotten fruit and pitchforks; the pressure to perform, to fit in while standing out. I had to be honest about where I wasn’t living in truth—because when we are lying, the muse stops visiting. 

I had to relearn how to listen, to tune the dial inward like a little radio catching the hum of spirit, the melody of my own soul beyond the static. And first, I had to let grief guide me there, holding a compassionate ear to the parts of me blocking the passage for my protection—so I could witness myself, the pufferfish poet, dance across the ocean floor once more.

I'm learning not to judge the way she moves, or to visit her imaginal realm with a fishing pole, but to transmute the rhythms she is willing to offer in devotion, to make art the safe, and nestled place where she can lay the eggs that give birth to her beauty. 

This deep sea journey is teaching me capacity—to bear critique without collapsing or contorting, or invalidating myself—to let not-for-me pass by like man-o'war. We cannot please everyone and still be the ones we came here to be. But, in our willingness to listen, to let our passion and authenticity be the current that guides us, we attract the mates that have the capacity to see us. We get to dream a wedding for the divine masculine and feminine within us.

And we won’t always know who our work will attract, or if anything will be born of it—we don’t always get to see the impact our lives or our voices have on those they touch. Still, we create from love because, like the pufferfish, it’s etched into our bones.
It’s in us to labor in wild love,
to carve sanctuaries of beauty in sand,
to risk the dark waters of the imperfect unknown—
remembering we are equipped with thorns.

So my offering to you is this: keep going.
Keep creating.
Keep following the quiet impulse to make beauty with your voice—
even if no one sees it right away,
even if the tide washes it away.

Do it as an act of devotion to yourself.
Do it to build a true breeding ground for the poet in your throat.
Call  forth your wild twin to your temple.
And let her cry out—
howl—
into that fathomless ocean of love.

A Deeper Dive and Offering to Paid Subscribers:

A deeper dive and offering for paid subscribers

If you’d like to swim a little farther with this piece, I’ve placed a small bundle at the shore. Paid subscribers receive:

• An exploration of the Shinto Myth of Amaterasu and Uzume and a story of Diné (Navajo) ceremonial sand paintings

• A Guided, Recorded Journey Through the Body— to find your wild twin and listen to her voice (10 min)

• 7-Day “Build Your Nest” practice (5–15 min/day) to shift from performance and perfectionism to devotion

• Critique-capacity worksheet to hold your center when feedback arrives

• Three-rune spread — for creative guidance to get started (with the Elder Futhark runes)

• Journaling prompts to deepen your reflection

• Community invite: share one line or piece of wisdom your wild other half brought you + one boundary you’re setting

Thank you for supporting my work and going on this journey with me.

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Near my home in Bourgogne, hawthorns hold spears along the forest edges,
guarding the passage, the turtle doves, the song thrushes,
their crimson berries that recall the tales of fairies.

I have a mind to reach up and grab handfuls of them
to tincture a heart medicine, but they are not ready
until the first frost glitters and pinches the ground.

Instead, I push my daughter in her carriage to sunnier places
and prick my fingers on hedgerows of field roses.
As I snap off their bulbous hips and the mossy scarlet pincushions
left by the gall wasps to bear young,
I remember my grandmother.

I never got to meet her, or hear her tell stories of her childhood in Italy,
or of her journey to America on the big ship with her sisters,
nor of her mother or grandmother,
or of her experiences in child birth.
I never got to listen to the wisdom that would weather grooves around her mouth.

Breast cancer took her life when she was just the age I am now,
and my father was a young teenager.
I share the BRCA gene that seems to have been at its center.

I often consider the unimaginable pain she carried,
the way she must’ve begged and bargained with God,
the way surrender came as an inevitable lullaby
when she held and looked into the eyes of her three young children
and my grandfather for the last time.

I speak to her as the winds sweep my daughter’s hair into wild tangles.
I tell her about our lives here in France, about the medicine of the roses,
and what a blessing it is that we have such an abundance.
I thank her for guiding me to them.
I ask her to look over my son’s heart, and for the strength to carry this heavy ancestral stone carved by severed love.

Though I do not hold a memory of her face, and she can feel further than the stars,
she is in my hands as we walk along these ancient paths
winding through freshly plowed fields and ivy bound wood.

We hear the songs of my ancestors call out to the birds,
guiding me to the roots of our wounding,
found beneath the hawthorn, the rose, the blackberry,
and to the medicine they offer in succulent jewels.

The rose family is one of guardians, triple goddesses, the dual nature of flowers, sweet fruits and sharp thorns.

Hawthorn is one of the harshest teachers, a queen who will take you through dark matter and terrifying storms, so you can reach the dawn that rises on the shores of your power.

She sets challenges of worthiness if you’re brave enough to offer your soft skin, 
to retrieve your medicine,
and she will break your heart open,
so you can hold and transmute the grief of generations.

Her leaves are dainty, and her five petaled flowers
grow in delicate white and pink clusters,
yet her branches bite and stab with thorns like daggers.

In autumn, she bears her fruit like tiny red apples
that are used to treat all heart-related matters and nervous disorders.

She is a pioneer, reclaiming land for the wild to return,
and can root into the most difficult ground.

🌬️What This Offering Holds

In this offering, I will take you into my intimate journey with hawthorn—
and into the way of the Great Mother, the goddess in all her forms—
she who lifts up her fanged branches and beckons
you through the doorway of initiation, the spiraled path of descent…and return.

For paid subscribers, this piece includes personal parts of my story as well as the matriarchs that came before me, the wound we’ve carried and the collective healing offered by this tree.

In addition, we will explore the Roman goddess of doorways and weddings, Cardea, who is symbolized by the hawthorn herself.

You will also receive:

• A guided shamanic drum journey to meet with the spirit of hawthorn and the goddess

• Instructions for preparing your own hawthorn tincture

• A set of journaling prompts to deepen your reflection and ancestral connection

🌿 Who it’s for:

This piece is for those who:

• Feel called to ancestral healing and reclaiming matriarchal wisdom

• Are navigating grief, estrangement, or mother wounds

• Long to connect more deeply with the magic of trees, seasons, spirit and the ancient goddesses

• Carry a desire to break generational patterns and re-root into a new truth

• Are curious about plant spirit medicine, shamanic journeying, or the sacred feminine

The Secret in the Wound

This past summer, while visiting my son in New Jersey, we were walking along the sidewalk of a shopping mall leaving a restaurant when he turned to me and said, “I know their secret.” He gestured toward a family ahead of us, and when I asked what he meant, he said, “Every family has a secret. You can see theirs—it’s an easy one. See how they walk, how they carry themselves, how they’re heavy and grumpy?” I laughed gently, surprised by his observation, and later winced, complaining of a knot in my shoulder as we reached the car. He looked at me as I buckled him into his booster seat, and asked, “Is that our family secret? You know, since Daddy always has a sore back too?”

I smiled, and replied, “maybe,” and then he pondered, “I wonder what yours is with your family, you know like with your parents.” After I got into the driver’s seat and buckled up, I craned my neck to look back at him and sighed curiously, “hmmm…” Knowing the answer would be too heavy yet for his arms to carry.

As I drove, I was struck by the way he intuited—that what he meant by secret was really wound. Something woven that whispers beneath the tapestry of families, invisible as it manifests through the body, through pain, until the black sheep goes searching for its name, and retrieves it on exile island.

The harshest parts of my story gave me a treasure map, X marking the path to that stone.

The wound of our lineage is marked by early maternal loss—of mothers dying too young, and children left without grief rituals, of estrangement born of rage, and the firewalls we place around our pain.

I am from one of those common American families, lost from our homelands in Italy, speaking English on stolen ground, forgetting the names and stories of our ancestors. So, what I know of this wound does not go far back, though I know cuts through an ancient cloth.

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For most of the year, the Atlantic sighs and swirls between us.

How could this be?

My grieving body wonders on those nights where the ancient ones seem absent, and I am begging them for the miraculous—anything to change the circumstances.

At times, I’ve worried—how might this ocean erode our foundation? Will it leave a wound so deep beneath the surface, we won’t be able to reach it?

At times, I’ve traded my faith and knowing for guilt and shame, drowned myself in confusion’s murky gulfs.

At times, I’ve let in the nightmarish voices of my parents, the false accusations and blame launched by my ex, or my own sister with full conviction.

At times, I’ve had to fight to hold on—to keep the tempest from swallowing me whole.

✨For Paid Subscribers Only: An Intimate Story✨

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was deep in the third and most grueling year of the custody battle over my son.

What follows is a deeper sharing—one I’ve reserved for paid subscribers.

🚪Here, I open the door a little wider.
🕯️I speak more openly about my story:
🔥How heartbreak and fear became an alchemical fire for my voice.
🌊What I’ve learned by carrying grief as a mother across lands.
🌵The accusations I endured—and the deeper truth I chose to stand in, again and again.
🌱How we were guided across the sea toward a life we hadn’t dared to dream.

Through the myth of Rhiannon from the Mabinogi—one of the oldest and most complete collections of British Celtic myth, steeped in stories of mothers and sons, estrangement and return—we’ll walk together through the ancestral pattern of the accused mother, the exiled woman, the soul who follows spirit’s call even when the world cannot understand.

✨ In addition to these stories, subscribers will also receive a rune reading, and a link to a guided shamanic rune journey to the otherworld to receive deeper wisdom and guidance from the ancestors, as well as a set of gentle prompts to support your own grief work, writing, and reclamation.

This story is especially for you if:

• You hold a vision that feels nearly impossible to manifest

• You fear that answering your soul’s calling might cost you everything

• You’ve been scapegoated, misunderstood, or bear the ache of estrangement

• You’re navigating separation, motherhood, or sacred becoming

• You’ve known the pain of being misnamed—and the holy courage of reclaiming yourself

• You long to hear from myth, Spirit, and a fellow traveler on this path

If something within you whispered yes while reading,
I hope you’ll join me inside. 🕯

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I’ve created this Substack as a libation to my grief.

It is an act of bravery for me.

And a long time coming as this will be the first time I consistently share my writing, raw pieces of my life’s story on a public forum.

Before now, even my poetry allowed me to hide, ever so slightly, behind metaphor.

I’ve blamed the demands of motherhood, the busyness of business and sweeping up the spilled dirt that inevitably fell each time I uprooted and replanted my life in a new backyard.

But, below those grassy surfaces are the persistent, uglier reasons whose lecherous teeth still dig into my pale skin.

Still, the words nag me, and no matter how long I avoid the page, they will not leave me alone.

Most days, lines echo between my temples hunched over laundry baskets, stoves and stroller handles, wandering grocery isles.

I’ve left them behind in notebooks, scraps of paper here and there, and in unfinished drafts of various works.

But now, their gentle thrumming has become too incessant to ignore—They ask for a dressing room in which to unfurl.

However, the risk their exposition poses seems impossibly harrowing—

I’ve been a fly burning beneath a cruel magnifying glass for so long,

punished for sharing my truth before,

and scrambled up in a static that invalidates my most tender parts,

retuning my ears to shame’s drone.

So, I told the words, No. Not right now to protect myself—my children.

And yet, my grief cries out from a different station and carries with it a wiser memory—of my voice, and yours, and the voices of our ancestors whose courage once broke the chains of scold’s bridles—carving us a cage door, so that we may fly out and sing.

I have chosen to share here anyway.

In a world that is increasingly clamping its fingers around our strained throats, our words, our stories are like hymns that rattle its nails loose.

This Substack is where I will begin to share my story, my work.

May it be a small torch lit at the edge of the wood.

Subscribe now

If we haven’t met yet...

My name is Rose Wollf. A name whose origin carries its own story—one I’ll share with you sometime.

I’m a mother, poet, storyteller, animist, mystic, a shamanic practitioner, and former educator. I’ve walked through initiations, exile, witch hunts, and custody courtrooms, familial estrangement, and the long silences between islands of stranded heartache and love.

My life has grown familiar with the mythic spirals of descent and return and descent once more.

I will tell these stories here, where you will get to know me better.

Not all at once, or with urgency, or in any particular order,

but when the greater web that holds them

pulses beneath the spindly legs of their weaver.

What You Can Expect

This is not a content feed.
It’s a den for intimacy.
A gathering place to weave new orbs in the great web of stories, to muse and marvel at magic, myth, motherhood and the intersections of creation.

A fire that holds meaning alight in a world where nihilism, denial, genocidal greed and blind delusion have gathered heavy clouds.

A home for my medicine—and perhaps yours, too.

Post Inclusions

• Reflections on writing, writer’s block and connections within the sacred web of voices

• Myth, motherhood and the process of creation

• Poetry & memoir, fiction and fairy tale

• Musings from my new land in Burgundy, France

• Notes on acquiring language, memory & expatriation

• Dreamwork and somatic journeying

• Archetypes and finding goddesses in the natural world

• Stories of loss, parental estrangement, and grief as medicine

• Northern European shamanism/ancient wisdom: rune and tree transmissions

• Stories on initiation, exile, and the path of becoming

• The quest for authenticity in a post-colonial dystopia

• Stories of sisterhood and belonging, and modern day witch hunts

• Invitations to my offerings

• And more we will discover along the way together…

For Paid Subscribers

• The more vulnerable, raw parts of my personal stories

• Curated guides, insights and wisdom gained from my experiences

• Animistic, spiritual and creative practices to support your path of becoming

• Journaling prompts & writing exercises

• Discounts on my courses and 1:1 mentorship

• An emerging community space for shared reflection and depth

For Founding Members

If you feel called to support me in this work, I am offering founders all of the above plus a monthly online writing circle.

This circle will provide a space for our words and stories, exploring new prompts that may inspire them out of us, and a safe container to share with each other, so that we may be witnessed and supported in our work.

In addition to prompts, from time to time, I’ll also guide us in shamanic drum journeys with the runes and Celtic ogham to access the power of vision and connection provided in altered states of consciousness.

🐺 An Invitation

You’re welcome in the Wollf Den.

Subscribe for free to receive most of my writing.
Or become a paid subscriber to walk a little closer with me.

This is just the beginning.
Come in and warm your soles.

With love,
Rose

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