ill-equipped to measure. We have yet to understand the she-science of the cosmic web, but we know we cannot track our souls’ progress in measurable goals and numerically ordered objectives. The Priestess of the Wild Earth embraces the dark valleys on her path with much feminine grace, knowing there is little merit in berating herself over past choices that cannot be rationalized away with our logical, left-brained know-how.
An additional truth the wayward Priestess clings to with a tight grip when the nights are endless is this: There is an immense beauty in her longing, in her fervent search for a home that is truly her own. Perhaps there is no greater testament to feminine fortitude than a woman’s story of risking immense insecurity for authenticity. The spiritual journey does not promise comfortable travel, and a woman who runs screaming from all things known does not do so seeking happiness; she does so seeking a truer version of herself. The evenings she spends alone and crying or raging most righteously, torturous as they are, are worthy of honor. They are the stuff of poetry, and they are the deepest, impassioned hues that render a lifescape a beautiful masterpiece full of shadow and light.
The awakening wanderer now sets foot on the spiral Red Road, moving away from the garden and into the unknown, having irrevocably broken the garden’s rules. She may now know only what she does not want her new house rules to be, but that knowing is sufficient to keep her moving in the right direction. Even the wildest woman sets some working guidelines for herself in times of transition, a sort of flexible manifesto largely meant to keep her from sinking back into the old underworld-garden or, worse, falling into a new trap altogether. As the Priestess of the Wild Earth takes to the road, her boundaries are often fiercer than they have ever been, than they ever needed to be.
The truths she wears on her back — the knowledge that her time in the garden was both necessary and well worth the agony, along with a strange, often unsettling acknowledgment that there is beauty in her quite painful new-found longing — are her most prized possessions; she has earned them, after all. The rules she writes now are those that have been tattooed on her bones since she was in the womb, long before she sat caged in the too-small life. These rules are born of those precious truths, but the wild woman realizes now, as her bare feet pound the red ground with infinite purpose, that she has always known her real rules, rules she did not need to read in any book of verses or recite to authority figures for sweet reward. Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
Her house rules were written by the ancient, wild hand, and she has been reciting them in her dreams since she was a babe.
The Red Road: A Parable of Feminine Fortitude
This wayward Priestess has raised her patchworked hood and smeared her lipstick in just the right places. She has shed her dried skin, leaving it heaped in a ditch alongside the Red Road. Lighter she moves now, her bare feet beating the rusted dirt while the wild wind blows her hair. A dull rumble of thunder heralds the impending storm, and she knows she cannot turn back. Her soul demands she press on, though she will pass ghosts of long-gone lovers who wounded her well.
“They cannot cut me again,” she whispers.
Her liberation depends on this journey; not its completion but its wholehearted undertaking. To turn back would mean consenting to be shackled to relinquished divinity, to low worth, and to a world where the voices of loud women are muffled under others’ accusations arising from bitterness and envy. This Priestess knows that the storm will toss her about, the road will run bloody with the overflow, and she will be waist-deep in the memories of hunted Witches.
“They will not catch me again,” she speaks skyward with a resonance her voice never had in her younger years.
The rain falls in sheets now, and her lashes drip thick with the Earth Mother’s tears. Still, she has never seen more clearly the sins of humankind against the wounded world. Part of her yearns for her joints to break apart and her body to fall into a limp bundle of skin on the ground. Part of her wants to be a blood sacrifice to the ailing planet, and part of her bids the drowning worms beneath her to ascend and climb her bones, to pull her under so she may nourish the sun-thirsty, spiderwebbing roots of the cut trees.
“Purify these lands with your storm; they are begging you to do it!” she beckons to the wilds.
The red soil has a sense memory of the truest freedom fighting. Were she to press ear to wet ground, the Priestess would hear echoes of the final beats of the bravest hearts as they slowed to a stop in the name of man-made maps. If she could hear the tallest and most ancient trees talking, they would be singing low and mournful dirges about bullets lodged in bark and blood pooling around their roots. If she turned back now, her body might live, but part of her soul would forever remain here on this hallowed ground. She must go on, in the name of her granddaughters’ granddaughters’ babes. She must go on, to preserve what is left of the sacred masculine and majestic feminine. She is but one electric-pulsing cell in the universal body, but her resolve will ripple the skin of the global collective and send a single message into the future.
“I am she who is and will always be,” she speaks solemnly into the rain. “If I die here on the Red Road, my soul will look down on my floating body from the ether and know my life was better lived for taking this journey, doomed as it may have been. I regret nothing, and I repent nothing except the joyless nights spent depriving myself of sacred indulgence, hedonistic delights, and the company of those worthy of the beauty that was me.”
COMING HOME TO THE WILDS: BUILDING THE LIVING ALTAR
A woman expresses the Priestess of the Wild Earth archetype, becoming whole unto herself, when she enacts an embodied knowing that she is a living altar, holy ground in her own right, and she needs no external validation. She comes home to the wilds. She writes her own house rules, and she claims her heathen’s birthright to live on uncultivated spiritual ground.
In This House, I Brew with Crone Magick
In this house, I am whole unto myself. Here is my altar; I like it just this way, covered in old candle wax and laden with wounded mementos from my garden. This is the scarred walnut that reminds me of my childhood, and this is the dried flower that lost all its juicy perfection, as I once did. I keep these things here in my new house, built with my own hands at the end of the long Red Road, so I know I must never look back.
In this house, I brew with Crone magick. The old ways of magick-making are emblazoned on my very cells, and I need no Book of Light and Shadow to tell me the right words or the perfect chant. Here, I am a Witch-Priestess in a congregation of one, and even my closest kin do not know all my secrets.
In this house, I melt back into the source of everything from time to time, dissolving into a wet heap of flesh and blood to be resculpted by some angelic artisan, some skilled descended master who puts my stretch marks in just the right places and squints to paint my tattoos just so. Here, no one wonders why I must become the hermit every so often, and no one keeps knocking when I refuse to answer my door.
In this house, I wake with the bone-deep understanding of feminine divinity. I am a wild Goddess unleashed within these four walls, and I will wear all the jewelry I like. Here, no one clicks their tongue when I speak of nature lust and the cosmic dance. Here, I will wax poetic on intergalactic Shakti before breakfast. Here, I pray all day long and with my whole body, for my limbs are a moving benediction to the Holy Wild.
In
