This is my initiation of blood and bone. I am naming myself Witch, and I am seeking out those hidden treasures in my psyche left there by my heathen grandmothers so long ago. I am taking back what is mine, and the wildest gods with the greatest stories are dreaming me into being and naming me their Priestess. Awakened I am on these precious days, and my most beloved dead are walking with me as I undertake this great journey and live the wildest year I have ever known.
Invocation to the
Crone of the East
Welcome, Witch of Blooming Bud
Paint my face with loam and mud
The scent of birth, this cleansing storm
And you, the hag, in softer form.
The language of spring leaves out the witty banter and proper rhetoric, forsaking the serious grumbles and pensive frowns of winter for those joyous belly-wobbling laughs that can erupt only from their low places on warmer days. Spring is the annual sunrise, the season of possibility dawning and hope subtly realized, if only in those fleeting glimpses of an innocence we once knew when our skin was tighter and our worlds were smaller. We look to the east now, searching for the perpetual dawn in the eyes of newborns and in the tender roots of a garden well nursed through those harsher moons. We find her right there, that Garden Hag who rules this fertile season of hard-blowing storms and resilient hearts, and she tells us tales of ancestral healing and the silver-threaded web of generations. She tells us to check in with our beloveds, to ask for what we need, and to allow ourselves to feel tender. Her stories are those of lightning women; warm, wounded grannies; and wild children, and her wisdom is born of an undying faith in renewal and rebirth.
Overview of the Spring Journey
Season of Tender Roots
Nourishment: Belonging
Story Medicine: The Chicken-Witch of the Grove
Season of the Elders’ Altar
Challenge: Heart Healing
Story Medicine: Temple of the Flame Tender
Season of Mud-Caked Hands
Wisdom: Gathering
Story Medicine: Bawdy Betty and the Lady in Beige
The Spring Altar, Handmade with a Wild Innocence
Lay to rest the bones and pine of winter. Now come the moons of erotic innocence and nature lust. Build your spring altar to reflect new beginnings, sensuality, and righteous rejuvenation. Gather things that grow, and tend them well. Honor the air element with sustainably harvested feathers, eggshells, and wildflowers. At altar center place a candle colored or carved in such a way that you might name it “Sovereignty.” You might place a small dish of fertile dirt in the north, seeds in the east, an image of the sun in the south, and a seashell in the west, all to honor the beauteous dance of the elements as the Wheel of the Year turns toward fruition. May your altar evoke a felt sense of possibility and infinite potential. These are the days of swelling purpose, weaving ancestral memory with long vision, and digging out the deep secrets, and your altar is a physical reminder of these fertile intentions. May you find what you seek.
Belonging
Surely you have never welcomed a wilder season than this. That journey out of winter might have meant death for a less bold version of you, or perhaps it did. Perhaps there is a heap of frozen flesh, a face with frost-webbed skin that looks much like yours, left behind in the snow, left to nourish the wolves and feed the loamy ground. Who you are now, a seeker having traveled through countless dreamlands of wintry snowscapes and barren fallows, is not the wild one you used to be. Who you are now, a warmth-famished wanderer destined to better heal those deep but unknown wounds of the anguished dead, is not the same creature who dwelled in winter’s darkness, who sought sanctuary at the hearthside and dreamed the smaller dreams.
Those final long moons of winter have been a birth, to be sure, and you have woken this brighter morning with a heart full of lusty Pagan poetry and eyes that long for the reds of rose petals and ten thousand shades of green only a sprouting early-spring garden can show you. This moon cycle is the first of spring, running through the vernal equinox. Here you are, at long last, and the Garden Hag’s been waiting with a bountiful table attended by an infinite number of spectral guests; you may not know them, but these ethereal ones most certainly remember you.
May this first moon of spring, this Season of Tender Roots, greet you as the Garden Hag does, with childlike curiosity and much, much joy. Her face is lined, her hair is gray, but her heart beats in the rhythm of the innocent erotic. You have come to her ivy-hugged house in search of some great, unnamed thing, and she is just the one to help you uncover that buried treasure, those invaluable golden depths of wild wisdom tucked away long ago, planted beneath the Elders’ Altar for safekeeping.
Hag Lesson #11
Spring magick is lineage-mending witchery.
Our spring magick does the business of binding our dreams to those who came before us; our healing is their healing, and our longing is their longing.
Remind Me, Grandmother
A Whispered Lament
Remind me, Grandmother. I’ve forgotten my way again in this time-impoverished world where no one seems to know how to find that soul-well of patience you showed me when I was a babe. My blood remembers endless days spent tending resilient gardens, uninterrupted by those unsanctified screens and spirit-starved screams for immediate attention. And, in those rare still moments, my bones’ marrow recalls retreat to the edges of waters fed by melting snows and into the yellow curls of budding daffodils.
Remind me, Grandmother. I fear I’ve misplaced the treasure map showing me where my ancestral inheritance was hidden. My spiraling double-helix sigils are stamped with the pain of famine, dead children, and betrayal. There is a persistent mourning in the ache of my joints, and day by day, they groan a little louder in a bone-on-bone keening for my
