and long-tongued old Germanic Goddess of destruction. Whatever its form, it was never long-winded or enduring, never a tirade or a scolding — just a bite.
The wisdom would inevitably follow then. After she’d bitten me, after she’d made me wonder what I was doing with that small life of mine, she’d somehow always seal up our visit in a neater package, offering warm-armed support and the softest, most maternal love I had — and indeed have — ever known. At the end of our visits, she would speak like spirit speaks, with a mysterious, innocent, so-subtle tone that, regardless of the precise shape her words were taking, always said Yes, dear child. These small moments are what life is made of.
And right you still are, Grace.
My visits to Grace’s house were my Crone School, and her curriculum was not easily learned, nor was it, I am sure, easily shared. If there was a single vision statement for her elder academy, it was this: A more holy gift than the regular enjoyment of — than the daily and embodied kinship with — those fleeting moments of contentment and peace does not exist. Living slowly is activism, too. Taking time to listen to the stories of our elder-teachers is the stuff of rebellion, but it is not the stories alone that will shape the emerging future. Find that hallowed meeting place where your life — where your lived experience, passions, wounds, and infinite hope — encounters the story; this is the edge of wildness, the fringe on which the greatest transformation can occur.
Here, we are beyond language. Here, we are living shrines to who we used to be and who we will become. Here, we are both hopeful prayer and mournful keening.
May we walk the way we hope our ghosts will walk. May we conceive of time as friend and the seasons as elder-teachers; they have been spiral-dancing since long before we were born, after all. May we learn to find sovereignty in our humility, and may we remember the magick of our long-gone ancestors. The hag has much healing wisdom to share with us, if we only listen, so let us build twig-and-stone shrines in the woods to those gray-haired ones who taught us well.
All blessings be.
The Hag’s Song
I fell into sleep and dreamt of a hag
She leapt like a youth and crouched on a crag
I know you, I said. Her face was my own
I’ll show you, I said, and ran for the crone
Just look! I am you, you wild-boned thing!
She shook and turned blue, then started to sing
Her prayer was so old, bewailing the trees
A keening so bold, for rough times like these
I licked a tear from her eye, the salt from her hair
Then she was I, her hymn mine to share
My bones — how they ached! But my songs were so rich
My voice, how it quaked with the howl of that Witch
I sang for the elders, the dead, and the snow
I moaned for the yew trees, the wolf, and the crow
In time, I grew soft, a soul sopped in song
A Cailleach lost in a rhyme gone too long
I woke in the dark, nudged up by a ghost
The song left its mark, but the hag I loved most.
Nestled somewhere within the untamed psyche of every wild soul is a wise elder with a salty sense of humor. If we listen, we can hear that cunning hag share her potent medicine with us, singing us songs of haunted autumns, deep winters, and lush-blooming springs. That old one has a long memory, and she speaks the lost rebel language of the wilds with a primal intonation. She helps us make sense of these ever-unraveling and eternally restitched stories of ours, continually offering us an invitation back to those hallowed, heathen lands our deepest selves have never forgotten.
Without the voice of our inner crone, without our well-aged wilderness guide, these flourishing and fertile lands, these ancestral dreamscapes that bud and bloom in our hearts and beyond our walls, rarely offer us definitive answers to our many questions about love, loss, or the sacred. Even gifted with her elusive guidance, we still inevitably struggle to discern what messages the natural world holds for us. Our minds howl for certainty. We want concrete answers. We resist the discomfort of a mystery-riddled life, but the wilds whisper only the softest songs, speaking in a slower and less predictable rhythm than our many screaming, fast-talking screens. The hag tells us of our inextricable belonging to the world, to the wild unseen. The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes: “This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.” We are creaturely. We are cocreated and dismembered by these wilds over and over again. What persistent unknowns our modern, overbright technologies struggle to illuminate, those holy wilds embrace in moon and flame.
To remember how to hear that inner hag’s voice often seems a near-impossible task, an arduous journey home after being away too long, when the comforts of certainty are begging us to rest and stay with all things known. The old ones are whispering, but the devices are shrieking. The haunting lure of the forest beckons, but so does the softness of our beds. We long to remember to listen, but our lives are full of contradictions. Remembering how to hear the hag’s voice means making peace with, though rarely resolving, these many beautiful and bizarre conflicts that show us our chaotic complexity, our magickal and messy humanness.
Hag Lesson #1
The best stories are not heard but met.
For some, the remembering happens only in dreams, in those subconscious spaces where that primal tongue is spoken through monstrous imagery, overgrown landscapes, or otherworldly spirits. For others, the remembering occurs by light of day, as they take notice of synchronicities, nods from nature, and suddenly realized patterns within their personal myths of wounding and healing. For all, the task is to fall in love with the liminal: the place between the illusion of our separateness and the unnamed sparking and numinous spirit evident in all — the cosmic dance between our feeling flesh, the beloved dead, and the yet-to-be-born; between the human and the beast; and between the stories we live and the stories we share.
Sovereign within the Collective
To walk with our inner hag requires such remembering, and this remembering is hardly a finite goal to be attained or permanent plateau to be reached; it is a journey of eternal becoming, of a constant and ever-weaving dance between our singular sovereignty and our intimacy with the collective. Regardless of context,
