Sitting at the edge of spring, and the edge of motherhood, I am becoming aware that these years of “singleness” (whatever THAT means), have also afforded me the opportunity to cultivate something precious. A deep, wildly sensuous affair with the living earth. Do you ever pick a single rose petal from a flower just to caress your lips with it until the petal becomes translucent?

I wanted to be held by a man. Someone who loved me so much that he wanted to create life with me. I wanted to share the moment of that positive pregnancy test with him, in joy and disbelief. I wanted him to bring me hot cocoa and soup and marvel and my shapeshifting. It was a fantasy, but not entirely unrealistic, after all, couples experience this all the time.

Last winter I wrote a series of twelve posts on Yuletide. Each post honored a theme or tradition associated with the pre-Christian winter holidays in old Europe. I have complied them here in one long post for you to browse through. Enjoy!

I see harvest feast season as the time between the Celtic New Year and the Gregorian New Year. This means, form Halloween through Christmas, food suddenly becomes much more interesting for me because I’m thinking about fall bounty: fruits, nuts, squash and all the other seasonal flavors that bring thoughts of warm nourishment and cozy times.

Rendering comb down to golden disks of beeswax is one of the ways I process the loss of a hive. By giving my attention over to extracting the pure, golden, divinely scented wax from the skeleton of a hive, I feel connected to the life-death-life cycle of that hive.

Once, I drove through the narrow country roads of west Cornwall to find a sacred well. It was autumn and the sea looked Caribbean turquoise. The map wasn’t very good, but my friend and I found the well, partially overgrown with ivy, but not forgotten. One of the old places, where women’s water wisdom once offered healing and insight. A nearly obscured heritage. ⠀

We’ve given her many names: Callieach, Persephone, Nepthys, Kali. But her original name was Earth. Mother. Crone. Womb and Tomb. There is no death goddess who is not also tied to, or herself a goddess of rebirth. They are not separate, because life is not, and never can be separate from death. This is why the Kelts built passage tombs or long barrows. We are born of the Mother and return to the Mother, her dark and earthly embrace.

I have often struggled with what it means to be a third generation Californian living on stolen land. I love California dearly, but I am also someone who has always longed for a deeper sense of roots.

I found the siren song of ancestral roots early on in Celtic myths and European herbcraft. This drew me to England and Scotland by the age of 17, and I have spent the rest of my life feeling as though I were of two places.

I am at a real crossroads this week. I’ve got some unpleasant thoughts moving through my brain. I’ve tried sorting through them with friends and colleagues. I’d like to have a strong argument or stance before writing about it, but I don’t. I have a Scorpio full moon cocktail of compassion and raised hackles. What I’m going to talk about may put you off. The subject is women stealing from women.