I want to say that the rejection of transgender women from traditional women’s circles has been an unfortunate, underhanded instrument of oppression labeled as feminism. Those who resonate with the wild woman archetype have an inner value system that is fiercely inclusive, and the feminine is not defined by biology. The Wild Mother opens her arms to all of us, and we must take great care to honor all her children, letting our circles be a microcosm of the world we want to live in.
Uncaging the wild woman means rallying against oppression, standing up for those who are sociopolitically and socioeconomically precluded from standing on their own, and honoring the beauteously untamable and miraculously unruined spirit within us all. We are all of the Earth, and it is wild. Your spiritual liberation is an act of social justice. The presentation of the twisted-nosed Crone-Witch in fairy tales as the poisoner of children is an instrument of feminine suppression that very much parallels the denigration of the environment. The Earth is feminine, and the continual threats to Her autonomy have coincided directly and historically with the oppression of women. By robbing the mythical Witch of her beauteous humanity and rendering her a malicious presence, the tales of our childhood rendered her socially powerless. The Witch is a holy healer who attunes Herself with the drumbeat of nature. She has heard the trees crying, and She will no longer allow herself to remain in the shadows while the voiceless are ignored. Her time has come, and She is beckoning for you to come wander with Her.
A NOTE FOR THE URBAN WITCH
Wild woman spirituality ignites a soul-deep kinship with nature, and this is true whether you live miles from your closest neighbor or within a densely populated city. As a wholly inclusive practice, the ways of the Witch are many and varied. This Craft excludes no one, and the urban Witch is uniquely positioned to have greater access to certain resources, the greatest of which is other like-minded wild women and existing circles. Most of the nature-based rituals described in this book can be adapted for those without access to open and green spaces. If you live in a place without safe access to open and green spaces, I recommend dedicating a space in your home to your Holy Wild; ideally, this is a place where sacred relics, plants, or symbols of the natural world can remind you that you are forever held by the Earth and Her elements. This is your Wild Home within your home, your sanctuary. Moreover, if you live in an urban setting, consider the ways in which the built structures frame the wild world rather than suppress it. Acknowledge the magick of the city as a sacred circle in its own right in which high-energy vibrations abound, human connections are readily forged, and the pulse of Mother Earth beats beneath it all.
READ WILDLY
Your spiritual liberation comes from a Craft that ebbs and flows over rough ground, carving out deep trenches in places where you crave it most often, spilling over its banks in times of loss or fierce need, and finding new rivulets when the high-edged ego begins to crumble to the holy ground. Let all parts of you feed this wild river, especially the exotic mud of your sensuality and the many-colored waters of your creativity. The Witch is being re-wilded through the reclamation of the fem-force, or Shakti, and She is being re-wilded through you.
Just like your spiritual path, each part of this book is intended to be unpacked in your own way and in your own time. Some chapters you may liken to a thick, hot, ceremonial cacao drink; they are not to be consumed quickly or absentmindedly, and the words may make your heart beat faster and take time to digest. Other chapters may slide down your gullet like so much rosewater, clean and familiar. The integration of any new spiritual practice should curdle your blood just a bit, for it threatens the natural human ego’s desire to already know everything about its world. Know that every word of this text has been written from my Witch’s soul to yours, with the feminine divine’s voice echoing at my heart center with all the grace of our grandmothers. I invite you now to read wildly, to loosen your grip on the three keys of rhythm, ritual, and circle-craft, and to begin planning the festival of your sacred homecoming. I will hang the banners for you, my love, and I will invite every Wolf-Woman I know to your Witch’s debutante ball.
I made the holiest vows in utter silence,
Trusting that an ancient version of myself was listening,
Knowing that in a time long gone, I was being heard.
My heart-voice echoed through the Mother oaks,
And this wounded woman from a world at war learned who she was
Only by listening to her own voice on a warm wind.
The ebbs and flows of the great Earth’s natural cycles live within you, Witch. Know the wild feminine as circular, and concerned above all else with the interconnectedness of all things. That logical left brain of yours wants to separate, fragment, and linearize all that you perceive, but your generative, intuitive right brain knows a deeper truth. In your cells you know that this world lives in you as much as you live in it. I call this magickal life for which you are destined your spiritual integrity, but in truth it is your physical, mental, and soulful integrity as well. The rhythms of nature are the rhythms of your energetic womb, the cycles of your emotions and creative work, and the continual, spiraling understanding that divinity exists in it all, forever and always. The recollection of your embodied cycles is the key to the broom closet’s first lock; without this, your Witch consciousness remains dormant.
The intentional embodiment of your wild rhythm is integral to your spirituality because it grounds you firmly in this world; it creates opportunity for continual affirmation of your sexuality and creativity as hallmarks of your very nature. There is no great chasm between your enduring spirit and your holy, sensual self. The rhythms of the wild world are proof of your holistic being. Your sex and your spirit were forced into a divorce long ago, but now, now let these two parts of you be reunited under red satin sheets. The first pillar of wild woman spirituality is the marriage between the Witch’s whole being — that is, her soul, body, mind, and spirit — and the cycles of the world around her. You are not merely in the world, my love; you are of the world.
When a woman’s life becomes isolated from the cycles of nature’s magick, she not only experiences a starvation of soul and spirit; she begins to question her sanity. The psyches and bodies of women are meant to wax and wane, swelling and thinning out with much majestic variability. The feminine is neither even-keeled nor easily predicted. We are changeable creatures. We women experience spiritual winters during which there is a divinely fallowed time when we care not for prayer or ritual. So, too, a woman experiences these sacred voids in terms of love and relationship, body and health, creative work, and every aspect of her way of being in the world. When compared directly and unknowingly to a high-fire inner summer, when deep, purposeful, and fertile transformation is being birthed over and over again, these inner winters can weigh heavily on a woman. She sinks low into a depression made far worse by a rejection of this time’s validity as a dark-moon psychic state during which a woman craves solitude and emptiness.
The rhythms of the Holy Wild give us permission to have our own cyclical nature; we need only frame these highs and lows as part of our bodily and psychic home. We are the living feminine, Sister, and we have a cosmically sanctioned right to check in and check out in accordance with our inner resources. Our energetic wells can only source so much work, so much play, so much nurturing, and so much devotion before they become depleted. Consider the solar and lunar cycles as more predictable metaphors for your own rhythms. We are not meant to be constantly turned on, and the world needs our darkness