This particular entry follows the poison path, the grief mysteries, and the maturation they require of us.

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12/31/2025:

“Thirst for what is growing. Don’t get swept up in the growth and become grabby and demanding—like a hungry ghost.”

Tarot: 8 of Cups reversed.

Plant ally: Aconite.

This is my entry on the omen day for July, 2026.

7/21/2026:

“Again, luteal is such a gift. It shows where you just can’t keep up with the amount of energy output.” A message to a friend.

An identity split I’ve been watching for a year must move. It’s not that there’s not enough energy; it simply wants to be directed elsewhere. There’s too much wasted in resistance to what wants to be flowing in another direction.

7/23/2026:

“I’m shedding layers of the womb before I can be really fertile again…my kids have completed their transition from little to big kids. Who am I when mothering them is not at the forefront of my days? I dream of something else, but I am sad to leave it all behind. I’m full of sorrow from all that we didn’t get to do, and all that we did. I want to bottle up the precious memories, but they left me behind in them. I feel as though I am alone in them now. I’m the only one there.” A journal entry.

7/26/2026:

“I wake nauseous and with vertigo. I’m spinning before I push out of bed. Head tilted to the left, I stumble to the bathroom. The room is cool despite it being summer. The tile is a reflection of a mild season, but it does nothing to stop the swell of heat that engulfs me. My mouth goes incredibly dry. I’m worried I will pass out, but I am compelled to make it outside. I veer left again, retracing my steps, and I collapse on all fours on the balcony. It still isn’t cool enough. I manage to reach into the doorway and point the fan at myself. Hovering on my knees, I place my hands on purple bags of Miracle-Gro and hang my head, catching my breath.

I need water. Maybe some sugar. I weakly call for my husband, asleep in bed. My body shakes and the nausea rises. This isn’t the first time, but it’s the worst this feeling has ever arrived with my bleed. My husband steps to the threshold of the balcony. I tell him I need water with honey, fast. I’m afraid to be alone for the minute he’s gone to get it for me. A greater wave of nausea rolls through me. This time, I think, It’s fine if I puke all over the balcony. My stomach’s empty. We can just rinse it off. I notice an empty plant pot to the left, and I reach for it just in time to dry heave into it. Ryan returns shortly after, and I drink the cool honey water. The spinning won’t stop, and I’m so tired. I crawl back into bed, restlessly dreaming and sleeping for two more hours. It’s lessened enough to get up, but I’ve bled in my pajama pants, too sick to have worried about the bleed that began hours ago.

I strip the pants off at the foot of our bed. Rather than slip a new pair on, I drop to my knees again. Elbows and forearms resting, I bury my head and sob. Tears flow from a depth so deep, I am not sure they are even from me.

My bare lower body rests on the bottoms of my feet. I imagine red pools gathering between them. Ryan steps behind me and asks me why I’m crying. I don’t know. And I let it go. The story. The why. I just let myself cry while I kneel in prayer to whatever this grief is that moves through me.”

A journal entry.

Aconitum napellus

Aconite is one of the most poisonous plants and one of the oldest medicines. In some stories, Hecate is the Creatress of the plant also known as Venus’ Chariot. She can cause death, and in infinitesimally small amounts, cure the heart.

7/31/2026

Seven days later, softly sitting with the Queen of Poison, Wolfsbane, for the first time, she nods her head over mine, reaching her hands over my shoulders while she stands behind me. She’s working undoubtedly with the Lady of Grief, and she’s the protector of a broken heart.

“Why are you so afraid of your herstory?” she asks me.

I’m grieving the end of a long, long era. It’s existed both within me and long, long before me.

This is thirst.

It’s time to make space by letting go. I receive this message several times from feminine guides and my own womb during this last week of July.

I think back to December, when I drew the 8 of Cups reversed, and the pattern is woven into the texture of my experience. Now can I see how precisely the field had been arranging these encounters. Reluctance to leave what already feels empty. The hungry ghost, thirsting for empty cups, mistaking nostalgia for nourishment.

“Don’t let grief become your appetite. The cups have been drained of what they had to give.”

Menstruation, her magical gnosis with a micro dose of poison, reveals. Thank you, Queen of Poison, who protects the heart in the right measure.

July is over.

I reflect on bloody thighs kneeling in prayer, begging for honey and water.

There are so many numinous threads that are not lost on me as I gather the fragments of the last month.

I am curious if you feel yourself leaving an old era and entering a new one?

In the last month I have learned of a larger cycle that is coming to an end, wielding a much greater impact for magical women. This has felt especially true to me versus the energy of the year of the Fire Horse everyone raved about months ago.

This particular cycle holds more significance and it explains why so many women I see are not experiencing what they thought from the beginning of the year. It’s incredibly valuable to trust your own seasonal timing. Big eras are ending. It might not be your moment to charge forward with fire without first feeling this.

Here are a few pieces that speak to this experience over the last year. The evolution of an identity that is being shed for a new one taking form.

I wrote this exactly one year ago, as the tide was slowly beginning to move out.

This came a few months later when I identified the changing season that the field of mothering morphs into when our children grow and no longer need us to the extent they did when they were younger.

Do women need to conceptualize their own capacity for structure, order, and creative ambition as masculine at all?

I received a message from a concerned citizen of the internet regarding my ignorance on the topic of the “inner masculine.” Judging by the response, I clearly didn’t articulate my point fully enough.

Apparently being fully woman accidentally attracted the Literalism Police.

So, let’s try this again.

For the literal readers of the world, here is my thesis:

I no longer experience my organizational capacity, ambition, structure, creativity, or world-building as an “inner masculine.” I experience these as expressions of my feminine nature. I do not believe women need to divide themselves psychologically into feminine and masculine halves in order to explain their capacity for action.

That is the argument.

Not that women are superior.

Not that men are unnecessary.

Not that genetics proves Goddess spirituality.

Simply that I no longer need to borrow masculinity to explain qualities that I experience as inherently feminine.

No.

The response as though my thesis was that genetics proves women are superior to men wasn’t even close to my original argument. It was inferred. If you're going to step into someone's work and declare it "the epitome of ignorance," you should first make sure you've understood the argument being made, not the one you assumed was there.

My writing is held by the mythopoetic.

I don’t write exclusively through the language of reductionist science. I write through symbol, archetype, biology, folklore, mysticism, embodied experience, and poetry. I’m interested in what happens when those conversations begin weaving a greater tapestry far beyond what the literal mind can perceive.

I wasn’t attempting to reduce mythology to biology.

I was inviting biology to participate in mythology.

My work isn’t trying to prove mythology with science. It asks whether biology, mythology, cosmology, and lived experience sometimes echo one another in ways worth contemplating.

Many sacred traditions imagine primordial creation through the feminine, and I find myself wondering what those stories were trying to preserve.

During the year that I wrote I Am (W)Holy Feminine, I was immersed in origin stories. I found myself returning again and again to the Bee and the Goddess Neith—a feminine creator deeply connected with Egypt’s creation mythology. The iconography of the bee, the Mother of Gods, primordial waters, Tiamat, and countless other feminine creation stories began revealing recurring patterns.

Then biology entered the conversation.

I originally wrote about the X and Y chromosomes and the biological reality that women typically possess two X chromosomes.

The XX chromosome became one thread in a tapestry of symbols through which I began contemplating feminine wholeness. I threaded maternal inheritance of mitochondria, primordial waters, the Great Mother traditions, and the recurring image of the womb as the place where worlds are organized into being into a contemplative whole.

When I write about maternal mitochondrial inheritance, I am not saying that mitochondria “prove” the Great Mother.

I am asking a different question.

If every living human receives the cellular engines that power life through an unbroken maternal lineage...

...what might that mean?

Does it offer another way of contemplating why so many creation myths remember life emerging through the feminine?

Does biology reveal patterns that ancient myth expressed through symbol?

When I contemplate the architecture of biology: the maternal inheritance of mitochondria, the developmental history of the X chromosome, and the endosymbiotic origins of complex life— I find myself seeing recurring patterns that resonate with the ancient symbolism of the Great Mother myths.

The biology was just a node in a web of ancient lineage that has some pretty unusual beliefs compared to modern thought.

I ask these questions to explore and move through life with a deeper understanding of what is means to be a Creatress.

What is the nature of the creative principle that exists throughout life?

If the womb is not merely receptive but profoundly organizing, might we have misunderstood where structure itself belongs?

If the earliest stories of humanity remembered creation through the feminine, what were they trying to preserve?

If every living body carries an unbroken maternal energetic lineage, what does that invite us to contemplate?

My mansplainer in the comments helps me remember that ancient cultures passed on physical inheritance through the motherline, not only the energetic. Did they perceive something that resonates with literal biology?

Does the origin even matter?

Yes, I think it does. My exploration has never been about proving that women are better than men.

It has been about recovering a language so that embodiment can be freely expressed. It’s allowing the split in feminine consciousness to be healed so women no longer need to describe their ambition, order, leadership, creativity, or world-building as masculine.

How would we relate to our lives if we understood that these qualities have always been a part of our nature?

I find it interesting that an essay about women no longer needing to describe their own capacities as masculine was immediately interpreted by some as an attack on men.

That reaction is worth contemplating, too.

I will continue weaving together biology, mythology, archetype, mysticism, and lived experience because I believe the deepest truths about being human rarely live inside a single discipline.

In my space you are welcome to disagree with my conclusions but the invitation to discuss it exists only for those who are holding true to the essence of my argument with respect.

In honor of the feminine,

Danielle

From the meditative state of my natural handicraft, untangling knots of the kiwi plants, I glance up. He’s right. His ‘man’ muscles are growing, and I tell him those pushups and hangs are working. He swells up with pride, but the smirk on his lips gives away the more powerful expression of delight.

The setting sun illuminates the beginning definition of an eight-year-old bicep. He angles both arms so I can get a good look at each, suppressing a smile. It's moments like this when all the strands of mothering seem to braid together. This is a moment of a young man invested in his physical strength, who’s building his capacity physically and emotionally. He's begun to take pride in the practice, and in the feeling of becoming capable. To choose a hard thing and see the fruits of it.

I’m back in the peaceful quiet zone while his soft murmurs join my hands in their quiet, deft work. The vines of the kiwi have gone unruly. Hands unraveling hundreds of exuberant, green snakes, twining around one another, in need of new support.

That’s the feeling I have while softly untangling the delicate, bright green vines from the new growth they’ve wrapped around. This plant is full of energetic, unbridled, child-like joy.

Once again, a voice catches my attention.

“Mama, do you think this is wick?” My stomach dips, a little flutter like the wings of the painted ladies who visit this garden. This child, who I have to all but drag to listen to read aloud some days, just asked me if a branch was wick?1

“I’m not sure. Why don’t you trim it and find out?” He correctly identifies the brown bits with no green ends.

Now the whispering of “wick,” “yup, wick,” “wick, I guessed it,” accompanies my gentle work. How can someone be so incredibly innocent and effortlessly wise at the same time? I think we all are at the core. We’ve just forgotten how.

I let myself drift deeper into my biodelic state. Sunset, a liminal time, lulls us into the in-between. Sensory gates open, like those leading into the garden, and I experience the otherworldly quality of natural time. My feet are still on green grass, a rare treat for early July. The breeze is soft, while the orange ball in the summer sky dips beyond the forest to the west. I feel so light and radiant, minding these vines. My eight-year-old is matching the mood of the plants, and the three of us entwine as we unwind the vines.

My husband is drawn into our orbit, catching us towards the end of our task. He asks me if I like un-weaving as much as weaving.

I think he likes me as a witch.

Now, I am no longer weaving with vines; it’s hair, threads, and fates.

This is the ideal state to be braiding futures in. Heart open, womb and feet connected to the Earth, innocence and wisdom wrapped around you.

As much as I’m untangling, there’s a simultaneous reweaving alongside.

It’s peaceful, beautiful summer nights. Berry-stained cheeks that won’t last forever. Sweet little voices that watch over plants, and lips that purse to hide the smirk when they receive praise.

It’s true delight to be kiwi.

My deeper dive in to what The Secret Garden has meant to me.

There are so many things I wish I didn’t have to see.

I live in and near another city that was built on timber. I watch thousands of whole trees enter the log yard to be turned in a matter of days to mulch and 2x4s. I feel the trees of our town stand sentinel over the lumberyard for those that were taken from their forest home.

Foster Farms is 20 minutes up the road. Chicken trucks are stuffed full of white birds who cannot stand, and it’s clear that even while we are traveling 70 mph down the freeway two lanes over, these chickens are unwell as they head to slaughter.

We send prayers every time we see them, though I can’t stand to look. These prayers are for the chickens as much as they are for humanity.

When I was a young girl, I cried more easily for deforestation than human atrocity. I felt devastation for the Amazon. Bereft for the loss of entire species and their homes. No one paused with me in these places. Nobody else was crying at picture books about animals in public school libraries. I felt early that we cannot escape the truth of ecocide at the hands of humans.

We stand atop a hierarchy of our own making, convinced we exist above rather than within the living world. This grandiose self-inflation of our importance, emphasized in patriarchal lands by religious ideals, made me feel shame that my tears flowed more for those without voices.

I wasn’t born ashamed of loving the world this deeply. I inherited it from a culture that misinterprets attachment as sentimentality and reverence as irrationality. We all have inherited ways in which to see past life instead of in to it.

Humans are conditioned to extract. We do this in all relationships, but I believe we do this most with nature. I watch the men fish in our local rivers. I am threatened when I tell one to respect the resource he fishes from when I watch him throwing his cigarette butts into her waters while hoping to pull out salmon.

I have come to understand that challenging extraction, whether of rivers, forests, women’s bodies, or animals, is often met with hostility. Material is necessary for our survival, but the relationship of taking and harm knows no bounds when it comes to the entitlement of humanity.

Though it may be rare, I know I am not alone in my urge for stewardship over extraction.

There’s a remarkable story about a mated pair of storks whose lives were deeply entwined with the help of a man.1 Reading this story was the moment where I let go of trying to lessen how much I feel for our more-than-human kin. The love story of two storks is beautiful, but the faithfulness of the human who makes it so breaks my heart in the best of ways.

The devotion makes me ache. Klepetan returning to Malena, who cannot fly or make the migration, year after year, is heartening. Raising over 60 offspring together wouldn’t have happened if Stjepan Vokić hadn’t rescued Malena after she was shot and left injured by hunters. He devoted himself to caring for her throughout her long life so she could continue to live and love.

There is something honest and true about being with, seeing, and stewarding our kinship with the natural world. I have spent three decades believing my grief for the more-than-human world was misplaced. That crying for forests, birds, rivers, or bees somehow meant I loved humanity less. But grief is simply the measure of kinship. I am tired of feeling like I need to apologize for belonging to a living world that I am wildly in love with.

I am tired of feeling silly for the great grief that catches me watching honey bees, panic-stricken, trying to get back to their colony while the truck whips down Interstate 5 and they are thrown from it by the wind. I see and feel them torn from their hive, circling empty air where their home had been only moments before. I wonder how long they will follow the truck, how far it will go.

People tell us not to anthropomorphize, like it’s a grave mistake to believe anything other than human beings exist without purpose that extends to a consciousness of belonging. The greater mistake is believing that disorientation, longing, and the instinct to return home belong only to us.

When humanity lives without its roots and humans have no connection to the land, it’s easy to see how we develop a cold, callous, and unfeeling orientation to the natural world. Extraction is easy when there is no interconnection.

To extract requires a particular way of seeing. Or maybe it’s more an act of not seeing that has led us down the path of not feeling the connection we have to life. Before the trees are lumber, they are the forest. The forest is bursting with aliveness and interrelationship. Can you feel it if you don’t see it?

I cannot clear-cut a forest if I experience it as kin.

I cannot throw garbage in a river if I believe she is alive.

I cannot reduce a chicken to a product if I remain in relationship with her suffering.

Detachment is not an accident of our culture. It is the condition that makes extraction possible. If I no longer experience the bee as part of a living community, I can experience it only as an agricultural necessity.

If I no longer see the devotion of the storks to their mates, I can more easily divorce myself from devotion to our more-than-human kin.

One of our greatest tragedies is the split we have from our reality of belonging to the entirety of the world. We have homes, but we are completely misplaced.

The eco-grief is not the problem.

It might be one of the last honest expressions of our belonging.

What kind of culture teaches us to feel ashamed of that?

These are the hands I want on my womb.

Soil in nail beds, mycorrhizae feeding the roots of the heart. Those are hands that know the Earth. That know love and kinship. Practiced palpation and listening.

Hands marked by seasons. By life, by death.

Those with evidence she’s been in contact with Her. Organic versus synthetic. Fingers that have woven with mycelial webs in soil, that now weave within the mycelial tapestry of my own organism, the fascia of my body.

Hands are the emissaries of our heart. Our love moves outward from the arms, spilling from the hands and fingers, and back again through invisible cords of connection. Hands link to the jewel that lives in the chest, right between our breasts. What we exchange through the hands enters and leaves the sacred chamber that houses our love.

I want fingers on my womb that have built the tactile sensitivity to feel a pulse. Hands that can reach deep and hold enough pressure to pull up buried tap roots, dismantle a root ball, and lovingly tuck small life clinging back to safety.

Hands that have been in soil lead to a heart that knows what is excavated will also ask for stewardship.

I want hands on my womb that know the gardener is changed by the garden. The Earth occupies more of the body of those who tend her. Knowing becomes intimate with the different textures of life. Her hands learn to recognize what is thriving, what is waiting, what is wounded, what wants to move, or emerge. Sensitivity to what is alive, and what is hidden in the dark, sharpens through touch and observation.

The body, too, is a living landscape.

Bone, tendon, sinew, and fascia form rivers of connection carrying the stories of a lifetime. The same intelligence that weaves fungal threads through forest soil weaves pathways of relationship through our own tissues.

What we touch becomes part of us.

Hands can take us apart and knit us back together. Its how we touch and can be touched.

Hands meant for healing know the songlines of Mother bodies.

These are the ones I want on my womb.

Her hands that remember they belong to the same Earth that made me.

Local women can now schedule The Restorative Feminine session with me. Two hours of body work (womb/belly + face) + 5 days of integration followup via whatsapp. Structural and energetic balancing for biological or creative birth. Contact me directly for scheduling.

They kept alive the record of the feminine never meant to be morally flat, endlessly pleasing, or consumable.

There were grandmothers who stood closer to the old goddesses who descended, grieved, destroyed, protected, wandered, raged, resurrected, and ruled. Without these women in our lineage who carried fragments of that wildness, we might still believe motherhood means silence, self-erasure, and goodness at the cost of aliveness.

But heaven on earth has never been built by the too-good mother alone.
It is also built by the wolf mother.

The mother willing to descend into hell to protect what she loves.

We don’t sanctify the harm. We honor the wild feminine that survived despite it. We thank them for keeping threads alive in a world that is incredibly difficult for women to exist within.

It is easy to love the endlessly pleasant, self-erasing woman while fearing feminine instinct, rage, grief, and sovereignty.

But women, even mothers, have always been complex. At least in the old myths and archetypal patterns, we were fed the truth of their ambiguity as a powerful paradox that was protective.

Kali fiercely destroys illusion and is loved for being a compassionate and protective mother at the same time.

The sovereign Artemis safeguards the people and the wild with strictness, not niceness.

Mother was never only a source of nourishment, but the exile of feminine power and the loss of initiation into mature feminine leadership led to the unconscious expression of the wound.

What we suppress becomes distortion. We see the mother’s sacred rage shift into volatility. Untended grief becomes deep depression. Stolen sovereignty shifts into control. Disconnection, jealousy, and shame spiral into the story. The shift from being the one who can hold, to the one needing the holding and safe places.

Mothers had always been the safe place, but polarity teachings can distort women into believing they need the masculine to provide the holding for their opening, causing them to lose the sovereignty the Great Mother was emblematic of.

A society terrified of feminine ambiguity will always prefer women disconnected from instinct because instinctive women disrupt systems of extraction and power.

I have been revisiting the tenacity of my grandmothers in the week leading to Mother’s Day. I am proud to say that, as a woman of 37 years, I can hold both my woman and inner child in conscious awareness within the duality of mother wounds.

These were women of grit that millennials like myself and younger generations will never fully comprehend. Our time is certainly full of its own hardships, and one day, I hope my grandchildren look back at the world I was navigating, the inheritance of thousands of years of exile, and the fragments of coal I was born with, and inherit the most refined diamond I was capable of crafting.

I hope they recognize I was remembering the feminine in the best way I knew how.

In honor of Mother’s Day this year I wrote how I renegotiated my relationship with the mother wound. You can read how the Secret Garden was part of that process.

I share about what dreaming and mothering means to the world in this article.

I write about the original mother and how she followed me throughout 2025. This story has some uncanny moments that surprise.

My lament on being a good mother and how stale it became.

This was one of my favorite things I have written about— my memory of my grandmother. It isn’t sweet and fuzzy. But it now makes me feel those ways, because the story is mine.

The state of living from what was lost or never had and longing for the imperfect humans in our lives leaves us aching for something in the present that won’t change the past. The point is not to heal, but to reconnect to the love that exists everywhere. We open to life, devote ourselves to it, and let that change us. Opening the door is opening the heart.

“And then she took a long breath and looked behind her up the long walk to see if anyone was coming. No one was coming. No one ever did come, it seemed, and she took another long breath, because she could not help it, and she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly—slowly.

Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, wonder, and delight.

She was standing inside the secret garden.”

The Secret Garden— Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The mother wound is a gaping chasm, massive as the great womb of the black hole we descend from.

A teacher of mine, Seren Bertrand, speaks on the mother wound like no other woman I know. She tells us the mother wound is too vast for us to heal it in a lifetime. I believe her. I am done trying after 37 years. I recognize all the trying would mean a lifetime of looking at my wounds rather than my magic.

The mother wound is the ache of not being seen by our own mothers, of being unmet, neglected in ways both subtle and overt. We are often chasing down the thing that makes us worthy, good enough. We perform or we can harden. Sometimes both.

The healing of wounds is costly on our energetic capacity and nourishment. But the Secret Garden speaks of a different orientation, when something is too big and painful to ever be made okay.

There is both magic and mother inside of each of us. The existence of these twin realms of mother magic can be accessed when we open a ‘hidden’ doorway. It is not the search through the mind that grants us access. The doorway is revealed through sensation and feeling. It is in the body. The coastal fret carrying sea mist kisses your face, the sweet calls from the robin that delight your ears and your heart, connect to the same living force inside you.

This is the other way of experiencing belonging even with our hurts. What we find there is not separate from the world. It is the same current, moving through all things.

The magic of this world—the force that birthed everything and gives form to life—is a mother.

We access her creative giving power inside the secret gardens of our lives. She is alive in the elementals and expresses in infinite ways. Touching nature is touching Her.

And in that intentional contact, something in us responds. The same current that animates the earth animates us, and the doorway opens in that recognition. We are not gaining access. We are saying yes to a relationship that transforms us. The doorway does not lead inward alone, but into a wider field we already belong to.

THE SECRET GARDEN, BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

I had this same edition of the book in my preteen years. I remembered it when I saw it again. Up until that point, I had completely forgotten it. At the sight of the cover, body memory returned. Grief and longing caught in my heart. It was thrown out in a fit of teenage rage alongside everything else that kept me company and gave me hope in youth.

It came back to me 20 years later, completely uncanny. Physiology and the psyche are the skeleton key to the mystery locked beyond the doors of the Secret Garden. We enter this relationship with the Mother through the body, not the mind.

“It was the lock of the door which has been closed 10 years and she put her hand in her pocket, drew out the key, and found it fitted the hole.” FHB, The Secret Garden

A hundred unseen spiders skim the surface of my skin, raising the hairs on my body when I read these lines. A slide of tears, wet and hot. Now I remember, sketched doorways with an arch, hours spent covering the wall of the garden with ivy. Was this when I first encountered the rose? Perhaps I was already tracing the edges of the doorway then, drawing a place I knew existed, even before I knew how to return to it.

The body remembers the way back.

I saw myself in the contrary Mary when I was young. The lonely Mary. Forgotten Mary. The one left behind. I dreamed of a sanctuary like hers I could call upon. But no one ever told me this magic was real. As I grew, this became fantasy versus reality.

The place we seek, the one that loves us abundantly, feels like another world. A place a contrary girl could exist without needing to be anything but herself.

This story and idea has made several appearances in my life since spring of 2024. Right after the first presence, I read this essay from and it brought up many findings in the garden.

Here’s a snippet of what I wrote then.

“This post reminded me that in the Secret Garden she is tended to by the Mother. When her heart is hardened, never mothered by her own mother, then she returns to the Earth Mother for her nourishment. Now it makes sense why I was torn by this book as a girl. I subconsciously knew that we all have to be a daughter of the Earth, a little wild, not always strictly ‘safe,’ but always loved and welcomed to be part of life’s seasons and unfolding.”

I still believe those things. Now, I feel the connection in my heart between this as an idea and a breathing, living reality. The trees hold answers to the mysteries of the heart, and they will answer you if you ask them.

The garden is the metaphor for the internal blossoming for Mary. She’s left motherless and is learning the task, the initiation, of mothering herself. Not only does self-mothering take shape when she sets herself determined, but she receives the belonging she has never had when she tends and becomes tended by those guides she meets along her journey.

She is not alone even though it’s self-discovery she finds. Magical allies lead her along the way. There is the robin, a non-human companion that softens her heart. Old Ben Weatherstaff occupies the role of wise, grumpy mentor and ally to the children and the garden. And of course Dickon, the Pan-like child, who awakens the wild heart of Mary. He is otherworldly in his manner and brings the magic of nature alive in Mary and Colin.

Human and non-human are the ones that usher Mary back into the web of life.

Through mentorship and devotion to the garden Mary is transformed physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She’s reclaimed by the Great Mother when she returns to her ancestral lands. Her spirit is revived by the moor—the plants, animals, sunshine, and even as a “wild, dreary enough place,” Mary is fully changed. It is her devotion— the tending and returning, the opening and the connecting— that transform her. Each return is a stepping through the doorway again. Not once, but over and over, until the garden is no longer separate from her, and she is no longer living outside of it. Not analysis, not healing work, but letting herself love and be loved by birds and blossoms.

Bringing the garden to life

Inside the Secret Garden it becomes less about the wounds and more about the magic. The wounding doesn’t pop out of existence because healing happens in the garden.

The power of the garden is to infuse us little by little with the light of the divine love that birthed the universe. Mother is alive in nature, reaching tendrils of love toward us with every crow that catches our eye, blade of grass that is stuck to dew-moistened feet, and cloud whose raindrops bring the scent of the earth alive after stretches of long, sunny days.

The secret garden is a place we know in the body. It is a return to the origin. The same animating force in us is in every living thing on earth.

In unlocking our heart to the land we remember at a cellular level the belonging that exists between ourselves and the mother magic alive in everything.

The land is a mother that feeds us across body, mind, spirit. Because of land, cosmic, ancestral, and earth mothers—we can find the blessings that become a balm to the human mothers shortcomings.

“But she was inside the wonderful garden and she could come through the door under the ivy any time and she felt as if she had found a world all her own.”

FHB, The Secret Garden

I pass snow white tufts of bunny fluff, life taken by car or coyote. The Sun warms my back, footsteps and crows the only audible noise accompanying me downhill. I decide to check in on the Starling nest we know of, hidden in a rotted post. We heard their chorus cries for food last week, and captured this picture. Hungry mouths awaiting their mother’s return.

The nest is silent 7 days later. It’s dark down in the post, and the small, almost kitten-like cries don’t rise from below.

I return to the orchard and stand beneath the youngest and smallest of the apple trees. Some of the blossoms are eye level, and I stare into the hypanthium. Small bumble bees, and massive ones too, flit from one pale pink flower to another.

A line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream pops into my mind.

“How low am I, thou painted maypole?”1

I have spent the last six weeks producing this show with young teens, the last two weeks inside the theater, hearing Shakespeare’s coded language over and over. The words take on new meaning the more I hear it.

William Shakespeare, the man who made 1,700 words we use today. But in truth, Shakespeare was likely not a single man. The name Shakespeare relating to the Spear Shakers, connected to the pseudonym of Pallas Athena.

Pallas Athena was the ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, handicrafts and the arts, falling under this umbrella. A virgin goddess depicted with helmet and spear. The name William Shakespeare is translated to mean, “helmet of the spear shaker.”

Research suggests that females are the drivers of language and its evolution. It is the ‘mother tongue’ that passes onto children.

Another unmistakable clue that the feminine was guiding the works of the notable Shakespeare was the verse it’s written in. Shakespeare’s plays are famous for the pattern speech of Iambic Pentameter among others. Rhythmic speech is capable of producing states of altered consciousness, similar to shamanic drums. Patterned speech identified the oracles throughout history. The burial of Macbeth and the prophetic language of the witches inside the Scottish play connect us to the oracle of Iona, once as famous as Delphi.

It is all but certain that the writers who wrote under the pseudonym of Shakespeare, who invented language and incorporated patterned speech, included women.

Five hundred years celebrating a fictional man and the deep feminine wisdom of the work is a shadow when it should stand as the main event.

I watch beautiful young women flit across the stage as fairies, unaware of the true meaning of the language, or the wisdom they are speaking.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest becomes a living, feminine force that disrupts patriarchal control, where women like Hermia and Titania embody wisdom aligned with nature. They are ‘acting out’ in ways completely against their time.

Something that goes unnoticed is the harmony that is restored not through authority, but through attunement to the rhythms of the living world and the feminine intelligence that moves within it.

And so I wonder under the apple tree on an early Beltane morning, is it the performance or the transmission that changes something in us?

Does the patterned speech of the oracle become the spell that wakes us again to the wild and natural laws we are bound by?

Art can be performed, but it can also be embodied.

If these young women read the lines of the maypole and danced in a celebration, would that change them more than performing it?

Out of the cerebral, back into the body, is where we must take young women.

The origin of wisdom is to see and to know. It is not the performance of words that shifts something inside us, but the ‘weid’—to truly see. We are in an era calling patterned speech back into the body.

Make today an opportunity to feel the truth of the innocent, wild feminine alive within, rather than perform it.

But I do care deeply about the organic vs. the synthetic.

The synthetic is often close enough. It solves a disconnection problem, and that is why it can feel convincing, functional, and even praised. But we trade the seeming simplicity of a convenient counterpart for the ease and the transformation awaiting us inside truth.

It’s why synthetic oxytocin wasn’t attractive to me when the real thing could emerge through a physiological birth process.

Birth control was a turn-off because it didn’t make sense to stop my body from experiencing her bleeds and the hormone matrix I was born with.

And when I discovered the astrology I was told to orient to wasn’t what was actually happening in the true sky, I felt the same as I did with synthetic hormones.

What happens when we live outside the present moment, attuning ourselves to something that is close, but isn’t real?

Disembodiment.

We can still feel something. We can still create meaning. But there is always a trade-off in the synthetic, even if it takes generations to discover it.

We know that disconnection from the Earth is a disconnection from the body and the timing that is actually ours.

We can choose any fairy tale to believe in. All myths can make sense in some way.

I am less and less available for trades that ask me to abandon what is organic,
in exchange for something that only imitates it. A convenience built on the linear logic of a 30-degree Zodiac fixed to 2,000-year-old positioning, rather than the sun and stars I live under today.

Mothering has taught me that I need to be available to the present—what is alive, in real time. I cannot worry about the future, nor dwell in the past.

My resourcing as a woman comes from my connection to the Great Mother in her current form and consciousness, moving me forward in this lifetime. It is my direct connection to the truth of what is, right now.

Today, if I look at the sky, there are not 7 planets in Aries. Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Neptune, and the Sun are Pisces as I write. The influence of the cosmic realm in this moment is asking me to be with the heart of the Great Mother, held by the waters of her loving womb.

I could make meaning of Aries energy in my world today. I could force or trick myself into feeling something I might not. Or I could lean into the ease of what is present within me and in the current moment of the cosmos.

A true-sky astrologer built a cosmic calendar for the 9-month birth journey of Mothercraft. If you are interested in conceiving your longing, gestating, and birthing in alignment with the stars and the Earth Mother, you can join the Matriarchs honing birth as culture-makers and creators of inheritance for their families.

MOTHERCRAFT

I am heavy into my thoughts and research on desire. Maybe that’s the first problem. I’m researching desire. Why don’t I know it clearly?

I come across Appetites, a brilliant book written almost 25 years ago by Caroline Knapp. Her commentary on cottage cheese is for the future. I imagine a seemingly casual statement about the reputation of this diet food from the 80s now reads like a warning for 2026. I am sure Caroline would have something to say about it. After her eating disorder’s roots that lay in relationship to women’s wants, I imagine she would be appalled to see its facelift and elevation.

Cottage cheese was seen as diet food in the 80s. For women who wanted to slim down, it was a holy grail substance. It was the symbol highlighting the limited appetite women were allowed or could express 40 years ago. Today, the food has become a staple for how much we love ourselves, that we eat for growth—because protein—mothers especially need the nourishment.

Sometimes I am concerned that our obsession with nutrient density and food quality is just another kind of eating disorder. A way to demonize that “bad” food the same way we do our “sins,” like hunger or pleasure.

It is interesting how culture rarely tells women not to eat anymore. It simply changed the rules for what is acceptable to consume. The control never leaves; it just becomes more sophisticated, more disguised as empowerment, health, optimization, longevity. The good girl of the 80s ate cottage cheese to be slim. The good girl of today tracks protein, balances glucose, and optimizes her metabolism. The same pattern at play.

Enough cottage cheese. It still kinda sucks whether it is the good girl of diet culture or the Queen of your macros.

Perhaps it’s time we see that cottage cheese is still just a food prison we’re locked in for different, but ultimately the same, reasons?

Or…does our need for nourishment, building, and growth take precedence, and does our obsession with hitting those goals mean our appetite is growing?

I might believe the latter if I wasn’t reading the greater patterns.

Just as lumpy cheese mirrors the depth of a woman’s hunger, the newest good girl of our diet culture, in the name of health, can come along to permanently alter your hunger just as cottage cheese was signaling decades ago.

Ozempic culture is reflective of the collective’s appetite. It’s the perfect analogy reflecting the hunger we’re allowed to want for our life. Not coincidentally, Ozempic research is showing it actually does inhibit or lower desire. A quick Google search yields its effect on the dopamine release centers in the brain, which “mute cravings and pleasure, sometimes causing apathy or reduced motivation for previously enjoyed activities.”

Translation: kills creative life force energy.

What Caroline was urging us to remember is that appetite is not just about food. Appetite is about life. The same force that makes us hungry for food makes us hungry for love, beauty, sex, children, art, meaning, God, experience. Appetite is the engine of becoming. To dull appetite is not just to eat less. It is to want less, to reach less, to risk less, to create less.

When cottage cheese isn’t enough to dull the palate, we have a drug for intrinsic physiological dampening to lessen our hunger across mind, body, and spirit.

This is why this conversation matters beyond weight, beyond health, beyond food. Appetite becomes desire, desire becomes birth, birth is creation. Not just of children, but of art, homes, families, communities, culture itself. When you suppress appetite, you don’t just change bodies; you are setting the bar on how hungry you can be. Less appetite simply means less creative energy, less change. Existing on crumbs makes a sad, beige world.

Ozempic thrives when humans are conditioned more and more to want things fast without the depth of experience of transformation. This is beyond the desire for thinness; it speaks directly to the human condition as it is right now.

We want the result without the process. The body without the hunger. The success without the risk. The transformation without the dismantling. But nature does not work this way. Birth does not work this way. Creation does not work this way. Nothing that makes a life works in this way.

I am having regular conversations with my children on the value of process and how much it adds to our lives. Who are we without our experiences and the hunger that leads us to them?

I am watching the world put aesthetics on pedestals without substance. I see the preference for biohacks over actual, authentic relationships with the sources of our healing and becoming. The world relies on program promises versus the transformation that awaits us when we say yes to the soul longings of pleasure.

True desire is going to dismantle you.

Desire rearranges your life. It’s a state that summons your greatest bravery. You leave what is comfortable. You create what does not yet exist. Desire is the beginning of every birth—every idea, every child, every home, every piece of art, every new version of yourself.

It will take you on a journey, and in doing so, your world is going to be restructured into something beyond the emptiness and thinness that our Ozempic-crazed culture wants for you.

I get more likes and comments on posts about lavender lattes than I do about desire. Is it that inaccessible?

I want my lavender honey lattes.

I DESIRE the aliveness that is only accompanied by the terror that wakes me up at night with insistent whispers of what really matters: Soul longing. My hunger haunts me in my dreams.

What I really want isn’t an aesthetic. It is not neat. It is not optimized. It is not efficient. It is wild and inconvenient and time-consuming and sometimes painful and always transformative. Which is exactly why a culture obsessed with convenience, speed, and control does not know what to do with it.

This is especially devastating for women who account for 70–75% of Ozempic users. Our desire is the origin from which everything gets created. Now it seems there is a weapon that can precisely target our life force and reduce our already shrunken allowable capacity to be the hungry creator beings we were designed to be.

A world that teaches women to suppress their hunger will eventually teach them to suppress their desire. And a world where women stop desiring is a world where fewer things are born.

The cost of your hunger may be dismemberment, but the payment is your aliveness.

Stay open to the callings of the soul, protect your life force at all costs. It’s the target as it always has been.

Your innocence is your desire, is the holy grail.

Appetite has always been dangerous, because its the hunger of the soul that leads us to create.

The soul isn’t seeking thinness.

She’s fucking starving.

Are you going to feed her?

Join a 10 moon journey birthing desire inside Mothercraft.

And sometimes, something preternatural can happen in the middle of something completely routine. This story makes me wonder how often both are actually present, invisible in our physically oriented world.

Why should we care about the simultaneous routine and remarkable nature of birth? This experience I witnessed honors the simplicity of the birth design and its magical signature. Everyone should hear these stories of birth’s wisdom and the threads being pulled just beyond the unseen.

When we can hold birth in a spectrum of opposites, natural and profound, the world will be reshaped accordingly. When we understand what birth really is, we understand why it must be protected.

A third child, first home birth story

I receive another message in the late afternoon: contractions have started again. Almost two weeks of wondering, maybe today? It’s getting closer to the dreaded 42-week cutoff date, and she is ready to move things along. I suggest a couple of things to balance the body and support engagement. She’s going to make dinner and try them. The next message I receive is that contractions have picked up, shortly followed by, “My water just broke.”

I enter the home a few minutes after 8 pm. Her husband meets me at the door to tell me she’s in the tub. Contractions are regular enough she only has time to tell me that her youngest daughter puked up dinner. Her husband is busy throwing out the vomit-soaked rug and setting up the birth pool. The student midwife arrives shortly after I do. She’s fussing with her stuff and directing the husband with pool instructions. Contractions are too consistent to worry about the pool, and I tell her husband, “I don’t think we have time for this.” The second midwife arrives about 8:45 pm and encourages her husband to keep going.

I wait with her by her tiny guest tub and can tell she’s ready to move. Her legs “need to stretch.” We make it the 25 feet from the guest bath to the kitchen, where the birth pool is still in the process of being blown up, still a dry, crinkly desert of plastic at the bottom. The only sound in the room is that of the air pump and her husband’s hurried steps to bring the hose into the house. The pool is sturdy enough to lean on, and she grabs my hand, using both for support. I tell her husband to stop and join us; their baby will be here soon. The kitchen stool goes under one foot and her legs begin to tremble. Within minutes, she is on all fours on the wooden kitchen floor while the hose trickles water to fill the abandoned birth tub.

Birth was never going to happen in the pool. It was destined to happen right there, in the middle of the house, in the middle of their life.

We both sit as anchors near her head. Transition is quick and she’s pushing within a few breaths. Everything is unfolding so simply, so perfectly. But in this moment something shifts inside the room and I feel it in my gut. It rises swift and overtakes me. She stands up onto her knees and roars her baby out within a few pushes. He is healthy and well. They make it to the couch where a cozy fire is built to warm her while I make her a cup of tea.

I am feeling more ill by the minute. Her baby latches, and by 11 pm I am on my way home. They are tucked in and ready for rest. I drive the 30 minutes back home dizzy and nauseous. I tell my husband when I crawl into bed how off I’ve felt since the shift in the birth atmosphere.

The afterbirth dream

I fall asleep shivering, like my world is spinning. At this point, I think I am sick. My whole system is experiencing these sensations for seemingly no reason. I fall asleep fitfully, and by 1:30 am I am woken by a dream. Within it, the mother is holding her baby in the kitchen she just birthed in when she suddenly hemorrhages. I recognize that it is about to happen, and I turn my back as the blood misses my face and coats the lunar side of my body instead.

I don’t expect my following interpretation or felt sense of what I experienced to be the conclusion that many people would come to. And, the evidence that exists in our myths and ancient practices, make sense of the dream and the journey that followed.

I wake up fearful but less ill. I breathe into the darkness, trying to find truth. I wonder for a moment, do I need to check in and warn her husband about my dream? The response was swift and quiet — she was in no danger. This was an energetic hemorrhage.

I check in the next morning anyway. What if I am wrong? The physical sensation was so strong, maybe it’s a warning. I knew she and her baby were okay, but something else had happened during that birth, and the dream was confirmation of it. Did I want to believe, or would I choose to believe, that the unseen made itself known to me in her birth space?

The experience was too visceral for me to ignore. With an energetic hemorrhage that showered the back of my body, I felt like I needed more support. I reached out to a shamanic practitioner I had worked with in the past for guidance in case of attachment.

Before we spoke, I had the sense that there was something released from the body during that birth. The timing, so specific to her transition, marked a shift not only in her birth but how I felt when it shifted. Her power thrummed, overwhelming the space with sound and instinct. Whether we name this as energy or entity, what matters is this: something was released, and it did not belong only to the physical body.

She was too strong a force for whatever was there to stay any longer. I felt the movement when something was pushed from her that wasn’t in physical matter. Deeper into the journey I took later, the energy I saw was black-cloaked darkness removed from around my head and pulled up into a black hole like a cosmic womb.

The journey didn’t end with the removal of it. I then saw myself atop a crocodile-type being, on a river, riding to a temple in Egypt. The synchronicity of the figures I saw in the journey, align to the ancient beliefs of Egypt, and the protectors of women’s spaces and the death and rebirth mysteries, the feminine domain.

I am first reminded of this vaguely familiar Egyptian deity Ammit at this point, a crocodile hybrid of ancient Egypt associated with Ma’at. Ammit resides in the underworld as the devourer of the dead, or eater of hearts. My interpretation of her role isn’t as a punishment or something to fear, but a role of purification and return to wholeness in the womb of the Earth. Whatever we died with that was heavy in our hearts was digested by Ammit, not for destruction, but to lighten our heart in order for rebirth. Curious that this crocodile hybrid could be digesting what we shed in our rebirths. I believe biological birth is always a shedding, mystical rebirth for women.

The unknown Goddess similar to Ammit, known as Taweret, with a crocodile tail, hippo body, and lion paws, overlooks mothers and childbirth I came to find out. Both of these goddesses could have been witness to experiences like these, reminding me birth is a liminal event where physical, emotional, ancestral, and mythic worlds all touch at the same time.

This journey made clear the role of why our ancestors had rituals, goddesses, and ceremony to safeguard and preserve their threshold spaces. Experiences like this are not new. They are not mine alone. They are part of a long human understanding that birth slides back the veil of the non-ordinary.

Across cultures, birth was never treated as only physical. There were always guardians, devourers, protectors, and rituals for death, birth, and rebirth. This didn’t exist because our ancestors were primitive and trying to make sense of the unseen, but because they understood birth opens a doorway into something more than our physical reality.

A teacher of mine told me, “It shares a wall with both life and death.” Our ancestors protected and honored birth because of this. In the Slavic tradition, the mother would craft a special doll known as a Pelenashka as protection for her unborn child. The dolls and the amulets were used to ward off disease, spirits, and protect the child throughout early childhood. All cultures took care to honor the placenta of the child. In some cultures, if the placenta was not buried into the earth, the child’s energy body — the spiritual double of the child known as the KA in Egypt — would not be as vital. The postpartum confinement period is intentionally designed to protect the physical and the energetic field of the mother and new baby.

The field is open during birth and postpartum. Protection was so important not only because death is a possibility; we understood that the invisible worlds are easier to touch. What comes in can leave, in more ways than one.

Like so much of our human experience, very earthy and otherwordly, at the same time.

Whether your birth is held by the comfort of the familiar home, or the contrast of the hospital bed, it is both everyday and extraordinary.

It is the most ordinary miracle humans participate in, and because birth is powerful physically, emotionally, ancestrally, and spiritually, it has been managed, controlled, and industrialized. When we acknowledge and make space for the potential that birth holds on the spectrum of life, we can choose to protect it so other forces don’t try to control it.

I wonder what otherwordly stories you have of birth?

This experience inspires me to return the protection rights back into birth spaces more fiercely.

Although those who are attending births can be affected by the energies present, it is equally important to remember who we invite into our birth space, and the energy they are bringing in.

Be intentional in the clearing and preparation for birth. But don’t fear it.

Additional musings I have on birth

I have been sharing field notes from the lands of dreaming and longing inside the private telegram group, DESIRE.

It is all leading to this moment when the light seeds the womb. When the Earth opens to receive, and we are influenced by the same cosmic dance of Earth and Sun, preparing to conceive, gestate, and birth ourselves again.

This is for the woman who wants to birth in generative cycles that nourish and feed the feminine soul.

What we conceive right now will be formed over the next 10 moons with conscious intention to each phase of innate feminine rhythms, supported by nature.

This is what I am calling MotherCraft — the feminine art of consciously conceiving, gestating, and birthing life in rhythm with the cycles of Earth, body, and soul.

Desire as our origin, cosmically supported right now, who will be our initiator into the spiral of birth.

You can listen to the audio, use the practices below, or create your own to connect to the energies of this particular solar season if you like.

MotherCraft is open to women ready to walk alongside other Matriarchs — women who understand birth as a profound initiation, a force of personal transformation, and the creative power through which culture itself is shaped.

Learn more

If you listened to the audio and wish to plant your own seeds for this year, here is a could do list for inspiration.

Read more

Last night was full of big revelations. I want to share them all with you, but I am not sure which one comes first. I am deciding, in real time, as I write.

I am settling on this statement:

I believe in women’s power.

Because of this, I am not hopeless.

It was one of those moments of, “of course—duh. How hasn’t this been more obvious?”

I think the most important and honest thing I can share today is that I don’t feel stuck in despair. I am not drunk on rage. I am not collapsed in fear or grief.

I am not saying the way I feel is right or wrong. It simply exists. And I know this is why:

I have things that I have to get done regardless of what is true or isn’t in the external world. That feels like what is most sustaining to me—my own personal list of things that are mine, regardless of anything else. That is a power that feels unshakeable at times.

There is something alive in me. That needs to be said. Must be felt and shared. I have to experience these things because they belong to me in some way, even if they haven’t yet been birthed.

And I believe in my power to do it.
And in yours.

Hopeless means there is nothing left to be done. I know that simply couldn’t be further from the truth. It has been leading me here.

My accountability to my heart’s desire and devotion is my greatest responsibility.

I’ve been quietly tending these realms of death and rebirth, studying under ancient lineage holders, tending the inner and outer structures of the feminine, and walking deeper into the birth mysteries.

Throughout this time, I have come to the conclusion that midwifing is the responsibility of every woman.

Fear of this responsibility lives inside us. The loss of our birth maps, feminine authority, and innocence that has been turned into inversion.

But deep down, at a cellular level—inside the mitochondria that has been carried for aeons from mother to daughter—is the mysterious thread of the motherline. Her origins lie in the great oceanic mother, carried from the original waters of Earth, our amniotic waters her micro mimic.

She’s making her comeback. Like a beacon shining brightly, pulsating in wombs across timelines, she beckons us back to a lighthouse of feminine power.

I’ve felt and seen her early signals—sparks of energy that will eventually burn brighter and hotter, restoring women’s vitality.

The path to restoration of the feminine is back into the primeval forest and primordial waters. It is through reconnection to the elements and nature. As women sink deeper back into our natural states, weaving with sky and soil, we will be deeply resourced for our creative works.

We will be funded by the long line of mitochondrial mothers from the deep.

I’ve been dreaming up this pathway back to birth as a woman’s natural, seasonal state as Mother. A birth terrain that is generative and not depleting. Birth held by lineage and physiological truth.

If a woman can sustain the role of creatrix, she has to be in connection to the raw materials that create the world she lives in. She must become more fluent in the language of nature. Listening and feeling the changing rhythms of the stars and what hums in the soil beneath us.

This is as much a personal gift as it is offering. It is my devotion to building my bandwidth to keep birthing love into the world, when it needs it most.

MotherCraft is what happens when women remember that tending life, shaping culture, and midwifing the future has always been our inheritance.

MotherCraft is open now. Signing up before 4/1/26 enters you into the three week private Telegram space, DESIRE—origin of feminine birth templates. In April, the 10 moon journey with sky and earth, the body, and birth energies begins in earnest with conception and Aries energy.

HONE THE CRAFT

But over the years, I began to see that birth is much larger than that. It is a cycle that is inextricable to a woman’s life and ultimately, the well-being of the world. Birth is a resource that funds. It is generative necessary cycle that doesn’t receive the respect its due. Sadly, many of us have forgotten how to move within it once the baby is born. We forget the original state of how we conceive.

When women don’t consciously engage with the birth terrain, biologically or creatively, culture destabilizes.

I have believed this whole-heartedly since I stepped into the birth world over a decade ago. In my intimate circles, birth is becoming more domestic and more mystical. It exists on a plane of duality, like all of female experience, simply natural and wildly mysterious.

I have been honored to support families in moving out of the man-made and medicalized. As I followed women into their postpartums, mothered, and home educated my children alongside them, I have been witness to a larger pattern of women’s longings, the tide that they flow in on, and the tide that washes them back out to distant shores.

Instinct and desire that were strong enough to counter 98% of reproductive culture, sovereignty to birth in their truth and honor, are usually gone after biological birth season ends. Instinct and desire are not part of our day-to-day when we are raising babies.

So many women are burnt out. The dry woman is how I imagine her. The realities of living and everything we swim against are sure to wash us up onto a familiar shore, because swimming against the tide is sheer exhaustion. The comfort of what we know, the sense of belonging that it brings, makes it an understandable solution to just stay on the known coastlines.

Let the seal skins dry up for a while.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of costs to dehydrating and being parched, and we’re living in them. And though the current of our man-made schedules isn’t made for our feminine sails, there is a lifeboat that has been waiting for us in this moment to remember:

It lives in the natural cycles of nature, alive in our bodies.

If you are serious about the great mother, matriarchy, the feminine mysteries, and womb work, then the next thing to mistress is the world-building capacity of feminine alchemy, because the womb does not only birth children.

The womb births realities. She births desires, family, homes, community, art, love, grief into gold, and abundant wealth.

The womb births the woman you are and who you were always meant to be.

What a time to be alive when we now openly talk about the messy realities of birth. You can watch babies be born in blood and feminine waters with your feet propped on the sofa, resting on the couch.

There are now spaces that uphold the integrity of birth, and their popularity increases regularly. How incredible to hold a broader view of the womb’s inherent power to be used for birthing children and more. We have accessibility to talk openly, find mentors, and center our womb if we choose.

This is the early movement seeing what is possible in the realm of feminine mysteries. These long-lost maps that lay dormant deep inside the inner landscape of our bodies are rising into view with conversation and relationship to be followed.

Every woman could see the creating capacity of her womb as her inner spark that wants to hold, structure, and release into the world. These unique womb quickenings are the inner callings of self in service to family, the Earth, and the future. She could choose that and be supported, held, and mentored through a design process that has belonged to the feminine since the beginning of creation.

What a time to be alive.

I read a quote by Marie-Louise Von Franz via SophiaCycles on Instagram.

“People get absolutely intolerable when they have a creative idea in their womb and can’t bring it out. They’re neurotic, aggressive, irritable, depressed. So then one has to help them bring the child out.”

The psyche is affected by loss of structural knowledge: the ability to take an idea, gestate it, and birth it into the world.

What happens to a culture that forgets how to complete this process?

What happens to a woman who keeps releasing her conception before it’s even structured to be birthed?

This makes me think about Twilight births that put us into a temporary sleep so we might forget the birth process entirely. The loss of agency and autonomy in our birth cycles, beginning with hormonal disruptions that sever the natural cycle of feminine biology and psychic information, to the medicalization of normal and healthy female processes, and the rise of birth trauma due to all this interference.

If there is truth to what Marie-Louise observed, that the inability to birth our creativity makes us crazy, could we say that was the root of the hysteria movement of our grandmothers?

Is the greatest concern of our time, the rise of mental illness in the world, the loss of expressing ourselves through the creative desires of our soul? And not in some cognitive dissonant, un-anchored from reality, sort of way. But simply because we don’t know how to move an idea into action, or worse yet, we’re losing the ability to have an idea.

No desire for a conception to even happen.

Desire is naturally tied to conception. It’s desire that conceives babies, families, creative projects, and more.

It is through DESIRE that the world gets fed.

Appetite is not indulgence, it is instruction of the soul, romancing us into movement toward that which we came to experience.

It’s more than emotion, it’s a state of being.

Does it matter if we are in desire when we begin something new? I think it does. I am going to get into a bit of quantum thought in relation to states of being and conceiving for a moment.

When we conceive an idea, it creates a timeline of possibility. We have a choice to either pursue the creative urge or not. We could start and then stop. Just these three options create new timelines of possibility. There are an infinite number that would arise as we work through the creation process as well.

Every time you evade a desire, you collapse a timeline of potential alongside it.

What makes a conception more viable? The health, or the state, of those trying to conceive. We know that desire is a state, and a very strong one. It has deep ties and alignment to the wants of the Earth because our desire arises from the heart-womb continuum. The closer we are to this magnetic force living inside us, the stronger our frequency is when we seed the idea.

The Earth wants what you want. And she is resourcing you through your connection to her.

Now, I don’t love using the word frequency, but the truth is our states matter. Frequency, my friends, is a state. When we combine frequency with the strength of planetary alignments and feminine birth blueprints, that sounds like the perfect duo of power and magic.

I’ve brought planetary influence into the conversation, so I must share how this affects our success in seeing things from idea to birth. Today, everyone has probably heard that “the new year doesn’t start in January.” We can all get on board with that. Many of us can now feel how wrong that is in our body. If it’s not January, though, when do we set our resolutions?

I don’t see many people talking about that.

That’s part of what I want to expand upon in birth culture, alignment to planetary and cosmic cycles for birthing.

Spring is the natural conception season for nature, and when you are part of the woman-earth continuum, it makes sense that your most powerful “manifestation” portal, aka the window when your desire is at its peak and you are full of dreams and inspiration, happens with a precise Earth alignment.

There is a moment each year when conception energy is strongest.

While women are barely getting midwifing for physical births, the midwifing for creative births that uses this ancient knowledge and blueprint is way behind.

We have several more weeks that we can dive into the dream world and touch our longings and wants before we conceive the big idea this spring during the upcoming Pisces season, the one that is going to be seeded in the womb for us to nurture and grow for the following ten moons of 2026.

If desire is truly the origin of birth, then we must be willing to examine how we relate to it.

Here are a few questions you can sit with and an invitation if you want to be in touch with your dreams in alignment to natural time cycles.

Contemplation:

• Do you see yourself as the bridge between heaven and earth, with your desire as their meeting point?

• What shifts when you consider that your body already holds a blueprint for bringing dreams to life?

• If this spring were a conception season for your life, what would you want to seed?

• Are you resourced enough to carry what you want? If not, what would need to change?

This is my invitation to prepare you for the nine-month birth prep that stems from the longing you are getting to know today.

DESIRE: The Heart of Feminine Soul Discovery will be a playful and low-pressure container to experience more of your wants in little moments of your day-to-day life. This slow build-up will grow into something big in the following nine months of birth-planning if you choose to follow me beyond those three weeks.

Expect 21 days of journal prompts, inspiration, practices, and contemplation you can dip into on your own time.

You will leave with clarity around one core longing you are ready to nourish in 2026.

Towards the end of our 21 days, we will take a journey at the Earth’s great inception window to conceive our new timeline, the desire you want most to seed in the womb, to be nourished and supported within a natural cycle of growth in alignment with the Earth mother.

Are you ready to say yes to the body, yes to desire?

21 Days for $21

Announcement

Mark your calendar for the first MA Church gathering, Sunday, March 15th.

This is a space for women devoted to Matriarch living, following wild feminine blueprints of the woman-earth continuum.

The first topic is Conception, how modern women can use Earth’s planetary conception moment for their own.

Message me or leave a comment to get on the list.

My word of the year was swirling around this topic that feels utterly domestic, simple, natural—and earth-shaking, annihilating, humbling.

Mothering in a way that isn’t soft and yielding. To mother as a force of creation. To take raw passion, love, instinct, and grief and give it shape and form and roots to grow. Anchors that hold and last. I want to mother in a way that honors the highs of my love and the depths of my grief. I tell my husband where this ship needs to land and feel his strength and support as we row across an ocean filled with dark secrets of the deep to moor on a new shore.

My wants are quite humble. Or maybe they aren’t all that much. Is it humble to want to build a world that is flowing with the current of feminine bodies? Watching over the children, the land, and community? Or is that a mighty power, shifting inner and outer tides of the world?

I think of Russian nesting dolls. Wombs within wombs within wombs. The great pulsing galaxy wombs that contain planetary wombs and billions of micro wombs inside the bodies of women. Cosmic webs that reach through time and space, braiding wombs together. Birthing things together. Menstruating things together.

The current period of menstruation feels as if it’s closed and the invitation is on our doorstep.

The urge to create has been building. When Jupiter and Saturn met in the sky in 2020, expansion and structure braided together as the cosmic reminder: growth without containment collapses, but growth held within form becomes legacy. The Christmas star’s arrival in the crowning moment of Earth, is also the moment when Winter Solstice arrives. How interesting that ten luminous moons passed between shutdown at Equinox and the light’s return, alongside the dawn of the next era. Gestation of Earth is mirrored by the gestation of biological birth.

What you did, who you were becoming during those passing ten months, was bringing form to what was to come.

Mother Culture is the remembering that woman is the continuum between sky, soil, and soul. That’s what this era is to me. The bridging of the alchemical opposites represents the complexity of mothering and its long-game effects.

Mothering is rarely instant reward.

How much of our work is good fortune that will arrive after we have built the structures to hold it?

The boundaries of toddlerhood pay out several years after the foundation is laid. Hours spent listening to the whimsy of children become comfort zones to share heart burdens in the years of the young adult. Repair work of tiny daily fractures seals in the golden bonds of love like treasured Kintsugi.

Motherhood is high contact, strictness, and limits that pay us out massively. We don’t get the expansion without first experiencing the contraction.

And so it goes with everything we hope to mother. A spark inside the womb, literal at the time of conception, and within the womb of containment, something grows.

In just ten moons from that illumination in our core, a new universe is born. Another soul that enters that world with an infinite number of potentials that will play out across their lifetime. The same is true of what we birth today, now, outside of biological children. Our every idea, longing, inspiration, and eventual creation is the possibility of that new shore.

This Mother Culture that centers creating a world of natural rhythm and honoring of Cosmic, Earth, and human body.

When we attune with heaven and earth, we become the bridge. We are mothered and resourced by alignment.

When we honor the cycle and its timing, we mother.

Desire is the origin point. But desire alone is not enough. What we are willing to contain, to tend, to structure — that is what gets born.

So what is asking to be conceived in you?
What are you willing to gestate?
What are you willing to build the structure to hold?

Is is strong enough, wanted enough, you enough to be carried until its ready for the world to receive it?

For the next 21 days, I am entering a season of dreaming and delighting in want and longing. Waiting on the timing before rushing it into form. Not trying to structure anything too soon.

I want my heart fully open, my body turned on, humming with excitement and devotion to carry this next thing full term.

If you are ready to be in the body as the continuum of the natural world, in sync with her cycles, are you ready to say yes to your desire?

Yes to my desire

And it wasn’t.

February 17th. The year of the Fire Horse. Chinese New Year finally upon us. We’ve all been properly chastised to complete our shedding in the year of the Snake? You did that, right??

I read that morning it’s a Chinese tradition, or maybe superstition, not to wear all black on New Year’s Day. Maybe that’s every year. Maybe this one isn’t special.

I didn’t think about it long. I just put this on.

I was wise enough to prepare for the day ahead. Leftover frittata. Banana muffin baked the evening before. We were meant to go to Commonwealth, but it was canceled. Not for the snow I secretly hoped would justify a morning at home — we haven’t had any this winter — but for the sweeping fury of a stomach bug taking down one-third of our community.

No consequence for me.

I poured coffee and added heavy cream. An indulgence. I read my boys The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Another sweet decadence.

We squabbled over the Little Prince interrupting the narrator who is simply trying to fix his airplane. We lingered over metaphors that try to explain the human experience. We laughed at the seeming absurdity of a little Prince’s indignance and pondered what the man might be missing.

The kitchen was a dark cave and I kept the house warm.

I washed the dishes by hand. The same domestic task of my grandmothers. The dishwasher has been broken for eighteen months and I’ve hovered on the edge of replacing it. But what might I miss if I do?

Sometimes I grieve while washing dishes. Sometimes I rage.
Sometimes I am so flooded with gratitude it embarrasses me and I feel too cliche to call it joy.

There are days I resent the dried food, crusted and hardened, left unrinsed. I scrape. I scrub. Things soften.

I wonder what has softened in me, this time spent at the sink?

My thoughts move like the wind shaking the bare branches of the fig tree outside the window. On this day, they moved to my father.

He hasn’t met my children.

And there, with my hands in warm water, I grieved. I wrapped myself in the story that they may never know him. That he may never know them. That an ancestral story carries like the ones before between fathers, sons, and grandsons.

Bloodlines are complicated and messy. Sometimes they are full of inter-generational ache. I hang the thought to dry just like the the last of the dishes I place on the rack and return to my work on desire.

My phone lights up.

“Just sending an FYI. We had my mom’s funeral today.”

The moment I had known would come for me came, and my wishing for it not to be the same with my father and sons intensifies.

“I was thinking about you earlier,” I write. “I must have known your grief. In honesty, I was thinking about how sad it is my children don’t know you at all. I wonder if that was on your heart, too?”

“Yeah, it is.”

Some inheritances don’t peel away so cleanly.

I think it’s fine I dressed in all black.

My grandmother’s lineage was European, and that’s all I know.

Did you hear the news? Yesterday, was the beginning of the year of the Fire Horse. Of course you heard it. But this morning I woke up and saw that yesterday was also when Venus met the North Node in Aquarius. The importance being a relationship or connection could have a sudden increase in significance and bring a closing of the gap between you and that person.

Without romanticizing end of cycles, momentum, and this Venus alignment with my north node, I am hopeful.

When I read this story, I saw the long memory of the feminine. I saw something greater than Rome’s glory. I felt what happens when men are formed by the institutions that claim them. I imagined what becomes possible when sons are born of the wild feminine, and what is lost when they sever themselves from her.

This essay explores what the she-wolf symbolizes and what it means for mothers raising sons inside modern systems still shaped by Rome’s legacy.

At the end, you’ll find twelve practical ways to embody this archetype in your day-to-day mothering, along with additional resources for those who want to go deeper.

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Roman mythology is not my area of usual interest, nor is it even slightly an area of expertise. However, when a wolf visits your son in dreams, and then yourself, it takes you straight to her story. When I read the myth she is centralized in, I found her as a representation of the Great Mother and instinctual feminine initiation that once shaped masculine power in relational harmony with the land.

It got complicated with Rome’s turn toward Mars and fratricide, which I interpret as marking the shift from earth-rooted kinship to a centralized empire, something that is still experienced today on a grand scale. In her tale, I ask myself: what do modern mothers need to reclaim from the instinctual archetype of the Shewolf in order to initiate sons differently?

This is a continuation of the wolf as initiator for families and was brought forward last fall by dreams my eldest was having. In the early hours of nightfall and before the sun rose again, a dark, looming shadow of the wolf stood in the threshold of his doorway.

He dreamed of a wolf when he closed his eyes. As he was nearing an eleventh birthday, and autumn was waning into winter, I now believe this was an inception point—a threshold crossing—the beginning, or a deepening, of his instinctual nature and what it means to be a son of the Earth Mother.

The wolf in the human realm of our deepest memory is the embodiment of primal feminine power, a natural manifestation of nature. An embodied intelligence of the wild. The guardian of threshold places. Both light and dark, she is part of the liminal in-between, just like my son witnessed before sleep and in the hour before waking. Wolves are here as representations of wild presence. Freedom, instinct, perseverance, and heightened devotion are the hallmarks of wolf medicine in many cultures.

I want to start the tale before the twins were saved by Lupa. I want to reveal the origins of their mother and what her lineage may be telling through their story.

Rhea Silvia was her name, the mythic mother of Romulus and Remus. Most details of her history are lost to time, with the exception of her name, which I believe lends us a great clue to the context of their more-than-wet-nurse and protector taking shape in the form of the Shewolf.

Silvia is a feminine given name of Latin origin, directly derived from the Latin word:

“silva, meaning “forest,” “woodland,” or “woods.” It signifies someone who is “from the forest” or “of the woods,” often evoking a connection to nature, serenity, and the untamed beauty of wooded landscapes.” AI generator definition

In ancient times, Silvia was the name used for woodland nymphs, connected to wild spaces. A woman of the woods.

Could it be that the divine intervention of the Shewolf was on behalf of Rhea Silvia and her connection to the land? A symbolic restoration of the forest-mother through animal form?

Beyond the name another possible clue in Etruscan history, an indigenous culture of the pre-Roman era, granted more power to women, with evidence of greater social visibility and autonomy for women than later Roman norms. Therefore, we have evidence that prior to the establishment of Rome, women and the mother line held value and significance to the indigenous peoples of Italy.

In the tale of Romulus and Remus, not much is known about Rhea Silvia except her name and marriage to Numitor. Taking what we know of the Latin meaning of silva, we can surmise that Rhea was potentially of a people connected to the lands. Not historically confirmed, but linguistically resonant.

Rhea (often Rea in Latin, particularly in the context of Rhea Silvia) originates from Greek roots, “usually interpreted as “flowing,” “stream,” or associated with “ease” and “motherhood.”-another AI generated definition.

Interesting to note that when Rhea Silvia’s uncle usurps her father for the throne of Alba Longa, there are retellings that Rhea was drowned in the Tiber, another nod to her namesake origins.

Either way, Rhea is made to be a Vestal Virgin under her uncle’s tyrannical rule and to keep the fire of the hearth always burning, and gather the sacred waters from the springs. When she is found to be pregnant, various accounts of the story have differing perspectives on how this came to be. In the end, all accounts lead us to Mars as the father of the twins she bears. After their birth, Rhea’s story dissolves as her twin boys float safely down the current until their discovery by Lupa, the Shewolf.

Lupa rescues the boys from the edges of the Tiber, protects them from pursuers of Amulius, and suckles them. From her flows not only life-giving sustenance but initiatory nourishment, wisdom transmitted through instinct and survival intelligence. She takes them to the cave, where they continue to grow under her protection.

A cave is not merely a place of shelter and safety. The origin of cave is a womb space. A placeholder for initiation and rebirth. Lupa retreats to the cave with Romulus and Remus, and through her intervention and stewardship, she prepares them for kingship. There are many stories of divine intervention by the Goddess, preparing the masculine for his martial bond with the land. In this particular myth, I see similarities with the Celtic tradition—Lupa as a representation of the sovereignty goddess of the land. She is the Magna Mater, matter brought into form.

This is the embodiment of organic law. Law through instinct. It isn’t the domesticated, good mother that Rhea Silvia was asked to become as a Vestal Virgin. Lupa is the Mother who nurtures, provides as predator, and initiates.

What is curious about Lupa’s decision to save and protect Remus and Romulus, when she could have easily devoured them, could be divine intervention. Or it could be the loving heart of the mother. I am drawn to the version of the Shewolf that chooses protection and initiation of the innocent. Whatever motivated Lupa to save the twins, we can all trace our matrilineal line back to a mother just like her if we travel far enough back into time.

Rather than get lost in an ancient story of instinctual mothers, let’s read the myth and recognize her patterns in our modern lives. Let’s rediscover what Lupa was emblematic of and integrate her lessons. She is a recovery of: wild feminine, organic law, sovereignty, belonging, and maternal initiation.

This brings me to the question I had when researching the story: how did Romulus end up killing Remus when he was initiated through this supernal power of maternal intervention? How does a son nourished by the Great Mother still choose fratricide?

We cannot forget that the paternal line of these two boys was Mars himself. Before he was the god of war, historically he also represented more.

In fact, early Mars (pre-imperial) was also: a protector of fields, associated with spring fertility, connected to boundaries and land protection.

He was an agricultural guardian, too. A boundary keeper before the well known conqueror. Which makes sense if Rhea Silvia, from the forest, wanted to continue her preservation of the land but knew that expansion was on the horizon. It is important to remember that there was a transitional period in which indigenous land spirituality was slowly being centralized into a state built on codified law rather than organic. The totem animals of the woodpecker and wolf, belonging to Mars, could have been animistic, part of the older Italic land cults. They could belong to Rhea just as much as Mars, or represent a shared symbolic inheritance later consolidated under his name.

As we see later on in the story, however, Remus and Romulus disagree on the location for founding the Eternal City. In the dispute over which hill to build upon, Romulus kills Remus.

I can hear the wolves gather and grieve, their howls ringing through the seven hills that would make Rome.

Were Romulus and Remus fighting a battle of inheritance, the cost of the natural world for this new one? Was Lupa’s decision to feed and initiate both men leaving room for free will to decide the fate? I wonder if the mother of the twins is bereft with grief, knowing of their fracture in kinship and the sovereignty that will be gained but also lost in other ways.

Does Rhea Silvia weep when she sees the sacred waters that flow through the Tiber have been quite forgotten? When the woodpecker doesn’t have a place in the forest? When the wolves have been pushed beyond the wild edges?

Is this the template fated, or the one that Romulus chose?

And could it be the boys were one and the same, and with “Romulus’” choice, he kills the natural instinct of his nature in “Remus”? An inner fratricide, a triumph of the impulsive over the instinctual.

Would Lupa have wanted the story to end this way? Was her divine intervention meant to raise Rome into a civilization organized around dominance rather than belonging, or can we unearth something more from the protection and wisdom of the Shewolf?

The myth of Romulus and Remus encodes a cultural transition from land-based animism, feminine mediation of power, and relational systems toward centralized masculine state authority, militarized expansion, and institutional religion. Systems of control.

Whether the wolf and woodpecker first belonged to Mars or to older forest rites, the myth preserves a memory of a time when land and animal intelligence initiated Rome’s sons before empire forced a hand. The tragedy is not that Rome forgot the natural order but that the wolf was held symbolically and Mars, god of war, reigned.

As a woman mothering today, with a boy visited by the wolf, I walk away from this story contemplating what happens when boys grow without embodied reverence for the feminine, instinctual boundary, or ecological identity.

With these missing initiatory experiences, they are shaped by the synthetic instead. Rather than healthy masculinity, it creates polarity that acts out domination or dissociation. When instinctual mothers disappear, it is institutions that shape sons—ideas and structures that do not hold the essence of feminine spirit. Depth of belonging to the natural world is lost.

When our sons experience the instinctual mother, it is a reclamation of archetypal authority, embodied boundary, and initiatory presence.

If Lupa is the wild face of the Great Mother who once initiated Rome’s sons, and if we have reduced that archetype to symbol rather than authority, what kind of civilization are we shaping now?

If the Great Mother is no longer embodied in us, who will initiate our sons?

These are the questions I carry with me, as I walk the path of mothering, learning to honor the wild feminine that initiates our sons.

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Here are 12 practicalities of this in action, today.

Continued encouragement to spend time in the natural world outside of young childhood. Identify local flora and fauna.

Live with the seasons. Watch the skies, the weather patterns, and live off the Gregorian calendar. We talk about when the seasons actually arrive based on what is happening in real time.

Make altars. We make them for the Earth. They make them in their rooms.

Also, make memorials. For pets, wildlife, trees. Honor life in all its forms.

Gather spring water, sing to the spring. Lay flowers, create mandalas, leave something beautiful where she flows.

Hold strong boundaries as part of relational law. My boundaries with tweens are in some ways stronger than when they were young.

Require relationship repair. I spend a good amount of time 1:1 or 2:1 with my children discussing how to navigate their changing relationship, relationship with peers, and their growing interest in girls.

Speak to their instinct, not just their intellect. Noticing when they are in tune with their own bodies and needs and saying something about it.

Let them witness you rooting and living with the natural world. They watch me sing to the elements while grounding in the mornings, and sometimes they join along. They are required to get morning light every day with me.

Teach them that strength serves life. We build our bodies not for domination, but to be in service to life. Lifting weights and teaching my sons how to use and nourish their body as a body worker is joyful for me.

Model reverence for the feminine in yourself so they learn to recognize it in others. Let them watch you pour your blood into the garden, watering the rose of your motherline.

Initiate them into responsibility versus competition. We spend much time speaking about process and our ability to choose. We are responsible for our choices, always.

Communicate. All of this. Over and over again. We are fighting a culture that does not prioritize this so it needs to be said extra.

I hope there is one thing on this list you can take into your own life that you don’t already do.

If you have something to add to this list, I would love to hear it.

Additional Resources:

While researching the Shewolf, I came across a beautiful retelling of Rhea Silvia. If you are interested in the mother who birthed Romulus and Remus, read or listen to Mother of Rome, written by Sylvia Lindsteadt.

Two essays I wrote previously while researching this archetype for my sons and myself:

Fairytales, myths, and stories on the wolf archetype to read with your children:

Read the blogpost I wrote here

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Little by little, we expose our children to what is happening in the world. It is a great gift to still be the gatekeepers of their childhood, going on eleven years. For me, it is important to continue to shape their orientation to the natural world—where humans live in, and out of, alignment with it.

My interest in wolves has been growing, and with it I have found just as much heartbreak as I have found sanctuary watching and reading their stories. Recently, I read a story of a man who tortured and killed a wolf for an audience.

While my family walked around one of our favorite wildlife sanctuaries —ironically, once a nuclear power plant—I shared this story with my husband and eldest son. We focused our conversation on justice and protecting the wild nature of our world. What is a predator in organic nature, and what a predator is in a synthetic and disconnected world.

These are two very different types of predators. The man hunts the organic while embodying the violent inversion.

We also live in a part of the world where homelessness combined with mental illness has overtaken the city we left and is leaking into our small town. The predators we worry about in rural life are no longer wild cats or wolves, just the man-made human ones.

The day after I shared the story of the wolf with my son, he crossed paths with a homeless man at the park. While playing with our community after commonwealth, I had several children come tell me there was a man acting strangely and they wanted to make sure everyone was safe. Children as young as six, up to sixteen, recognizing the danger of a man no longer inhabiting the world they belong to.

It’s not wildness that threatens our children, but a world that has forgotten what that really means.

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My son is old enough to remember what our city looked and felt like before 2020. It is hard to reconcile the dehumanizing conditions of tents, tarps, and garbage that litter highways and neighborhoods. People who are filthy, lost to some other universe, eating out of garbage cans. I will not tell him that this is okay. I won’t pretend that this doesn’t make me angry for many reasons. Because there is truth, balance, and order that must be maintained, and humans have lost sight of it due to disconnection from our true belonging.

Later that night, he tells me that it’s hard for him to care about homeless people when there are stories of the men and the wolf I told him the day before. I understand what he is saying—the wolf story really hurt my heart, too. I tell him that sometimes I see the trash, the sickness, and the fear there as well. And I also tell him I see those people, especially the men, as children. I see him and his brother just children, too. At one point, these people were someone else’s child. That a mother somewhere loved them with all she had. I see them, and it would break my heart if that were ever you. That a world would ever make space for anyone to live in that way.

Tears are in my eyes as I choke out those words. Tears for fallen wolves, the loss of the true wild in a wasteland, the little boy who lived somewhere inside the man who posed with the wolf he tortured, all the children who are now walking the streets, disconnected.

He makes a final plea to me about their bad choices, how it makes it difficult for second, third, fourth chances. I agree. And I also tell him I would hate for a bad choice he ever makes to land him there.

I’m not the only one crying now.

I want my sons to have compassion for humanity even when it’s hard to. But I am really struggling myself. Justice is not without humanity. In fact, it should be a part of the natural order.

The homeless are trying to survive just like the wolf. Yet the wolf lives in harmony, in right relationship to its nature as a wild being. The synthetic has twisted, warped, and eaten away the integrity of humanity and its belonging to the native world.

It’s made space for humanity to live on the fringes, in un-belonging, and demonized true predation.

I have no compassion for grown men who take the innocent, whose ignorance of what sustains life is inverted proudly in their ego. Is that why the story of the slaughtered wolf is more painful for myself and my son to hold?

I imagine it is very scary to an eleven-year-old boy, wondering, how does someone end up there? These children rightly understand the organic world. Their own keen instinct tells them something is very wrong here.

They can sense the wolf is unbroken belonging, a being still governed by natural law. The homeless man represents broken belonging, a being expelled from right relationship with the world.

And what of this wolf killer? Who is he in our story? One thing is for sure.

They know the villain is not the wolf.

The tragedy of our story is to blame the instinctual by severing us from nature. It is making natural predators the ones to blame, rather than identifying the upside down of our world as the true villain.

I want my sons, and myself, to remember:

It’s okay to be a predator in the sense of the true wolf.

That way, we can always be wary of who the real villain is.

We can protect and provide for the pack. We can belong.

We can truly live.

Not because it was wrong, but because it has completed its work.

I found myself at that edge last year. The season stretched longer than it should have, loosening what no longer fit and revealing with clarity how I had been spending my energy. What emerged was not softness, but precision of a yin feminine energetic, often misnamed as masculine, but deeply instinctual. Cutting with a sharp edge.

This was not a crisis of love. It was a reorganization of energetic orientation and honoring of physiologic stages in a woman’s life. If anything, the capacity of my heart has opened more.

While I had picked up the scent, I was like a wolf in pursuit, hunting down a new taste of freedom.

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I became keenly aware that myself and my children were attuning to a new dynamic with each other and ourselves. I’d come to realize that the last little vestiges of new motherhood were almost lost to me. That bubble that we built, steeped in the slowness of the organic world, the softness of the dyad, the sweetness of togetherness, was now a fog, barely visible through our evolution as mother and child. Their needs and mine were changing, and I had to restructure in order to keep up. My time out of time with young children was coming to a close. The land of the milk teeth mother was no more.

I wasn’t the only one moving through these changes. While I shared these griefs and new templates I was moving through with a friend of mine with children of similar ages, she expressed she was experiencing much of the same. A phenomenon hardly anyone speaks of. A quiet and culturally unrecognized developmental crossing. The transition from milk teeth mother, to instinctual mother.

There is a quote from my mentor Seren Bertrand that haunts me. She tells us, “Humans are the only mammals that train their children to be prey.”

The first time I heard these words, the resonance rang true. I wasn’t given a map in girlhood to orient to the world in any other way than seek authority outside of myself. Well trodden paths of the masses promise happiness if the plan is followed. While those empty promises were excavated and I had licked my wounds clean, this simple statement gave me permission for my primal instinct to be revived. This older, wiser version of myself who knew that to create a legacy for my children we would need to become the instinctual, wild self.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés warns us of “the psychic force that represents an overly protective, ever-watchful inner voice that ultimately stifles a woman’s growth, autonomy, and instinctual life.” When this figure remains uninitiated in us (when the too-good mother is never metabolized through her own developmental crossings) she does not disappear. She becomes the mother. And from that place, we often insert this same force onto our children. We keep soothing where we should help hone the shaping. We protect where we should teach the art of orienting. In doing so, they do not become wild beings capable of discernment. We train our children, subtly and lovingly, to remain in the smallness of incomplete initiation, because we never completed it ourselves. The fawning cycle is preserved and goodness reigns.

As I moved through my own seven‑year maternal threshold, I’d realized I was no longer capable of orienting to new motherhood in this season, but the vision of motherhood that has permission to exist in culture haunts me. She’s the repeated mantra of co-sleeping culture. The baby-wearing, breast is best mother. The people pleasing good mother. The over functioning woman. Her image is everywhere and it eclipses the instinctual mother still. Her voice is the one I hear in my corners of the internet.

But after the appeasing and palatable face of the young mother fades and the necessity of the wolf mother begins to emerge, her tracks get lost and she fades back into the forest?

It seems there is this never ending cycle. The women who have a decade into motherhood often disappear and are replaced by the sweet simplicity, the goodness, that is the new mother. The mother that culture finally recognizes for her role of necessity in raising well regulated, happy, healthy families. This mother that functions with the physiology of the mother-baby dyad is a good mother, and her aesthetic fills culture’s fondness for the too-good mother. The mother that plays it safe while being pleasing.

And once she doesn’t have a baby to feed, or toddler noses to wipe, and her time has come to teach her pups how to orient as predator rather than prey, just as she herself has had to learn, we lose sight of her. They throw out the mother who’s function of teaching her children not to collapse is equally necessary for happy and healthy families.

Where has she gone? Her message, her wisdom, her wild ways need to be visible to show the rest of us the way, lest we leave the initiation incomplete.

Up until several months ago, I had retained too much this archetype. I was choosing what was easy with my children and leaning into trust that they would figure it out, rather than creating a hard line that balanced kindness with clear expectation.

When one child failed to follow through on an agreement and the line was held, monumental feelings flew. There was begging. There were tears. And there was a boundary that did not move. It raged.

This time, I did not rescue from the discomfort. I did not soften the edge to restore peace. I held the line, and he held the feeling. This was the kind of love that stands without condition and builds well supported resilience.

That was the bite.

And this becomes the moment the instinctual mother so often becomes the problem to the child, to the culture, and sometimes to herself, or to anyone invested in her remaining the too-good one. She no longer absorbs discomfort on behalf of others. She redirects it to where it belongs. She pulls back and relights her wildfire, while culture loses its appetite for her and forgets her insight along with it.

Where are the women who have learned to hone their bite too? What of us whose children are ready to learn the lessons of a symbiotic nervous system rooted in instinct rather than appeasement, capable of shapeshifting beyond the safety of the inner child? What if we are the women who never learned that lesson and were trapped in the shoes of this unsustainable goodness when our physiology and mythic map are begging us to remember?

When I wrote Mother and the Seven Year Spell, I was undergoing another layer of psychic transformation from too-good back into primal mother mode. Inside the frisson of holiday buzz, snake year shedding, and the shifting internal tides of intense womb work, I emerged at the peak of winter—claws out and teeth exposed. And just like Clarissa assures us, and my womb mothers remind me, my heart still holds her wondrous innocence and love.

The life stage I am entering into requires more of my wild side for the nourishment of myself and my sons. While the heart expands and capacity flourishes, the space I have for nonsense diminishes. There are limits I must uphold with greater strictness. Boundaries I must know within myself and be disciplined to honor.

This quote from C.S. Lewis sums up the somatics of the instinctual mother who has not forgotten the too-good mother, but has outgrown her exclusivity.

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

This is the expression of the wolf mother. Awareness of her edges with the capacity to uphold them. Not in service to comfort, but in protection of growth and becoming.

It is a love that goes beyond immediate calming and acknowledges what is fully at stake.

It is the love that refuses to confuse soothing with safety. It honors the truth of life and what is organic.

A necessary threshold we should be supported and mentored through, guiding our children out of the mother-baby dyad of soothing-dominant physiology and into an instinctual, formation-dominant physiology.

Above all, I wish to pass on a legacy of somatic intelligence. The actuality of a nervous system located beyond the limitations of smallness. How to expand and reach past the confinement of a mother-child dyad designed to quietly close when children reach their first quarter return of Saturn.

My own first Saturn cycle completed its work, shaping me into a mother capable of standing inside this initiation rather than protecting myself from it.

Seven years beyond that return, integrating the core of initiator teachings, I am ushered into remaining relevant as a mother in a world that seems to place its value more firmly on the new mother. And that, we know, has been just barely granted.

I am Tired of Being a Good Mother was the first honest language I had for what the world looks like when I no longer mistake softness for truth. The part of me who questioned whether our domestication in flowy dresses, Christian puritanism, or priestess codes was the feminine reawakened.

Now that I feel well enough beyond that threshold, I want to know the wolf mother.

I want to see women mothering with a ferocity that honors the love and grief of raising children in this world.

The wolf mother who does not need permission to exist. She needs stewards of her wild places just like the wolves who must return to the land in order to survive.

She needs to be seen long enough for others to recognize themselves in her tracks. This is how initiation continues outside of the fawning of pure ‘goodness’, but through mothers willing to remain visible once sweet softness is no longer the primary offering.

This is not the end of motherhood’s devotion. It is its deepening.

Where do you feel the wolf mother stirring in your life?

I recommend giving a listen to First Aid Kit and Wolf regularly when inviting this essence back to mothering.

I also haven’t stopped thinking about the feelings stirred in this essay from since I read it a few days ago. To me, it encapsulates the fierceness of a wolf mother who holds truth in herself. This is the mother who doesn’t fawn or turn away from her wildness, while maintaining the heart posture of love.

Mythic Mothers

Oranges Over iPhones

I have five children. Three of them are boys from my first marriage. Thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen now. Already half-grown, already slipping through my fingers like smoke through a clenched fist…

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8 months ago · 57 likes · 47 comments · Melissa | Mythic Mothers

I feel a softness making way for next year. A presence devoid of urgency. The lack of pressure might be foreign but it is supremely welcomed. Before I rush into what’s next I want to look back on what’s been. I will plug a teaser of what’s to come in 2026 at the end.

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Top 7 shares of 2025 (in case you missed them!)

#1. This essay is a dive into the roots of parthenogenesis and DNA. I ponder the idea of the masculine code that is layered on top of a feminine genetic foundation. It brings form to the latter part of the year when I reread it today.

#2. The heptad (number 7) brings me back to the #1 essay of the year. More unveiling of bees and their virgin symbolism linked with the legacy of Mary Magdalene and Great Mothers of ancient cultures. These two essays written eight months apart are complimentary and leave me with more questions than answers.

#3. Circling my own experiences with the myths of Medusa and Persephone, finding my source of power from the womb and the initiation rites. I was tasked with reclaiming another layer of responsibility this year. Dear Dark Goddess is that journey.

#4 A raw share. My birth stories and the shamanic initiation rites I believe birth holds. A possibility for humanity. A quote from the essay that sums things up nicely:

If you find this vision of birth aligned to your desire, I created a birth companion for you.

Reclaim Birth

#5 This was the year I leaned into community versus friendship. Most commonly in our culture, we intertwine the two. This conversation resonated with many women who were looking to widen their circles and abandon the idea of sameness as the only form of bonding. There are some reflections for you to sit with if 2026 is the year of widening your circle (which I highly recommend).

#6 Shredding the gentle parent, tradwife movement that is threatening authentic motherhood. I must admit, its so pretty and soft I want to be wrapped up in it from time to time. But alas, we contain multitudes and this is my good mother stripped of her domestication.

#7 A love letter on the spiral that connects woman’s bodies with the Earth’s. Its sweet and simple. Something to return to when you feel like you are not held or supported. We have so much belonging and nourishment right outside our doors.

Looking back on these words feels like a whole new kind of contentment. Something shifts inside us when we share our experiences through written word.

If you have been here reading, thank you.

If you are new, welcome, its lovely to have you here. Come say hi! Let’s make media more social again. If we are going to be here, we might as well connect.

What’s in and what’s out for 2026?

I am pausing my bodywork business this year and focusing more on mentorship. I want to write and teach more on bridging the mystical and practical of mothering. I want to get a bit lost in the old ways of my lineage. Fairytales. Superstitions. Magic.

What are you feeling like 2026 holds for you? I want to know what creative projects I should be on the lookout for.

Until next time,

Happy New Year!

Danielle