Grief in, grief out. I truffle pig through the brush, snuffling and wuffling mimosa, yarrow, rose, lemon balm. I learn the bees and count them, thrilling to see their numbers grow. I greet my ever-welcome house guests–these two mourning doves who sit with me in the early hours.
I feel like your late 30s usher in Real Adulthood–a preoccupation with birds, gardening, and meteorology. I open my weather app and drawl like a premonition-slinging Stephen King townie, still no rain, just like that summer of ‘57.
40 clinches it–gifting you an unapologetically early bedtime, an immediate pass from any late-night parties or standing room only music halls, and an unflagging dedication to a supportive shoe.
I call it Witch in the Woods: my incantation for a simple life on a soft bed of moss, cuddled by a pile of bunnies, sipping dew from a flower blossom, wearing a tiny acorn hat. The sillies are as silly as the wishes are fervent: for the restoration of Us to the earth, for communal care, for a life of knowing ourselves through our relationships to each other, and the forest, and the sea, and the birds.
Witch in the Woods may be an unreachable dream, but I thread in as much as I can in this life. I scatter the seeds and greet the birds and make teas and tinctures and honeys and poetry. And when I take off my acorn hat to do the things I don’t want to do nearly as much, I try to remind myself to text my friends back, and to make time for that puppy belly rub, and to give myself a few more breaths outside.
Witch in the Woods is more than some ephemeral dream. It’s real medicine for outsized grief.
Go on. Just like at Passover, drop a little coffee on your napkin for me as we pour it out: COVID. 4 years of trauma that we’re being gaslit into burying. Genocide. This election. The climate crisis. Our collective atrophied mental health. Rights that are threatened and stripped again and again. A tidal wave of fascism.
And then, more, for some of us: Immense loss. Long COVID. Chronic illness. A life and livelihood undone.
And then, there’s the grief that is not new. The grief that is as old as your knowing, as the hurt that came with 2 or 7 or 13 or 20, the ones we like to imagine are healed, but split open fresh when a new hurt comes in, one that rings a distant bell of That Old Grief.
I know most people do not like to talk about this.
To my frequent mortification, I am not most people.
I have learned the hard way that the only way to make my grief ache a little less is to lean in, stare down the freight train lump racing up my throat, and let it crack me wide open. So I surrender, all salt water, and give my grief up to the garden, the rain, those belly rubs.
Rose for my dad; oh, oh, my dad.
Moon-cured honey for my lonely, frightened 7-year-old.
Hawthorn for the enemy I kept too close.
Rosemary for the best friends who disappeared from my life overnight.
Motherwort for the traitorous lesson: no one really cares about you.
And Holy basil to soften the echoes of that aching lie.
A shower of petals to anoint the hurts, to soothe and integrate and accept that life is loss, and death, and regeneration, an endless collection of miracles. My capacity for love is only as great as my capacity for grief—and oh, I want to feel every ounce of love in this world. Don’t you?
This is the magic of our elders, our ancestors, the wisdom of our matriarchs, the medicine of worlds we purport to have left behind, but worlds that have never left us. The earth, the sea, the woods, she can hold this grief, while our systems and infrastructure crumble beneath it.
I cry into my teacup, into the puppy’s fur, into this bouquet of wildflowers. It feels immense, unyielding, it might take me for good this time. And then—
This floof, this Muppet, this kiss, and then there’s laughter and joy and love that could break your heart wide open. Outside the door is sunshine waiting to cradle you, grass and honeysuckle on the breeze eager to dry your tears. And if you stay open—and you must stay open—you and your wounded heart feel as necessary to this sacred world as the air and the sun, and joy and peace.
xx Jen
Can we please make witch in the woods our reality? I need to become moss 🍄🟫