Baba Yaga The Wise

There are women who have been taught to apologize to the windfor the way it moves through their hair—and then there are women who learnthe wind was always speaking to them. I am Baba Yaga.I have lived in the marrow of bone and birch,in the tremble between breath and knowing,and I will tell you this:…

The Unbound Altar I have spent decades building a cathedral out of other people’s hunger. I wore the heavy velvet of “mother,” the stiff, beaded bodice of “wife,” and I painted my face until the mask became the only skin the world would touch. I was a river trying to fit into a teacup; I…

Child—I have watched you bow your head to stormsyou did not summon. “I’m sorry,” you whisperto the rain,to the wind that tangles your hair,to the silence of a room that does not know your name. You apologizefor the way your laughter spills—wild, uncontained,like a river that refuses the shape of a man’s map. Who taught…

In the high, breathing wilderness of the Montana wilderness — somewhere between the Glaciers and the Yellowstones —where the air tastes of pine resin and cold river stone,and the mountains hold their silence like a secret—  Encapsulating the blue skies in the frames of the ancient mountain ridges?there was once a woman who came…

Come closer, flame-hearted one…closer still—there are stories that do not belong to daylight,and this is one of them. You speak of the bear—but I see already you knowhe is not only one. He is many. He has come to youin different skins,different voices,different hands that have learnedhow to rest against youas though they had always…

I am older than the fence posts, older than the stories told about me— yet still I kneel in the grass to listen to the small, breathing truths of fur and feather and paw. Animals do not lie. They do not decorate their longing with pretty words the way humans do when they are afraid…

Let me start by saying love is weird love is not what you’ve been taught. Love is not what you expect. It’s far more than any of us understand. But here is my personal take on it at this particular point in my life. We are often handed a “standard definition” of love before we…

In the deep green hush of Founders Grove, where the redwoods rise like old, listening elders, there walked a woman who had once been a child with a very specific dream. “I’m going to grow up and marry Bigfoot.” She had said it plainly, confidently— to her mother, to the air, to the invisible listeners…