First Step

So here I am, starting my sixth blog. This one, however, I'm doing (semi-) anonymously. I am dying to be able to talk about this sort of thing, the witchy, the liminal, the well, if not shamanic, shamanish; but my public blog, the one with my real legal name on it, the one that goes with my professional Goddess art site, does not quite feel safe. And I have to feel safe, I do, having a background of abuse and neglect. I can't have my family (I use that term strictly in the biological sense) finding it. I'm already nervous enough having shared my experiences with my daimon, my him as I imagine I will simply call him here too, on that public blog. I am, at forty-three, only now starting to work out what that abuse I experienced as a child has done to me, though I know it's nasty. And since I am not yet at a place where I can just say of my family fuck 'em, anonymity (semi- or otherwise) seems a good thing.

So here I am Hazel, a name I've known for years would be my crone-name, though, again, I'm only forty-three. But I'm in the process of a change, a big one, and I've often joked, mostly seriously, that I feel as if I'm going straight from maiden to crone. It's also a nice plant-ish name, and one thing I've finally started getting into is the witchy side of herbs, though I've been a gardener for years.

This blog, then, will be about exploring the path of the hedgewitch, for me. It will be a place for me to think out loud, though, really, that's all a blog ever really is; and I should say straight up front that I am no expert. I am mostly at the beginning of this path. It is calling me, I guess, or, rather, has been calling me; by the time I stumbled upon the word, and started reading about the practice, it was less a feeling of Oh wouldn't that be wonderful and interesting! and more Holy shit there's a name for what I've been doing?

I suppose then that I should define the term hedgewitch. I am using it to mean witchcraft with a traditional bent and a strong shamanic element, meaning, part of the practice involves trancework and communing with spirits, and which therefore, is basically animist. Some define the practice as primarily concerned with herbs and the Green, as a subset of the sort of green witch path; while that is a part of it, certainly, in my mind it is darker and thornier, more bone-deep, blood and black earth and the scream of the rabbit as the fox kills it to live.

I mean, that may be high talk; I don't imagine I am going to grow out of being a coward any time soon. But this world deserves my open eyes, I think.

And so I will look, and See what I can.