Confessions of a Hedge Witch

“We believe in the trees, and grass and in being sensible.” – Cora Anderson

I am a Texan, 6th generation in fact. I grew-up on a family farm on the wide coastal plain of the Gulf and spent my youth roaming barefoot: a wild child with black feet and a mass of tangled brown hair.

My relationship with Place began on the farm as I encountered wild and domesticated life, the solitude of the country, and the mental space afforded an only child. That relationship matured as I moved around the U.S. and Ireland, living in mostly rural environs, and finally ending up back in Austin—my first truly urban encounter. I struggled at first to connect in Austin, not understanding how to find Place in a concrete jungle.

It was out of that conundrum that I began to qualify what Place meant to me.  Glenn Albrecht’s writing on Solastalgia deepened my understanding of the disconnection and longing I often felt.  As Gregory Bateson and many others have expressed, I believe our Western tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicates a core level wound (I won’t go as far as calling it a flaw). Bateson (1972) once said, “…if Lake Erie is driven insane [by the dumping of human by-products], its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of [our] thoughts and experience.”

We are moving, however reluctantly, further into an urban, technological future of our own creation and away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds.  How we get back in touch with those forces and find our “heart’s ease” (Albrecht, 2010b)—our Place— is what interests me.

So, who am I?

I am a Faery / Feri Witch, and initiate of that tradition.

I walk the Hedge and follow a folkloric, animistic path. My roots are in the loamy earth; my arms, the starry heavens.

You are welcome to read about my journey on this crooked path of discovery. Do mind the Thorns! Nothing is as it seems.

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.
Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

CS Lewis