Resolutions of the Flame-Tending Bone-Witch: A Farewell Ritual for the Dying Year
from ‘Ways of the Witch Storyteller’ by Danielle Dulsky
The new moon of wolf and snow found my body weary but my soul full of faith, and I left the warmth of my bed before dawn to smoke-sweep the stagnant energies left behind from a most cold-hearted year. I lit the berries and cinnamon to slow-burn on the mantle, and I set branches of dried pine and juniper to crackle and hiss with flame inside my blackest cauldron. I took care. I eulogized the dying year with bitter poetry and spit, creeping about my house with hood raised and burn bowl smoldering. I wept. I hurled my witch’s breath into the shadows, sending smoke-spirals to alchemize my more twisted monsters and turn them to muse, to invite my many griefs to step out of the dark and walk with me now while the freckled, tattooed flesh fell from my bones.
Room by room, I walked like my ghost will walk. I began low and moved high. I sang the old year to death with spontaneous rhymes and a sour tongue.
Farewell, you year of petal and thorn
For you, with flames, this witch shall mourn
I made resin from rot. I called every lie to die, every inherited festering fear to drop away clean like dead leaves from the branch. I told the story of the past year from its ceremonious winter birth to its swollen summer incarnation, and I ended it with a yuletide saining turned to funeral rites on this, a new moon morning.
Born as hope and unformed time
Dying now to the tune of rhyme
I shed the crusted, flaking scales of my foremothers’ residual shame, and I looked the specters of lost lovers who still haunt me straight in their swirling void eyes. I coughed, and I howled. The last of my skin fell from my face just as the smoke ceased to rise, and I stood on my rooftop as the flame-tending bone-woman who keeps a lone candle lit inside her cobwebbed ribcage in the name of the ancients and the yet-to-be-born, who sings softly with neither lips nor tongue, who watches the pale glow of dawn arch from the east and swallow the last of the diamond pin-prick stars.
To you, dear friend, I say goodbye
And gift you lastly a knowing sigh
I raised my bony hands skyward, but I looked to the barren ground. I made my new year’s resolutions into new year’s revolutions, and I spoke the affirmations of the altar-keeper, the vows of the flame-tending bone-witch:
When this soon-to-crown year meets this wounded world with whimpers and wails, I shall be both hearth-holder and poet-warrior, for these roots of mine have grown deep despite my wanderer’s ache. I shall be healer, maker, weaver. I shall be storyteller and dedicant. I invite the disciplined devotion of the fire-keeper and the elegant wonder of the bone-witch to step into this holy shell of a heathen body and animate my next dance around that god-star we call sun. I will sing more and tiptoe less. I resolve to be delighted and dazzled by the wild dawn, by the rogue simplicity of cloud-speak and the rebel birdsongs. I welcome innocence and awe to waltz with wisdom and belonging, and I shall build stone shrines for the quietly dying parts of this world. This year, this flame-tender’s year, I shall brew the thickest medicinal syrup out of my as-yet-unmet dreams, persistent artist’s angst, creaturely grief, and moonlit, pagan gratitude. I shall wake the holy wild spark within me over and over again, and I shall rekindle the hearth-fires left smoored and smoking by ancestral pain. I lay to rest what was, and I welcome what comes. I drum skin back onto my bones and sing the blood to well and warm in my veins. When this dawning year takes its first breath, surely, I will be ready.
And so it is.