The Witch’s Weaving: A Slow-Stitched Imbolc Ritual of Becoming
from ‘Ways of the Witch Storyteller’ by Danielle Dulsky
That relentless beast of a wolf moon was finally waning toward a certain black-hole darkness that haunted my midwinter dreams, and I picked at a fraying indigo thread called tenderness sprouting from the soft and spoiled place at the edge of my aching heart. With all the patience of a weaver-woman, I wound the thread between my fingers and crooned Imbolc hymns of glowing hearths and flame-tending priestesses who stoked humble midnight fires surrounded by ghosts with only their most forbidden memories to grant them that elusive thing called hope.
I had faith. I took care.
I wrapped the thread around my wrists and called out to the babe I once was to pluck the petals of her soft pink innocence and hide them right here in this deep blue tapestry of the suddenly disciplined, tender-boned winter witch.
I hummed.
I knotted the finest lace around my belly and petitioned my inner scholar to mine that silver-flecked curiosity from the depths of her garnet-red arrogance and to nestle it here in my work. I wept. I braided and looped the thickest rope around my thighs and prayed to the timeless gods to initiate the most wounded parts of my sacral soul into the coven of the bright and bleeding ones and plant my unbroken vows like seeds here, right here in my soon-to-sprout shroud of becoming. I snarled. I knitted an ancient pattern onto the soles of my feet and begged my hag-forebears to bend toward me and stitch a guiding map onto my body lest I lose my way again.
I sang.
I wove that indigo tenderness lastly through and between my eyes, between each and every tooth, and I hemmed my storyteller’s tongue to match my mood. I commanded the befuddled and bumbling parts of my broken certainty to sink into this, my mosaic crown of shattered belonging. I raised my chin. I danced. I fell in love with the ache again. I showed my motherless tears to the monsters who knew me best. I bewitched my orphan’s garment into warming my frozen bones, and I heard that once-rotten drum I call heart begin to beat again, and I, cloaked in the softest incarnation of my craft, readied myself for a most-holy Imbolc evening spent wild and well, spent as the living poetry of the flame-tending woman.