The just-full moon of the longest night is singing songs of ice and storm, and I, a weary witch without a dream, am taking to my cottage of stone. Here, may I meet those unseen Others who know me best, and may they drum the old year to death in a rhythm my deeper soul remembers.

The full moon found me wild-eyed with wickedness on my tongue, and I perched my spritely-with-spring bones deep in the hollow of a graveyard oak. She loomed large and loving, that thick-trunked beast, casting a long-armed shadow across the moss-masked stones bearing the names of my dead.

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.

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.

On the full Blood Moon in October, I locked eyes with a white wolf in the woods. Today, on the cusp of Yule, I pulled the elder ogham. This is unburnable integrity, the bitter medicine and graceless shadow that is ours whether we choose to see it or not, that which remains, the space between death and birth.

The season of pitiful suns had dawned, and I begged for a hopeful sign from an unnamed god. I prayed for some spectral song to grace my ears with heathen tidings before the eerie gloaming swallowed the sky whole and retched back the indigo-and-pinprick-star night. These were hallowed hours.

I’m sourcing ingredients for snake oil. I have my great-great grandmother’s recipe in my hot little hands and I’m not stopping until I’ve brewed the most potent batch of Lilithian cure-all, this wicked world has even tasted. And I don’t care if I’m called a ‘fraud’, ‘phony’ or ‘imposter’... for we wise, womxn-folk have been called much worse…

And its finally time to guilt-free turn inwards and warm ourselves with blankets of darkness (assisted with hot chocolate). Personally I love these times as the year is ending; the days are at its shortest and we can stay inside without the fear of missing out…