I’ve been thinking about ways of getting together as a group to feel into the moon phases, explore some Tarot, and connect groups in a healing capacity. And I think I’ve got it—let’s start a coven!

A coven is a gathering of witches. The word “witch” can mean a lot of things, but all it means to me is someone who taps into their own intuitive powers and the powers of the natural world. Being a witch doesn’t have to require initiation, a leader, or any religious doctrine—in some ways, it rebels against all that. It’s a practice of inner connection that doesn’t need an authority figure.

“A grieving person is a healed person. Can you guess why our culture does not want a healed person in it?” 

I was stuck in a snowstorm on rush hour traffic when I heard this line from Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance. As I listened to her powerful voice explaining in no uncertain terms that slowness is a powerful reclaiming of power in a world that disempowers us, I didn’t mind the traffic. I drifted with the snow, taking my sweet time to get home, letting Hersey’s words wash over me. 

It’s early December as I write this, and we are getting into grief season. As the daylight gets shorter and the moon comes out more, it’s natural to think about what was gained and lost over the last year. Traditionally, the Winter Solstice was called Yule, a 12-day celebration of the rebirth of the light after the darkest moment of the solar year. It’s a time for revelry, food, and joy, but it’s also about remembering was came before, about being in the sweet, if melancholy, embrace of the darker season. It’s about looking forward to the next year, but also about looking back at the last one. It is a natural time to be engaged with the feelings and processes of grieving. 

I’m a winter witch—I love cozy sweaters, fireplaces, low lazy mornings, and time to do my rituals and meditate without all the pressure to get outside and soak up the sun. Summer witches tend to be nature witches—your herbalists, trail runners, ecologists and the like. Winter witches tend to be meditators or empaths—counselors, meditators, spiritual teachers. We like to be inside with our candles and tarot cards, maybe gazing at the moon. 

My birthday lands in late September, and while I love the season, I don’t always love my birthday. I tend to get really melancholy around it, always comparing my reality against what I thought my life was supposed to look like at whatever the age is. Then I do that thing where it’s never enough—you know that thing?

And sometimes things don’t shift. Sometimes we’re stuck in a rut for a long long while and nothing seems to change no matter how many full moons pass us by. I’ll be honest—with everything I’ve been dealing with this year, I am in a sort of self-imposed, restorative rut. I’m in day-by-day mode.

The Wiccans and English Medieval traditions refer to the full moon closest to the summer solstice as the Mead Moon. At this time of year, beehives are heavy with sweet honey that can be fermented into an alcoholic elixir called mead.

I’ve been writing lately about a loss I’ve been going through, and I know many of you can relate. You’ve had your own losses or are maybe even going through one now. And when we’re experiencing a loss, there are a lot of uncomfortable feelings that can come up—anger and sadness being the big ones. So we often resist them. But in my long history of dealing with loss, trauma, and the big feelings that can come with simply being a sensitive person in a world that doesn’t always support that, I’ve learned that one of the absolute most powerful things that you can do to resolve uncomfortable feelings is to feel them. Just feel them. Just let them be there.

So how am I doing? I am okay. I knew about the risk I was taking when I allowed myself to hope. I know that fear and anxiety don’t cause bad things to happen, and thinking positively doesn’t guarantee that things will go well. I know I’m not to blame—not my thoughts, not my intentions, not my connection to spirit or lack thereof. I know that sometimes things happen for no discernible reason and it’s really freaking unfair, but that I can still be okay. 

I’ve been in a complex dance with hope over the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to expect and plan for the worst. I keep hope very, very close to my heart and certainly don’t engage with it joyfully. This helps me feel safer from a negative outcome. It helps me feel like I’ll avoid the embarrassment of finding out I shouldn’t have hoped. 

So welcome to Witch Season. Halloween, or Samhain, is the official beginning of the Witches’ Year, if you’re looking at it from a pagan/Wiccan perspective. This is traditionally the time when the veils between the worlds thin. Some of us find it’s easier to tap into our intuition right now, to talk to our ancestors, and to get guidance from Spirit, whatever Spirit means to us individually.

The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

The Death Light has been something of a theme for me in the last couple of months. It can be metaphorical or existential—working on a will, thinking about changing our life paths, or considering the legacy we want to leave after we’re gone. But sometimes it’s literal. We witness death, face a serious illness, or someone close to us has died. This last month, one of the ways Death came to my door was for my little orange fox dog Finnegan.

I’m having one of those weeks that I know many of you have had (or are having right now), where, due to no choice of my own, I’m hanging out in the Upside Down. It’s not my first time here, and I know by now that struggling and fighting it isn’t going to get me out of the tree any faster. I know I have to surrender to it. To breathe through my feelings. To trust that I won’t be stuck here forever. Even if I really don’t want to do any of that.

When the Moon tarot card comes up (especially in the Dreamkeeper’s deck, above), I am also called to ask about grief. For me, this image is about waiting, about being in that twilight place in a long embrace with the past. What losses have I not fully processed? If I allow myself to change in the ways that I really want to, in the ways that I am really excited about, what will I have to let go of?

Though the drooping head and lost color of a flower might look like death, there is wisdom in its wilt. There is wisdom in pausing when we are going through something hard. Slowing down, as if our internal energies are hibernating. Just because we’re not “doing” something doesn’t always mean nothing is happening. That flower was able to come back to life again when the sun returned not despite but because it had the wisdom to wilt. This is true for us, too.

For a lot of us, especially when we have experienced trauma, been through difficult times, or, like, ever made a mistake, trusting ourselves can feel more complicated. I mean, trust myself to what, exactly?

I used to think trusting myself meant being able to feel into my gut or intuitions and just “know” something. Like whether or not a certain person was good to date. Whether I should follow a particular career path. Should I buy a yoga studio? What I should have for lunch??