A Life Stitched With Ancient Thread

A journey back to the ancient knowing that lived beneath every version of my life.

There are doors we try to close that never stay shut.
Mine has been cracking open for much of my life.

Sometimes it opened gently, and sometimes it pushed itself wide with a force that felt like memory. I would lean in, get distracted, and then find myself drawn back without understanding why. The pull never faded. It waited behind everything I tried to become. It waited while I tried on other identities. It waited while I built careers that were never meant for me. It waited while I outgrew certain versions of myself. The door wanted me to return. I think it always knew I would.

I felt this pull long before I had language for it.
It lived in the forest where I grew up.
It lived in the hours I spent talking to trees.
It lived in the way animals made more sense to me than people.
It lived in the soil that held my childhood like a secret.

I didn’t see any of that as sacred when I was young.
I simply knew the woods felt safe during years when safety was scarce.
The branches made room for me.
The ground steadied me.
The wind carried a kind of presence that asked me to listen.
The forest was the first place that ever welcomed me without asking for anything in return.

Now that I am much older, I look back and see something I missed.
I wasn’t just talking to trees.
I was remembering them.
I wasn’t just escaping into the woods.
I was entering the oldest place I knew how to call home.

The magic was there from the beginning.
I didn’t create it, I just recognized it.

---

My mother played a role in this remembering, even though she never used the word witch. Her relationship with the sacred remained was personal to her. She read religious texts without needing an institution to frame them. She trusted her own mind. She believed in a world that held more possibility than punishment. She gave us permission to explore rather than commit. She left a trail of evidence that she knew more than she ever said aloud.

I know with all of my being that she belonged to a long line of women who carried the old ways in their bones.

Women who listened to their intuition during times when intuition was seen as rebellion. Who who tended their families and communities with quiet medicine. Women who understood the land through their hands and how to survive by reading the world with senses deeper than sight.

There is a deep grief in this.
I didn’t know to ask her about that part of herself while she was alive.
I didn’t understand the questions I needed to ask.
I didn’t realize she was the first doorway.

Sometimes I whisper to her now.
I ask her to show me what she didn’t say.
I ask her to guide me the way she always did.
I ask her to walk with me on this path she unknowingly placed beneath my feet.

Her silence still carries wisdom. The memory of her still feels like an ancient compass.

---

Magic never felt foreign to me.
My earliest belief was always possibility.
Everything felt open until life taught me otherwise, and most of it never did.

I wasn’t raised inside strict doctrine or rigid rules.
My spirituality grew in open air.
My imagination didn’t have to fight for breath.
I learned early on that truth could be found in many places. That certainty was not required for a life of meaning.

As I grow older, the desire for a different kind of life has taken root.
A slower one.
A smaller one.
A life made from mornings that feel like offerings and nights that feel like remembering.
A life that doesn’t demand any performance or proof of worthiness.
A life built on attention rather than accomplishment.

Smallness has become a doorway to depth.
The more I simplify, the more room I have for wonder.
The more I let go of noise, the more clearly I hear myself.
The more I return to the natural world, the more I recognize who I am underneath everything I learned to survive.

The word witch began rising inside me as I aged.
It sat heavy and real like recognition. It was like a homecoming, like naming something that had been humming beneath every stage of my life.

I refused to claim it for a long time. Society covered that word in fear and shame long before I entered this world. Yet the word kept calling back. Each year the call grew steadier. Eventually, the weight of truth overshadowed the weight of stigma.

A witch is a person who knows the world is alive. One who works with the rhythm of nature. Who listens to intuition as though it were an elder. A person who understands energy, connection, and relationship. A woman who honors her own knowing.

I use the word because my spirit has been waiting for me to say it out loud.

---

I didn’t know it then, but the forest from my childhood shaped everything that came after.
The soft ground under my feet.
The quiet companionship of animals.
The rustling conversation of the leaves.
The way the air shifted when something unseen moved near.

Those memories sit just beneath my skin.
They show up when I stand barefoot in the yard and when I watch birds gather. They show up when I place my hand on a tree and feel the pulse of something ancient.

That forest raised me in ways I didn’t understand until now.
It taught me how to survive.
It taught me how to trust myself.
It taught me that the natural world speaks in sensations and symbols.
It taught me that wisdom often comes in silence.

I carry those teachings in my work, my rituals, my relationships, my grief, and my healing. That forest became my first lineage.

If my work feels like a place your spirit can settle, you are welcome to join me here. I write about the sacred, the strange, and the deeply human rhythm of being alive.

As I grew into adulthood, the world complicated what had once been simple.
Social media created a version of witchcraft that felt curated rather than lived.
There were rules for everything.
Aesthetic expectations.
Arguments about lineage and legitimacy.
Gates that didn’t exist when the old ways were thriving.
Voices that insisted magic needed a specific look or language.

That noise made me doubt myself in ways I had never doubted as a child.
The doubt didn’t come from the earth.
It came from the performance around it.

The deeper I go into my own path, the more I feel the difference.
My practice has nothing to prove.
It is made of simple acts that feel intimate and true.

I thank my food.
I speak to the plants in my home.
I ask flowers permission before picking them.
I talk to trees the way people talk to mentors.
I listen to my body as though it carries an ancestral voice.
I place my hands on the earth when I feel lost.

This is my magic.
It does not need witnesses or validation. It does not need to resemble anyone else’s path.

My need to be understood grows quieter every year. The approval of others cannot shape a calling I did not choose.

---

History changed this path for me too.
The real history. The women who lived in villages and served their communities. The midwives. The healers. The caretakers. The herbalists. The women who carried knowledge through their hands and bodies. Who were feared because they understood things that could not be controlled.

These women lived close to the land, and that intimacy made them dangerous to people who valued power more than wisdom. Many of them were killed because they knew too much. Many of them were targeted because they held influence without permission. Many of them were erased from history because their independence threatened those who demanded obedience.

I feel them when I learn. When I light a candle or sit in silence.
I feel them when I trust my intuition more than outside noise.
Their stories stir something that feels like memory.

I look at the world around me and see echoes of their time.
The policing of women’s bodies.
The dismissal of women’s pain.
The suspicion of women who think for themselves.
The fear that rises whenever women return to their own power.

This return to the old ways is inheritance. It is an awakening.
It is women remembering who they were before fear took their names.

---

This is the place where I stand now.
In a life I built with intention.
In a rhythm that matches my nervous system.
In a body that carries its own wisdom.
In a lineage that speaks without words.
In a path that doesn’t need to be learned so much as recalled.

I am learning slowly.
I am building carefully.
I am rediscovering the ways my soul wants to move.
I am honoring the voice inside me that waited decades to be heard.

Every time I speak the truth of this path, something inside me strengthens.
The fear loosens.
The shame fades.
The hesitation dissolves.
The old ways rise.

I feel the women behind me.
I feel the land beneath me.
I feel myself becoming someone I knew long before I had a name for any of this.

This is my return.

A return to the earth. To my lineage. To my intuition. To my own power. A return to the life I was always meant to live.

I feel a fire rising in places that once held only survival.
It moves through me like something ancient reclaiming its breath.
The return feels like settling into my own skin after years of living slightly outside it.
Each day brings a little more wholeness. Each breath sinks a little deeper.
Each moment of quiet reveals another truth that has been waiting for me.

I am no longer waiting for permission.
I am stepping into the woman I sensed in the forest over forty years ago.
The one who watched the trees. Who listened to the wind. The one who already knew.

I feel myself moving closer to the woman I was born to be.
Steady.
Rooted.
Alive in the old ways.
Ready to walk forward with the strength of every woman who walked before me.

Love today,
Heather 🌸

A Remembering Ritual

This ritual is simple.
You can do it anywhere.
You only need your breath and your presence.

1. Sit somewhere quiet.
   A floor. A chair. A patch of earth. Somewhere your body can settle.

2. Place your hand on your chest or your belly.
   Let your breath move in and out in its own time.

3. Close your eyes and imagine the women who came before you.
   A line of women who survived what the world tried to take.

4. Say softly, either aloud or in your mind:
   I remember you.
   I honor what you carried.
   I listen now.

5. Let a memory rise.
   It may be yours.
   It may be from the women behind you.
   It may be from a place you once called home.