There is a night each month when the Moon disappears from our sky entirely.

But she is not gone, only turned away, gathering her light back into herself before she gives it out again.

We call it new, though the ancient Moon knows what she is doing: emptying herself, embracing the darkness, so the next beginning can find her.

Today she does this again and the sky holds its breath.

I wrote the poem below, listening to her wisdom:

What the Moon Knows

She silently watches our stories unfold
Transforming, to ebb and flow within us all
Casting silvery glamours perchance to mold
Destiny-cords strumming to heroic call

Gentle escort for evenfall journeys made
Argent solace that fear and sorrow know
Pearly-balm for restless souls dismayed
But carelessness finds deceitful shadow

Empires and dragons have crumbled away
Fleeting clouds across constant sovereignty
Female devotion endures as they pray
Queen of minds and seasons, land and sea

Yet He is the reason She is shining
She glows with the surety of his worth
He holds the cup, their powers entwining
Gilded sentinels of heaven and earth.

The Moon does not shine on her own. This is not smallness; it is architecture.

The Sun gives to her: steady, fierce, unasking.

She takes that gift and turns it into something magical, soft enough to walk by, to grieve by, to dream by.

One cannot do the other’s work.

His fire would blind us if it fell unfiltered. Her light alone would be no light at all.

New beginnings ask the same of us. We like to think starting fresh means summoning our own blaze from nothing, pure will, pure self-generation and maximum effort.

But the dark moon knows better. She waits. She receives. She lets what has been given to her by seasons, by others, and by the accumulated years pass through her and return altered: usable, kinder, wise.

Her strength is in the knowing, the entwining. Nothing begins alone.

This is a time to ask yourself: what are you ready to receive, instead of force?

A Coaching Exercise for the Dark

Take a sheet of paper. At the top, write:

What am I trying to start by sheer will alone?

Beneath it, write:

What would it mean if I simply “let this begin”: making space to receive it, rather than manufacture it?

Reflect on the gap between those two answers.

That gap is usually where the exhaustion lives.

A Practice: Washing Away

Stand with your feet rooted and bring your attention to your breath. Let it become long and smooth, in and out through the nose. Count the breath in, then make the outbreath one count longer.

When you are ready, slightly bend your knees and cup your hands in front of your navel, as though holding a bowl of water. On an inhale, slowly raise them overhead, as the breath and energy rise in you.

At the crown, tip the bowl over your head as you breathe out. Let your hands move down in front of the body as you visualize cool, clean water pouring over you: over the face, the shoulders, the chest; washing away all you do not need, down through the body and into the ground. Let it take what is finished: old strains, pain, fear, last month’s disappointments, the version of yourself that pushed too hard.

Do this three times. On the third, let your hands come to rest at your heart, eyes closed, and stand in the dark for a moment: empty, cleansed, and ready. New Moon. New beginning. The past has gone.

If you try the practice, notice what changes when you stop forcing and begin receiving.

The Moon is not gone. She is gathering.

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Share From the Crone of Heartwood

My dear ones,

Are you sitting comfortably? Then lean a little closer, for there is a story I have been carrying for you, and it has been dancing through the years.

There are nights when the veil grows thin as parchment, and the earth speaks to us, like a dream to a sleeper, it murmurs its secrets through the roots of ancient things. I have known these nights my whole life, though it took me many years to learn how to hear.

To share it with you, I’ll tell you of the night Mabel first gathered with the women of her Circle:

The initiates came to a hidden clearing near a stream, each of them carrying two things: the old ‘knowing’ that lives in women’s bones and a hunger for the magic they had been born to, but never quite knew.

Mabel carried something else too, though she would not have had words for it then: a small ache, a sense that some part of her had been waiting outside of her own life, calling to her.

The Elder, Alice, met them in the clearing, along with the other women of the Circle. Mabel’s own mother and grandmother were among them. Smiling. Women that Mabel only recognised, some she had known her whole life, but had always been a little apart from; welcomed her.

Alice was as vibrant as she was old; she knew the deep of things, in the way some women do. She had them all bathe in the stream, telling them the water would awaken their spirits and open them to the “weaving” to come. The cold water bit at their skin. But, old and new, young and aged, in they went. As they bathed, their bones ached with remembering, their blood began to hum and their lungs were filled with the silvery scent of the water, wet stones and green, growing things.

Next a fire was lit. No ordinary fire, but a “Need-Fire,” was coaxed to life. It was born in a struggle as many true things are. The sticks hissed and resisted, suddenly sparking into flame, true and bright, smelling of iron and old stories. This the way it has always been, when people remember to do it properly. Mabel found the rune at her own throat without quite meaning to:Nyd, “need,” used for binding and for protection, a small safeguard.

One by one, the women leapt over the fire to be purified.

This was the only night of the year the moonflowers would bloom, and everything had to be right.

They were gathered for the sake of the future, by remembering and maintaining the old magicso it is not lost. The magic their mothers’ mothers had carried, the kind that blesses the land, guards the threshold, soothes the sick and names danger.

This is the work they came to do: to remember, and to keep remembering. To tend to and carry forward what was carried to us. To be the voice of the earth. To bear witness.

While they waited for the darkness to deepen, they weaved the crowns:

Periwinkle for protection;

Rose for the heart and for what renews it;

Blackberry vine for the boundaries that keep a woman whole;

Basil to open the spirit’s pathways;

Geranium to ward the ground beneath their feet;

Oak for the authority that is a woman’s birthright, whether she has claimed it yet or not;

Fern for the knowledge that hides until it is ready to be found;

Birch for beginnings and for the healing only a woman’s hands seem to know.

Each plant was threaded with care. These were not decorations: each leaf, each petal, was a promise, a ward; strong and green, woven against whatever mischief might gnaw at the edges of the night.

When the time came, the women stood in a ring, the space between them hummed like a note held, the inhale before a storm breaks. And they began to dance, crowns on their heads, hands joined by a many-coloured thread, a promise.

Mabel had thought she might feel foolish and her body might refuse, even though her heart wanted to know... But the dance found her so naturally that it caught her breath, it was as though her feet had known the pattern all along.

A soft purple light rose from the trees. The moonflowers had been waiting, shyly. They unfolded all at once, a held breath finally released, and the clearing bloomed with light so soft. Silver-violet, delicate as spider silk and starlight, they lit the clearing from every side and then;

ah, Mabel felt it, “the slip”; the moment that happens in old magic: she was no longer the one doing the dancing. The dance was dancing her, and she was simply along for it, the magical current running through her, uniting her with the Circle as they danced as on, transformed into The Wheel, a living thing spinning them all into the old, old song.

Then, a shape at the edge of the circle. A movement outside the ring of women. Mischief? Mabel thought first, some spirit slipped through to cause trouble on this night when the door stood open?

But no. As she watched she saw it was a woman, or an outline of one anyway; dancing her own slow circle just beyond theirs. And then another. And another, fading in, one by one, dressed in clothes from more ages than Mabel could name, though she knew some from old pictures, old stories and some that were labelled, kept behind glass. As the newcomers danced, they arrived more fully, every turn more solid, until they moved like flesh and blood before the trees, encircling Mabel’s ring of women.

There was no fear in it. Only recognition. This was a spell cast through time; women bound to women, knowledge passed hand to hand across centuries, the same Circle simply widening to hold everyone who had ever stood in it.

At some point the dancing must have stopped, because Mabel woke to find herself lying beneath a sky holding three suns. Three! She rubbed her eyes, and still they shone there, bright as new gold coins, turning and bobbing in merry dance of their own. Their light spilled over the grass in ribbons, and wherever it touched, colour opened.

“It’s the only day of the year the brothers get to meet,” said a voice beside her.

An old woman sat there, face creased with pleasure, watching. She smelled of lavender and woodsmoke and the earth after the rain. “See how they play? So happy to see each other before they go back to watching over their own lands again.

They cast rainbows everywhere when they dance; you can feel their joy from here. Just as we are happy to spend this one night and morning with our daughters. The moons and the suns; just as it has always been.

It is a fine thing, Mabel, to have this time with you.”

Mabel did not need to ask how she knew her. This woman was hers. An ancestor, come to sit beside her in the first hours of the new dawn.

Something had shifted inside Mabel, something old turning its face towards the light; like a cat stretching in a sunbeam after a long nap. It blinked at her and she blinked back. At that moment, she knew her work. She stepped into her power.

She smiled at the old woman, and together they turned back to watch the three suns play.

I tell you this now because Mabel’s night was not hers alone. The Circle is never for just one woman, it is for all women. It is a dance that waits for us; the same dance, the same fire, the same calling, that is for every daughter of the moon and the earth.

The veil thins whether we notice or not. And the old magic calls to you: you, with your modern bones and your busy hands. The question is only whether you will go to the clearing when it calls.

And now, dear one, ask yourself: what wisdom in your own bloodline has been forgotten or hidden, mocked or made unsafe to carry? What old knowing waits for you to remember it?

Perhaps, on the next full moon, gather what you can: photographs, names, heirlooms, scraps of story, or simply a candle and your own willing heart. Place them before you. Light a white candle for remembrance and ask softly: “What did you carry that I am ready to remember?”

Then listen.

In my own home, I keep my ancestors close. Their faces and names live on our stair wall, and each morning as I pass them, I remember that I do not walk alone. The men and women who came before me are not gone from me. They are threaded through me. Multi-coloured and unbroken.

Repeat, this as a small spell of return:

“The magic of my ancestors flows through my blood. I remember. I reclaim. I rise.”

With love, from the Heartwood,

The Crone

Are you sitting comfortably? There is a story to share with you, and it has been walking the old roads for many years. It has mud on its hem and salt in its seams.

Do not simply trust a story that revolves around the man. Often the man is the smoke but the woman, is the fire. This story has a woman’s handprint pressed deep into the grain of it.

You may have heard the version of this tale that has been dressed, for centuries, as the haunting of a village by a wronged, dead rector. But this story really belongs, as so many true things do, to the wife who survived him.

This is not the usual story everyone is told when they visit the village and ask about the name of the pub, The Pickled Parson. No, the true story came to me another way: passed from woman to woman, mouth to ear, across nearly three centuries, in kitchens, over childbirth and during long winter evenings, when the fire was low and one woman leaned in toward another and said: let me tell you what she actually said.

And so, it arrived at my hearth, the way such things always do. In the dark. With the weight of many hands upon it. And now it is a story for me to keep safe, then share when the time is right.

This is the truth that Mary Gamage told:

He died in August.

Which gave me four months to solve a problem that seemed to have no solution. I had no one I could tell, and my children were asleep upstairs. They did not know their world, as they knew it, had ended.

John died in the house we lived in for eleven months of the year; our house in Worcestershire, in White Ladies Aston, where the lanes were quiet and the orchards bountiful, and everything smelled of apple and old stone.

He had always preferred his life there. Rich living and socialising with men of consequence. Sedgefield was a duty. A living that paid well and required little, so long as he appeared in December to collect what was “owed to him” due to his station. He swept in and took, whilst managing not to offend anyone of consequence in the doing of it.

He was good at not offending people of consequence. He was less good at other things.

But I did not think of that in August.

In August, I sat beside him and held his hand while it cooled and was hit by a thought like lightening striking me: the tithes are due on the twentieth of December.

God forgive me. That was my thought, before he was cold.

Perhaps God already has forgiven me. I have had a long time to wonder if God even cares,since it was his own Church that... well… you see, the law was simple and merciless, as laws tend to be when written by men who will never be a widow thrust into the street with her children to starve. It was the law that if the rector did not collect his tithes on the appointed day; say, if he was dead, if his post was vacant, if his wife was sitting in a Worcestershire parlor with her grief and her arithmetic, then every penny passed to the Bishop of Durham. The Church would feed itself on our misfortune and call it procedure. I had seen it happen to others. I knew what it looked like. I knew what came after.

I was not going to let it happen to my children. He had to collect those tithes.

So, I thought. And, I thought. I could not tell you for how long.

I thought with a particular stillness that comes when panic has nowhere useful to go and must become something else instead. As the hours passed, that stillness hardened into the steel I needed. And by the time the candle had burned down, I knew what I had to do.

I told no one John was dead, because he could not be. I spread it about that he had been called away suddenly to attend to parish business. Even the servants were told this, just enough to explain and not make them suspicious. John was often away visiting one rich house or another. Nothing noteworthy in his being away.

And then I made my arrangements.

Salt! Practical women will tell you that things kept in salt may hold their shape through a cold autumn. I had a long road north ahead of me and a story to maintain for two hundred miles. So, I found a barrel and filled it. I put my husband in, surrounded by salt.

He was not a large man, but he never denied himself any the finer things that his indulgent life had to offer. In death, as in life, he was awkward. He was difficult to bend. He was near impossible to move, and there was a great deal more of him than there seemed when the barrel stood empty.

I worried that I could not pack enough salt around him.

But I was determined.

And John, for once, yielded.

I would tell the carrier it was “goods for the rectory”.

Which it was.

In a manner of speaking.

I knew, even then, that he would not like it.

John had strong opinions about propriety. About dignity. About the correct order of things and the appropriate behaviour of women, within that order.

He had rather fewer opinions about how his family might eat without him, that had always been a matter he was content to leave unexamined.

But the indignity of the barrel, the deception, the fact of being used, carried north like cured beef, propped in a chair like a puppet while his wife collected his money and smiled at his tenants…oh! I knew what John would make of that!

I considered it for perhaps…thirty seconds.

Then I sealed the barrel.

I will not tell you I felt nothing on that journey. I will tell you that what I felt was not what you might expect. There was grief in it, of course there was. John was my husband, and I had loved him once, I suppose, but my children would grow up without a father and the grief of that was a pebble in my stomach. But there was nothing good in letting it grow into a boulder to drag me down. I had to do the things that needed to be done to keep them safe.

Beneath it, around it and threaded through every hour of those long cold miles, there was something else. Something cold, bright and entirely my own.

I was doing it. I was solving it. With my own hands and my own mind and not a single soul to help me, I was going to keep my children fed.

The roads were hard. The weather turned in October and we came through Derbyshire in mud and sleeting rain. I sat in the cart with my hands folded in my lap like a woman, on a perfectly ordinary journey.

Behind me an impossible secret, silent and curled up in salt. An unthinkable cargo that gave us a chance. A briny act that I traded for the possibility of a future.

I smiled at the tollkeepers and I kept moving.

We arrived in Sedgefield in late November.

I settled the house. I spoke to the necessary people. I managed every question with the careful vagueness of a woman whose husband was simply very busy. I mentioned that he was somewhat unwell and did not want to be disturbed. No one cared. It was to my benefit that John was not missed at all. No one questioned me. Women who appear to be managing are unremarkable. It is one of the few advantages of being so thoroughly underestimated.

On the twentieth of December the farmers came with the tithe.

John, sat at the table in the dim room, a little distance away, like a man who did not wish to be troubled with unnecessary conversation. This was his nature with them anyway, and they saw nothing they did not expect to see. They asked after his health, as was polite. But John was not well liked and had been mostly absent from their lives; they didn’t ask more. They paid because they had no choice, and they resented every coin. Who could blame them? In previous years I had felt embarrassed by the taking of what was owed when naught had beengiven. But this year was different. This year, it was necessary.

They paid what they owed, and I gave them their receipts, and they went home to their wives and their fires, grumbling about the rich Reverend who cared not one jot for his flock.

The next morning I sent for the doctor.

He saw what I needed him to see. He looked at me strangely, and for a moment I thought I had been caught. Perhaps he did know. But he was a kindly man, and as I have said, John was not well liked. I looked him square in the eye. His face softened, and he signed what I needed him to sign.

John Gamage was declared dead. He had died suddenly. There was no cause for suspicion. I was a widow.

But my children were provided for. We would need to vacate the houses, yes, but the money was where it needed to be. I had breathing space to make a life for us, without John.

I had done it.

That night, the rectory changed.

At first a coldness in the passage between the house and the church, a heaviness to the dark that had not been there before. Doors opened when no hand had touched them. A sense, at the edges of a room, of something that had opinions and intended to express them.

John, it seemed, had come to Sedgefield after all. And he was furious.

I will admit I had not anticipated the haunting lasting quite so long. A few weeks, perhaps. Amonth or two of rattled windows and cold draughts and the particular atmosphere of a man making his displeasure known. That I could manage. I was only staying a matter of weeks, and I had been managing John’s displeasure for the better part of twenty years.

But John’s fury, it turned out, was not a temporary condition.

He walked that passage and haunted the rectory for forty-five years.

Forty-five years of making nights hideous, of cold spots and strange sounds, and the unmistakable presence of a man who felt he had been wronged and intended the world to know it.

The village got on with its life and stepped a little more quickly past the rectory after dark. Until a fire cleansed it all and haunting ceased.

What was he angry about, exactly?

That I had deceived the parish? No! He had drawn a comfortable salary from Sedgefield for decades while living somewhere else entirely.

That I had used him without his permission? Perhaps.

That I had won: that I had taken the situation he left me in, with no resources and no recourse and no one to help me, and I had solved it with my own two hands and I had done it without him. Using him, as a prop in my own scheme?

I think it was that, mostly.

I think John Gamage spent forty-five years furious that his wife had turned out to be so much more capable than he had ever needed to notice.

I will not pretend there was no cost to me in any of it. I carried that winter inside me for a long time afterwards, the weight of it, the silence of it, the fact of having held myself so perfectly still for so many months that I had almost forgotten how to move freely.

There are things you do to survive, that change the shape of you.

For nearly three hundred years, that story has been travelling, and now it has been told to you.

Mary learned that there is a kind of power that does not announce itself. It does not wait for permission, precedent, or someone to tell it what is possible.

There she was. She had a barrel. She had a road. She had children who needed feeding and a world that had made no provision for her. So, she made her own.

Sometimes we do not become powerful because we are ready. Sometimes we become powerful because the moment arrives and there is no one else in the room. There is a power in us that does not always look like power. Sometimes it arrives as stillness. Sometimes as calculation. Sometimes as the next necessary step, taken with shaking hands.

The world has called her a trickster, a deceiver, a woman of dubious character who had failed to behave appropriately in her grief.

But you do not need permission to become the person the moment requires.

“There are things you do to survive, that change the shape of you.”

The question is not whether survival changes us. It always does. The question is whether, afterwards, we will call that change damage, or initiation.

Panic runs in circles. Wisdom sits down, breathes and asks: what is the next true thing? Wise women learn that wisdom is the opposite of fear. If we make a little space around fear, wisdom may rise, up through the cracks.

Mary had answered the one question that has saved so many women throughout history: what needs doing, and what do I have to do it with?

So, ask yourself, be honest: where are you still waiting for the world to make things possible? And what might already be in your hands?

With love, from the Heartwood,

The Crone

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This is a place for women who feel things deeply. Who find meaning in the turn of the season, who are drawn to the old stories and wild places, who are quietly-or not so quietly-in the process of remembering who they are.

I am Isadora.

A British artist, writer, poet, qigong teacher, coach and 5th Dan martial artist. I am a nature obsessive, a folklore hunter, a lover of fantasy, magic and ancient myth.
I am also a carer, a vegan, a D&D player and a woman who has done a great deal of her own healing work.

I am currently wring a book about magical women; about power, about the parts of ourselves we were taught to make small and what happens if we stop. I’ll share more with you…

I have walked through the crucible. I have burned. And emerged.

Letters from The Crone of Heartwood has grown out of all that.

I will write letters to you ~ they will arrive in your inbox filled with seasonal folklore, original artwork, poetry, short stories and small practices drawn from the embodied traditions I have spent decades inside: martial arts, qigong, coaching, the slow work of living close to the land.

This is not a wellness brand. It is not a product. It is a letter from someone who has sat with the hard things and found beauty in them, written for women who are doing the same.

The Crone is not a frightening figure as depicted in fairytales. She is simply someone who has lived enough to know some things; she has learned the hard way.
She is the keeper of the deep wood, the tender of the fire, the protector of the well, the one who tells the true stories.

She has been waiting for you.

Come in.

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