The Dance of the Moonflowers

...will you remember

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