REAL STORIES | E. Katherine Bates and the World She Could Not See

Photography by Patricia Bozan

There are people who experience one inexplicable event and spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened.

E. Katherine Bates was not one of them.

Her world seemed crowded with the unexplained.

Dreams appeared to anticipate death. Séances produced communications believed to come from people no longer living. Houses carried strange presences. Messages arrived through mediums. During years of travel, Bates encountered stories and experiences that repeatedly brought her to the same uncomfortable boundary between the world we can see and whatever might exist beyond it.

Eventually, she wrote them down.

Published in 1907, her book Seen and Unseen collected experiences involving Spiritualism, psychic phenomena, dreams, apparitions, telepathy and what Bates understood as evidence that human consciousness might extend beyond the physical world.

She did not present the book as fiction.

She presented it as testimony.

A Woman Interested in the Unexplainable

Emily Katherine Bates belonged to a period when Spiritualism had become an international phenomenon.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, séances, mediums, automatic writing, table-turning and psychical research had entered drawing rooms, newspapers and serious intellectual debate. The possibility of communicating with the dead fascinated believers, skeptics, scientists and writers alike.

Women occupied a particularly interesting place within this movement.

At a time when women's public authority remained restricted in many areas of society, the séance room created an unusual space in which women could become mediums, interpreters and authorities on experiences that supposedly originated beyond the material world.

Bates entered this strange cultural landscape as both participant and observer.

And she traveled.

Her accounts move through Britain and across journeys involving America, Australia, New Zealand and India. Wherever she went, the possibility of another world seemed to follow.

When Dreams Become Warnings

Some of the most unsettling stories in Seen and Unseen concern dreams.

Most dreams disappear within minutes of waking. Others remain strangely vivid, carrying an emotional weight that feels different from ordinary dreaming.

Bates became interested in the latter.

Throughout her writings, dreams sometimes appear alongside deaths, warnings or events that seemed significant only after something happened in waking life.

This is one of the oldest forms of supernatural experience recorded across cultures: the dream that seems to know something before the dreamer does.

Was it coincidence?

Subconscious perception?

Memory rearranged after an event?

Or something else?

Bates lived during a period when these questions were increasingly being examined by organizations devoted to psychical research. People collected testimony involving apparitions, telepathy, deathbed experiences and precognitive dreams in an attempt to determine whether patterns existed within experiences usually dismissed as superstition.

Bates added her own experiences to that archive.

The Séance Room

Then there were the mediums.

To understand Bates's world, we have to enter the Victorian and Edwardian séance room.

Imagine a small gathering of people sitting together, often around a table, waiting.

Sometimes they waited for knocks.

Sometimes for movement.

Sometimes for a medium to enter trance.

Sometimes for words believed to originate from someone who had died.

Bates attended séances and recorded communications she found difficult to dismiss.

She was not alone in her fascination. Spiritualism attracted enormous audiences during this period, including writers, intellectuals and investigators who disagreed passionately over whether mediums demonstrated genuine paranormal phenomena, unconscious psychological processes or deliberate fraud.

Fraud did exist.

So did sincere belief.

And between those two realities existed an enormous territory of experiences people could not easily explain.

Bates was willing to enter that territory.

The Dead Were Not Necessarily Gone

At the center of Spiritualism was a radical proposition:

Death might change a relationship without ending it.

For believers, the dead remained capable of communicating with the living.

That idea transformed grief.

A séance was no longer merely entertainment or occult curiosity. For some participants, it offered the possibility of hearing from a parent, spouse, child or friend whose physical body had disappeared.

This helps explain why Spiritualism became particularly powerful in societies experiencing enormous mortality. War, disease, childbirth and childhood illness meant that death was an intimate presence in everyday life.

The possibility that the dead continued somewhere just beyond ordinary perception could be profoundly comforting.

But Bates's writing is compelling precisely because comfort was not the only thing she encountered.

The unseen could also be strange.

What Makes a Story Evidence?

Reading historical paranormal accounts creates an immediate problem.

Memory is imperfect.

People misunderstand events.

Coincidences happen.

Belief changes interpretation.

Fraud is possible.

And a story written decades ago cannot be placed inside a laboratory and repeated for us.

But dismissing every unusual experience creates another problem.

Human beings have been reporting apparitions, prophetic dreams, sensed presences, voices, deathbed visions and encounters with the dead for thousands of years.

The interpretation changes.

The stories remain.

Bates believed some experiences deserved investigation precisely because they did not fit comfortably within ordinary explanations.

Her writing therefore occupies an intriguing space between memoir and investigation.

She was not merely asking readers to believe in ghosts.

She was asking them to consider testimony.

The Woman Who Kept Looking

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bates is not whether every event in Seen and Unseen happened exactly as she interpreted it.

It is that she kept looking.

Travel did not diminish her curiosity.

Neither did exposure to different beliefs.

She continued attending séances, listening to accounts, observing unusual events and considering whether consciousness might operate in ways human beings did not yet understand.

That willingness to remain uncertain is part of what makes historical supernatural writing so compelling.

There is an enormous difference between saying:

I know what exists beyond death.

and saying:

Something happened to me that I cannot explain.

The second leaves the door open.

Seen and Unseen

The title Bates chose for her book may ultimately contain its most important idea.

Our lives are divided constantly between what can be seen and what cannot.

We see bodies.

We do not see consciousness.

We see grief.

We do not see where love goes when the person receiving it dies.

We see someone sleeping.

We cannot enter the dream.

We see the room in which a strange experience occurs.

We cannot always determine what happened inside it.

More than a century after Bates recorded her experiences, many of the questions that fascinated her remain unresolved.

Do dreams occasionally anticipate events?

Can consciousness exist independently of the body?

Why do people near death sometimes report seeing deceased relatives?

Why do certain experiences of apparitions appear repeatedly across cultures?

Are these neurological phenomena?

Psychological phenomena?

Spiritual phenomena?

Something else entirely?

Bates believed there was more to reality than the visible world could account for.

Whether we believe her conclusions is another matter.

But that is the pleasure of reading a real supernatural account.

The witness tells us what she experienced.

History preserves the testimony.

And then the story passes to us.

We decide what we think happened.

About E. Katherine Bates

Emily Katherine Bates, generally published as E. Katherine Bates, was a British writer and traveler whose interests included Spiritualism and psychical phenomena. Her travels brought her into contact with mediums, séances and accounts of unusual experiences across several countries.

In Seen and Unseen, published in 1907, Bates gathered personal recollections and observations concerning Spiritualism, dreams, psychic experiences and phenomena she believed suggested the existence of realities beyond ordinary perception.

Her work offers a fascinating glimpse into the period when Spiritualism and early psychical research brought questions about ghosts, consciousness and communication with the dead into both private homes and public debate.

Source & Public Domain Credit

This article is based on E. Katherine Bates's Seen and Unseen, originally published in 1907.

The digitized edition is listed by Project Gutenberg as public domain in the United States, allowing the original historical text to be read and reproduced freely.

Author: E. Katherine Bates
Original Work:Seen and Unseen
Publication Year: 1907
Subject: Spiritualism, psychical phenomena and personal experiences
Copyright Status: Public domain in the United States

Source:Read Seen and Unseen at Project Gutenberg

REAL STORIES | Julian of Norwich and the Sixteen Visions That Changed Her Life

Photography by Ron Lach

More than six centuries ago, a woman lay gravely ill in medieval England believing she was about to die.

She was approximately thirty years old. We do not know the name she was given at birth. History remembers her instead as Julian of Norwich, the name associated with the church of St. Julian in Norwich, England, where she would later live as an anchoress, a woman who withdrew from ordinary public life in order to devote herself to prayer and contemplation.

But before Julian became one of medieval Christianity's most extraordinary mystics, she was a woman lying in a bed, surrounded by people who believed her life was ending.

Then she began to see things.

Julian would eventually describe sixteen revelations, or "showings," that she believed came directly from God. Her account became Revelations of Divine Love, a work now regarded as the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman.

Whether we approach Julian's experience through religion, mysticism, altered consciousness or the mysteries surrounding proximity to death, her story begins with something deeply human:

A woman believed she was dying.

And in that space between life and death, she experienced a world beyond the one everyone else could see.

The Illness

Julian dated her experience precisely.

It was May 13, 1373.

In her account, Julian explained that she had previously prayed for three particular spiritual gifts. Among them was an experience of severe bodily illness while she was still young, something she believed would bring her closer to an understanding of mortality and God.

At around thirty and a half years old, that illness came.

Her condition became so serious that those around her believed she would not survive. Julian described gradually losing physical sensation as death appeared to approach.

This is important when reading what happened next.

Her visions did not occur while she was peacefully sitting in contemplation.

They emerged during an experience she understood as the possible end of her life.

Sixteen Showings

Julian called what she experienced showings.

The first fifteen occurred over several hours, beginning in the early morning and continuing through approximately nine o'clock. A final revelation followed later. Over the years that followed, Julian continued contemplating what she believed she had been shown.

Her visions were intensely Christian. She saw imagery associated with Christ's suffering, blood, the Virgin Mary, sin, compassion and divine love.

But within those visions were also ideas that would make Julian remarkable even centuries later.

Again and again, she returned to love.

Not punishment.

Not terror.

Love.

Her mystical theology eventually developed around the conviction that divine love existed beneath everything, even when human beings could not understand suffering or see how something broken might ever become whole.

One of the messages associated with her revelations became the most famous expression of her work:

"All shall be well."

It is a remarkably hopeful conclusion from someone whose spiritual awakening occurred while she believed she was dying.

God as Mother

Perhaps one of the most fascinating elements of Julian's spirituality is her use of maternal imagery for the divine.

Living within medieval Christianity, Julian did not abandon Christian theology. Yet her understanding of God was not confined entirely to masculine imagery.

She wrote about Christ as mother.

Divine love could nourish, protect, birth and sustain.

For a woman writing in the fourteenth century, this was an extraordinary theological vision. The sacred, in Julian's understanding, could possess qualities her culture associated with motherhood while remaining fully divine.

It gives her work an unexpected resonance for modern readers interested in the feminine dimensions of spirituality.

Centuries before contemporary conversations about balancing masculine and feminine conceptions of divinity, a medieval woman sitting in spiritual isolation was already imagining sacred love through the body and language of motherhood.

The Hazelnut

Among Julian's most beautiful visions was something extraordinarily small.

She described seeing something in the palm of her hand resembling a hazelnut.

Looking at it, she wondered what it could possibly be.

Her answer was essentially everything that exists.

The tiny object seemed fragile enough that it might simply disappear. Yet Julian understood that it continued to exist because it was loved by God.

From something no larger than a nut, she drew an enormous spiritual conclusion.

Existence itself was held by love.

There is something strikingly modern about the image: the universe reduced to something small enough to rest in a woman's palm while still containing the mystery of creation.

Was It a Near-Death Experience?

It is tempting for a modern reader to place Julian's experience into contemporary categories.

Was she experiencing a near-death phenomenon?

Was her illness producing altered consciousness?

Were the visions neurological?

Were they religious experiences?

Or did Julian encounter precisely what she believed she encountered?

We cannot answer those questions with certainty.

And perhaps we do not need to.

The historical record tells us what Julian believed happened to her.

She experienced a devastating illness. She believed herself close to death. She received a sequence of visions. She survived. And rather than allowing the experience to disappear into memory, she spent years trying to understand it.

Her visions became the organizing spiritual event of her life.

That alone makes her story remarkable.

The Woman Behind the Visions

After her recovery, Julian eventually became an anchoress in Norwich.

Anchoresses occupied an unusual position in medieval religious life. They lived enclosed lives devoted largely to prayer, often in small rooms attached to churches. Yet enclosure did not necessarily mean complete disconnection from the community. People could visit an anchoress seeking spiritual counsel.

From that life of contemplation, Julian continued returning to the visions she had experienced.

Her surviving work exists in different forms, including a shorter account and a much more developed version reflecting years of contemplation.

She did not simply record what she saw.

She spent decades asking what it meant.

That distinction may be one reason her writing endured.

A Woman Writing Herself Into History

There is another extraordinary element to Julian's story.

She wrote it down.

Women's voices from medieval Europe survive far less frequently than men's, particularly voices describing their own interior spiritual experiences.

Julian preserved hers.

She recorded fear, illness, doubt, revelation and contemplation from the perspective of the woman who experienced them.

In doing so, she left behind something more intimate than doctrine.

She left testimony.

More than six hundred years later, we cannot enter the room where Julian lay believing she was dying. We cannot see what she saw or determine with certainty what produced the visions that followed.

We have only her words.

But perhaps that is what makes accounts like Julian's so compelling.

Real stories of mystical experience rarely arrive with proof neatly attached.

They survive because someone experienced something powerful enough to change the direction of a life and decided it was worth telling.

Julian survived her illness.

The visions survived Julian.

And centuries later, the woman who once believed she was disappearing from this world remains present through the story she refused to let disappear.

About Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was an English Christian mystic and anchoress who lived during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Her exact identity and birth name remain unknown. Her writings grew from sixteen mystical revelations she reported experiencing during a severe illness in 1373.

Her Revelations of Divine Love is regarded as the earliest surviving English-language book known to have been written by a woman. Julian's spirituality emphasized divine love, compassion, hope and the maternal imagery of Christ.

Source & Public Domain Credit

This article is based on Julian of Norwich's own account in Revelations of Divine Love. The edition edited by Grace Warrack, first published in 1901, is listed by Project Gutenberg as public domain in the United States.

Original mystic and author: Julian of Norwich
Recorded visions: 1373
Source text:Revelations of Divine Love
Edition: Grace Warrack, 1901
Copyright status of sourced edition: Public domain in the United States

Read Revelations of Divine Love at Project Gutenberg

“Summer” by Edith Wharton

Image by Nastasya Banana

Note from Editor:

Every generation inherits stories that continue to speak long after their authors are gone.

Published in 1917, Summer is Edith Wharton's only novel centered on the emotional awakening of a young woman. Through its exploration of longing, identity, freedom, and the quiet courage it takes to become oneself, the novel remains as relevant today as it was more than a century ago.

For this issue of Bruja Magazine, we are sharing an excerpt from the novel at a pivotal moment in Charity Royall's journey—a moment where hope, desire, and self-discovery begin to reshape the life she has always known.

As you read, consider how every generation of women must eventually ask the same questions:

Who am I becoming? What life am I choosing? And what parts of myself have been waiting to awaken?

We invite you to experience Edith Wharton's timeless words and discover why Summer continues to resonate with readers over one hundred years after its first publication.

Originally published in 1917. Presented here as a public domain literary work.

He stopped and lifted his hat with a shy smile. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I thought there was no one here."

Charity stood before him, barring his way. "You can't come in. The library ain't open to the public Wednesdays."

"I know it's not; but my cousin gave me her key."

"Miss Hatchard's got no right to give her key to other folks, any more'n I have. I'm the librarian and I know the by-laws. This is my library."

The young man looked profoundly surprised.

"Why, I know it is; I'm so sorry if you mind my coming."

"I suppose you came to see what more you could say to set her against me? But you needn't trouble: it's my library today, but it won't be this time tomorrow. I'm on the way now to take her back the key and the register."

Young Harney's face grew grave, but without betraying the consciousness of guilt she had looked for.

"I don't understand," he said. "There must be some mistake. Why should I say things against you to Miss Hatchard--or to anyone?"

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The apparent evasiveness of the reply caused Charity's indignation to overflow. "I don't know why you should. I could understand Orma Fry's doing it, because she's always wanted to get me out of here ever since the first day. I can't see why, when she's got her own home, and her father to work for her; nor Ida Targatt, neither, when she got a legacy from her step-brother on'y last year. But anyway we all live in the same place, and when it's a place like North Dormer it's enough to make people hate each other just to have to walk down the same street every day. But you don't live here, and you don't know anything about any of us, so what did you have to meddle for? Do you suppose the other girls'd have kept the books any better'n I did? Why, Orma Fry don't hardly know a book from a flat-iron! And what if I don't always sit round here doing nothing till it strikes five up at the church? Who cares if the library's open or shut? Do you suppose anybody ever comes here for books? What they'd like to come for is to meet the fellows they're going with if I'd let 'em. But I wouldn't let Bill Sollas from over the hill hang round here waiting for the youngest Targatt girl, because I know him...that's all...even if I don't know about books all I ought to...."

She stopped with a choking in her throat. Tremors of rage were running through her, and she steadied herself against the edge of the desk lest he should see her weakness.

What he saw seemed to affect him deeply, for he grew red under his sunburn, and stammered out: "But, Miss Royall, I assure you...I assure you..."

His distress inflamed her anger, and she regained her voice to fling back: "If I was you I'd have the nerve to stick to what I said!"

The taunt seemed to restore his presence of mind. "I hope I should if I knew; but I don't. Apparently something disagreeable has happened, for which you think I'm to blame. But I don't know what it is, because I've been up on Eagle Ridge ever since the early morning."

I don't know where you've been this morning, but I know you were here in this library yesterday; and it was you that went home and told your cousin the books were in bad shape, and brought her round to see how I'd neglected them."

Young Harney looked sincerely concerned. "Was that what you were told? I don't wonder you're angry. The books are in bad shape, and as some are interesting it's a pity. I told Miss Hatchard they were suffering from dampness and lack of air; and I brought her here to show her how easily the place could be ventilated. I also told her you ought to have some one to help you do the dusting and airing. If you were given a wrong version of what I said I'm sorry; but I'm so fond of old books that I'd rather see them made into a bonfire than left to moulder away like these."

Charity felt her sobs rising and tried to stifle them in words. "I don't care what you say you told her. All I know is she thinks it's all my fault, and I'm going to lose my job, and I wanted it more'n anyone in the village, because I haven't got anybody belonging to me, the way other folks have. All I wanted was to put aside money enough to get away from here sometime. D'you suppose if it hadn't been for that I'd have kept on sitting day after day in this old vault?"

We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!

Of this appeal her hearer took up only the last question. "It is an old vault; but need it be? That's the point. And it's my putting the question to my cousin that seems to have been the cause of the trouble." His glance explored the melancholy penumbra of the long narrow room, resting on the blotched walls, the discoloured rows of books, and the stern rosewood desk surmounted by the portrait of the young Honorius. "Of course it's a bad job to do anything with a building jammed against a hill like this ridiculous mausoleum: you couldn't get a good draught through it without blowing a hole in the mountain. But it can be ventilated after a fashion, and the sun can be let in: I'll show you how if you like...." The architect's passion for improvement had already made him lose sight of her grievance, and he lifted his stick instructively toward the cornice. But her silence seemed to tell him that she took no interest in the ventilation of the library, and turning back to her abruptly he held out both hands. "Look here--you don't mean what you said? You don't really think I'd do anything to hurt you?"

A new note in his voice disarmed her: no one had ever spoken to her in that tone.

"Oh, what DID you do it for then?" she wailed. He had her hands in his, and she was feeling the smooth touch that she had imagined the day before on the hillside.

He pressed her hands lightly and let them go. "Why, to make things pleasanter for you here; and better for the books. I'm sorry if my cousin twisted around what I said. She's excitable, and she lives on trifles: I ought to have remembered that. Don't punish me by letting her think you take her seriously."

It was wonderful to hear him speak of Miss Hatchard as if she were a querulous baby: in spite of his shyness he had the air of power that the experience of cities probably gave. It was the fact of having lived in Nettleton that made lawyer Royall, in spite of his infirmities, the strongest man in North Dormer; and Charity was sure that this young man had lived in bigger places than Nettleton.

She felt that if she kept up her denunciatory tone he would secretly class her with Miss Hatchard; and the thought made her suddenly simple.

"It don't matter to Miss Hatchard how I take her. Mr. Royall says she's going to get a trained librarian; and I'd sooner resign than have the village say she sent me away."

"Naturally you would. But I'm sure she doesn't mean to send you away. At any rate, won't you give me the chance to find out first and let you know? It will be time enough to resign if I'm mistaken."

Her pride flamed into her cheeks at the suggestion of his intervening. "I don't want anybody should coax her to keep me if I don't suit."

He coloured too. "I give you my word I won't do that. Only wait till tomorrow, will you?" He looked straight into her eyes with his shy grey glance. "You can trust me, you know--you really can."

All the old frozen woes seemed to melt in her, and she murmured awkwardly, looking away from him: "Oh, I'll wait."

Why Women Need Celebration More Than Self-Improvement

Photography by Ericka Sánchez

For as long as I can remember, womanhood has been a list of assignments.

Lose weight. Gain weight. Be softer. Don't cry. Cry more. Be stronger. Be ambitious... but not too ambitious. Don't intimidate. Stand up for yourself. Heal your trauma. Fix your habits. Improve your mindset. Be more positive. Be more aggressive. Learn the lesson. Become the best version of yourself.

The language changes with every generation, but the message remains remarkably consistent: there is always another version of yourself waiting to be achieved. And even as I write this, I think about the fact that within spiritual communities, the same pressure persists. The toxic positivity of staying positive in order to change. The rush to heal our wounds, balance our chakras, release our shadows, manifest our desires, and keep evolving.

Keep evolving.

Keep evolving.

While growth is an absolutely beautiful thing and is often necessary, it can become another form of striving that is just as toxic as the negativity or stagnation we are leaving behind. It can become another way for us to see ourselves as not enough. This is one of the reasons June is such an important month.

It is refreshing.

Because it reminds us that we are enough - in this time, in this moment, in this now - with simply a flower upon our heads and our faces turned toward the sun.

Historically, the days leading to the Summer Solstice were not dedicated to self-improvement. They were dedicated to celebration.

Across Europe, communities gathered beneath the lengthening daylight to dance, feast, weave flower crowns, sing, and honor the abundance of the season. Bonfires illuminated hillsides. Young women braided flowers and herbs into wreaths. Families remained outdoors long into the evening as the sun lingered on the horizon.

In our celebration, therein lies transformation.

In our celebration, therein lies recognition.

We look to the earth and see what is already happening. We recognize the Mother loving us back. The crops are growing. The flowers are blooming. The earth is alive. For one brief moment each year, people pause to acknowledge what already exists rather than obsess over what still needs to be changed.

In this era, we are masters of flaw recognition. We all know what we need to work on. We all know our insecurities and unfinished projects. We all know our emotional wounds and our goals for the next month and the next year. Hell, the next ten years. But can we say what we are proud of? We look to the birds and marvel at their wings and colorful plumage. Yet how often do we marvel at our own eyes or the sheen of our own hair? We look to the grass and see the green and are reminded of childhood, of rolling down hills without a care in the world. Yet do we marvel at the feet that have carried us through years and years of life without immediately pointing out that our manicure is two weeks overdue?

In June, I call upon women to be proud of themselves without hesitation. Do not celebrate your milestones with reluctance. Do not diminish your accomplishments. Remember, we are the light bearers. We are the life bearers, whether we choose to give life or not. We are the portals through which humanity itself enters this world. That is not a compliment. It is a truth that cannot so easily be brushed aside.

And while a billion-dollar industry exists to convince us that fulfillment lies just beyond the next purchase, the next certification, the next breakthrough, or the next transformational retreat, there is always the wind willing to acknowledge your beauty for free as it brushes your cheek with a summer kiss.

There is always another mountain. But there is rarely a moment to stand at the summit. The Summer Solstice offers an alternative philosophy. It offers self-love and recognition in the present moment. Nature never apologizes for its strength, its abundance, or its lack thereof. Does the sunflower question whether it deserves to turn its face toward the light? Does the oak tree spend its days wishing it were taller?

It simply is.

Perhaps this is why so many women feel drawn to flower crowns, garden gatherings, outdoor dinners, and seasonal rituals during this time of year. Beneath the aesthetics lies something deeper: the remembrance of a tradition and an ancient truth.

Celebration is not a reward for perfection. It is a practice of recognition. Celebration reminds us that though we may not have all the achievements we desire, we are still here. We are still living. We are still becoming.

There will always be time for improvement.

But June reminds us that there must also be time for celebration.

And perhaps the most important thing a woman can celebrate is not who she hopes to become, but who she already is.

When the Body Starts Screaming: May, Beltane, and the Female Cost of Ignored Pain

Photo by Léo Gilmant

May arrives dressed as renewal. The flowers bloom, the light changes, the earth softens, and everywhere there is an expectation that life should begin to feel lighter. Astrologically, May is a month of acceleration and emergence. We move through the embodied steadiness of Taurus - a sign deeply connected to the senses, the physical body, pleasure, appetite, and material existence - while approaching the mental quickening of Gemini. It is a seasonal threshold when what has been dormant no longer wishes to remain underground. Things surface in May. Emotionally, spiritually, and physically, this is often the month when what we have successfully buried begins to make itself known.

That is part of why May can feel strangely confronting for women.

Within pagan tradition, May also carries Beltane, the ancient fire festival historically observed at the beginning of the month to mark fertility, passion, sensuality, and the full return of life force after winter. Beltane was a celebration of vitality, but it was also a crossing point - an acknowledgment that the bright half of the year had begun and that dormant energy was once again moving. Fire rituals, purification rites, and communal observances all centered around one essential idea: life cannot remain suppressed forever. Nature pushes outward. Desire returns. The body wakes up.

Yet many women move into May not feeling invigorated, but exhausted. Instead of bloom, there is inflammation. Instead of sensuality, there is numbness. Instead of vitality, there is adrenal fatigue, anxiety, sleeplessness, unexplained tears, panic, weight retention, chronic pain, or the deep and unnerving sensation that something internally is no longer cooperating.

This is not incidental.

On the three-dimensional plane, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this week specifically is National Women’s Health Week, a national observance intended to remind women to schedule the appointments, screenings, and checkups they routinely postpone. But these observances, while practical, point to something much larger than annual medical housekeeping. They reveal a long-standing truth about female conditioning: women have been trained, historically and culturally, to delay attention to their own suffering until suffering becomes impossible to manage.

Women are expected to continue functioning while uncomfortable. We are taught to normalize fatigue, to dismiss hormonal shifts, to explain away anxiety, to minimize pain, to work through burnout, and to place the body’s complaints somewhere behind the needs of children, spouses, work, money, caregiving, logistics, and emotional labor. By the time many women seek help, the body is no longer signaling politely. It is interrupting.

This is when the body starts screaming.

Sometimes that scream is medical: autoimmune flare, nervous system dysregulation, chronic migraines, gut dysfunction, hormonal collapse, unexplained inflammation, fertility struggles, or the kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems capable of repairing. Sometimes the scream is psychological: panic attacks, rage, depression, emotional detachment, brain fog, or an inability to tolerate one more demand. More often than not, it is both. The body and the mind are not separate enough to suffer independently, no matter how modern medicine prefers to categorize them.

For centuries women have been taught to distrust this connection. Female discomfort has long been trivialized, romanticized, or pathologized. A woman in pain was dramatic. A woman emotionally perceptive was unstable. A woman highly sensitive to her environment was irrational. A woman whose body reacted visibly to stress was hysterical. We know the historical language well because women who listened too closely - to cycles, herbs, dreams, blood, intuition, weather, and the unseen shifts in atmosphere - were often the women pushed to the margins and called witches.

This is where the spiritual thread becomes impossible to ignore.

The witch archetype was never simply about occult aesthetics or ritual for ritual’s sake. At its oldest root, it was often the woman who understood that the body is not separate from intuition. She knew that symptoms arrive before collapse. She knew that grief lodges somewhere. She knew that anxiety changes breathing, that trauma changes digestion, that resentment changes hormones, that silence changes the nervous system, and that environments can make a body ill long before a physician can name why. Traditional women knew how to read the body symbolically and practically at once. The body was not just anatomy. It was messenger, warning system, weather vane, and archive.

Modern women, by contrast, are rewarded for severing that communication.

We are praised when we remain productive despite depletion. We are admired when we sacrifice sleep, appetite, boundaries, and emotional stability for everyone around us. We are considered strong when our suffering remains invisible. We wear overextension as discipline and dissociation as competence. Then we act surprised when the body eventually revolts.

But the body does revolt. It always does.

That is why May feels so symbolically appropriate for this conversation. Beltane asks us to look at life force. Mental Health Awareness Month asks us to look at what has been mentally buried. National Women’s Health Week asks us to look at what has been physically postponed. All three point to the same uncomfortable reality: women are often the last to grant themselves permission to investigate their own pain.

And pain, ignored long enough, does not disappear. It changes form.

It becomes insomnia. It becomes hormonal chaos. It becomes clenched jaws, inflamed guts, racing thoughts, sudden tears, sexual numbness, skin eruptions, migraines, shallow breathing, and a nervous system that never truly powers down. The body will continue translating what the conscious mind refuses to process until translation becomes disruption.

This is why so many women feel “off” in spring without understanding why. Spring is not only a season of blossoms. It is a season of emergence. The same earth that forces seeds upward also has a way of forcing buried truths to the surface. What winter allowed us to numb, spring often makes visible.

There is something deeply spiritual in recognizing that the scream is not the body betraying us. It is the body refusing to lie any longer.

Women have spent centuries being taught to ignore what is inside of us - instinct, intuition, fatigue, sadness, pain, resentment, and warning signs alike. We have been told to smile through it, organize through it, mother through it, work through it, and remain desirable through it. But there comes a point when the body stops negotiating with performance.

It raises its voice.

And perhaps that voice, however inconvenient, is not punishment.

Perhaps it is the first honest thing we have heard in years.

The Woman Who Followed the Sound: An April Folk Story of the Green World

Photography by Cottonbro Studio

There once was a woman who walked beyond the edge of her village. It was the first true arrival of spring, the kind that does not ask permission but announces itself through softened ground and air that feels newly inhabited. Some would later say it was April first, though in those places time was not measured by calendars so much as by the behavior of the earth itself. In her departure there was nothing remarkable. No urgency. No witness who could say, with certainty, when the moment shifted from ordinary to something else. She simply followed the sound.

Whether it was music, wind, or something less tangible was never agreed upon. But it was a sound. Or rather, something that resembled one. A frequency that moved beneath hearing, something felt more than received. There were those in the village who understood this distinction. The old ones, they were called. Those who had lived long enough to recognize that the land does not always speak in ways the ear can translate. They said the earth spoke to everyone. Not in language, not in sound, but in vibration. And that every so often, someone would answer.

She was gone for days.

Or at least that is what the others believed. Because when she returned, nothing in her appearance suggested absence. Her clothes carried no sign of travel. Her body bore no evidence of hardship or distance. Nothing, except the quiet arithmetic of time, could have insisted that she had been gone at all. It might have been minutes. It might have been something else entirely. And yet those closest to her felt it immediately. Not in what they saw, but in what they sensed.

As she moved through space, it was as if the air adjusted around her. Not dramatically, but subtly, as though density itself had shifted. Her presence did not arrive in the same way it once had. Her speech changed, though not in volume. It became measured, inward, as if each word had to pass through another place before reaching her mouth. She seemed to be listening while speaking, attending to something just beyond the visible. There was a quality to her attention that unsettled those who knew her best. It was not distraction. It was orientation. As though she were encountering this world for the first time, or perhaps remembering it as it had once been.

When pressed, she offered only a single explanation.

“I went where everything was alive.”

In early Celtic regions, particularly in parts of Ireland and Scotland, there existed a long held understanding of seasonal thresholds. The turning between spring and summer, what would later be called Beltane, was not simply agricultural. It was considered a point of permeability. Fires were lit not only for protection, but for passage. Livestock were driven between them. Bodies were marked by smoke. It was believed that during this time, the boundary between the human world and what lay beyond it thinned. Not vanished, but softened. The land itself was understood to be animate, responsive, aware.

Within that framework, stories like hers were not dismissed. They were recognized.

The place she described, though she did not name it, aligned with what was often referred to as the Green World. Not heaven. Not death. But a realm of intensified life, where growth was not seasonal but constant, where time did not behave in the ways humans expected it to. In older accounts, particularly those recorded in early folklore collections of the nineteenth century, there are repeated references to individuals who crossed into such spaces. Most often women. Most often during periods of seasonal change. They did not return with spectacle. They returned with alteration.

Something in them had shifted.

It was not always visible, but it was always felt.

In the weeks that followed her return, small things began to reorganize around her. Plants seemed to respond to her presence. Not dramatically, not in ways that could be proven, but enough to be noticed. Animals approached her without hesitation. Women, especially, found themselves drawn to her, though they could not always articulate why. They came with questions they had not known they were carrying. Questions about the body, about longing, about the quiet unrest that seemed to rise with the warming of the earth.

She did not call herself anything. Not a healer. Not a seer. She did not name what had happened to her.

But she listened.

And those who paid attention began to understand that what had changed was not her form, but her orientation to life itself. She no longer moved as someone contained by the world she inhabited. She moved as someone in conversation with it. As if the boundary between her and the living field around her had thinned, just as the old ones had always said it would.

There are reasons these stories persist. Not because they can be proven, but because they remain recognizable. Even now, April carries that same undercurrent. A subtle stirring that cannot be fully explained by weather or light alone. It arrives in the body first. In restlessness. In memory. In a kind of quiet alertness that does not always make sense.

In older traditions, this was never dismissed as imagination. It was understood as response. The earth shifting, and the body answering.

The woman who walked beyond the edge of her village was not the first. She would not be the last. What happened to her was not an exception, but an expression of something cyclical. Something that returns each year, whether it is acknowledged or not.

Because spring does not simply bloom.

It calls.

And sometimes, someone follows.

Zora Neale Hurston and the Magic of Folklore: The Woman Who Preserved Hoodoo Traditions

Long before spiritual traditions like rootwork, hoodoo, and ancestral folk practices were discussed openly in books or academic spaces, one woman was quietly documenting them with care and respect. While much of the world dismissed these traditions as superstition, she recognized them as something else entirely: cultural knowledge.

Zora Neale Hurston did not simply study folklore. She preserved the living spiritual traditions of the African diaspora at a time when they were rarely taken seriously.

Today she is widely known as the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, but her work extended far beyond literature. Hurston was also one of the first Black women anthropologists in the United States, and her research took her deep into the spiritual practices of the American South and the Caribbean.

What she discovered there would change how future generations understood magic, folklore, and cultural memory.

A Childhood Surrounded by Stories

Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first self governed Black towns in the United States. Storytelling was woven into daily life there. Front porches became stages where people shared folktales, jokes, spiritual beliefs, and oral histories passed down through generations.

From an early age Hurston learned that stories carried power. They preserved memory, identity, and knowledge that did not always appear in official histories.

This early exposure shaped the work she would later pursue as both a writer and anthropologist.

Documenting Hoodoo in the American South

In the 1930s Hurston began traveling through Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana collecting folklore and spiritual traditions. She immersed herself in communities where hoodoo, a system of African American folk magic, remained part of everyday life.

Unlike many researchers of her time, Hurston did not approach these traditions as an outsider looking down on them. She lived among the people she studied and allowed practitioners to teach her their methods and beliefs.

Her book Mules and Men became one of the most important records of hoodoo ever written.

Within its pages she documented:

spiritual baths used for cleansing and protection
herbal mixtures and root work
candle rituals and charms
beliefs about luck, fate, and spiritual influence

What made Hurston’s work remarkable was not just the information she recorded, but the respect she showed toward the people who shared it.

She treated their knowledge as wisdom rather than superstition.

Journeys Into Caribbean Spiritual Traditions

Hurston’s research eventually took her beyond the American South. In the late 1930s she traveled to Haiti and Jamaica to study spiritual traditions connected to the African diaspora.

Her experiences there became the basis for another important book, Tell My Horse.

In Haiti she attended Vodou ceremonies and observed rituals that honored ancestral spirits. She documented how spiritual practices shaped everyday life and community structure.

These journeys allowed Hurston to show readers something rarely acknowledged at the time: that African derived spiritual traditions were complex systems of belief with their own philosophies, ethics, and cultural significance.

Magic as Cultural Memory

Hurston understood that folklore was more than entertainment. It carried the memory of a people.

Stories, rituals, and spiritual practices preserved knowledge that could survive even when formal history ignored or erased it. Through her writing she ensured that these traditions would not disappear.

Her work helped future generations recognize that hoodoo, Vodou, and other folk spiritual systems were not relics of the past. They were living traditions shaped by resilience and adaptation.

The Legacy She Left Behind

For many years after her death in 1960, Hurston’s work was largely forgotten. It was not until the late twentieth century that scholars and readers began rediscovering the depth of her contributions.

Today she is celebrated not only as a brilliant novelist but also as a cultural preservationist who safeguarded spiritual knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Zora Neale Hurston did not claim to be a mystic or a practitioner of magic. Yet in many ways she performed a different kind of magic altogether.

She listened.
She recorded.
She ensured that the voices and traditions of her community would continue to be heard.

And through that work, she left behind a legacy that still speaks today.

The Woman Who Figured Out the Secret to Immortality

Image Courtesy Library of Congress by Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer Article by Bruja’s Circle

For centuries, humans have searched for immortality. Ancient myths tell of elixirs, sacred waters, and hidden knowledge that could allow a person to live forever. Alchemists experimented with strange substances. Kings and emperors sent explorers across oceans looking for fountains of youth. Entire philosophies were built around the desire to escape time. But immortality rarely looks like the legends imagine it. Sometimes it looks like a woman sitting quietly at a desk, writing. Joyce Carol Oates has spent more than half a century doing exactly that. While many writers produce a handful of books in their lifetime, Oates has written dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, essays, and poems. Her body of work stretches across generations, touching subjects as varied as violence, identity, family, history, and the strange emotional terrain of ordinary life.

Looking at the scale of her work, one begins to suspect that Oates may have discovered something others have missed.

Not a potion. Not a secret ritual. But a different form of immortality.

Writing as a Way of Remaining

Every story preserves a moment of consciousness. When a writer records an observation, an emotion, or a piece of the human experience, it does not disappear with time. It becomes part of a larger conversation that continues long after the writer is gone. Readers open a book decades or centuries later and suddenly find themselves face to face with another mind. The distance between past and present collapses. In this way, literature becomes a kind of time travel. Oates has spoken often about discipline rather than inspiration. Writing, in her view, is not something that waits for perfect conditions. It is something that happens every day, through persistence and attention. That consistency may be the real secret.

The Legacy of Attention

Many people assume immortality belongs to extraordinary moments. Great discoveries. Historic achievements. Dramatic events. But writers understand something different. Immortality can grow out of careful observation. The small details of life that might otherwise be forgotten. The texture of a conversation. The tension in a room. The quiet thoughts that pass through someone’s mind at night. When these moments are captured in language, they remain accessible to future readers. A person does not need to live forever for their perspective to endure. Their voice simply needs to be recorded.

Women and the Question of Legacy

For much of history, the literary world did not easily grant women this kind of permanence. Many women wrote, but their work was overlooked, unpublished, or dismissed as insignificant. The idea that a woman could leave a lasting intellectual or artistic legacy was often treated as secondary to other roles society expected her to fulfill. Writers like Joyce Carol Oates changed that narrative. Through sheer persistence and dedication to the craft, she created a body of work so extensive that it cannot be ignored. Her stories continue to circulate through classrooms, libraries, and private collections around the world. Her voice travels farther each year.

A Different Kind of Immortality

The secret to immortality, it turns out, may not involve escaping death at all. It may simply require creating something that continues to speak. A story that moves someone decades from now. A sentence that lingers in the mind. A book that becomes part of another person’s life. Joyce Carol Oates did not set out to defeat time. She simply kept writing. Yet through that practice, she achieved something remarkable. Her work has become part of the cultural memory that shapes how people understand the world.

That is its own form of permanence. And perhaps that is the real secret.

Behind My Eye: A Spell for the Half-Light

By Selahmon Risingsun Photography by Matias Mango

Image by Matias Mango

I have never truly spoken about what it’s like to be legally blind. Maybe because language feels too small to carry it. It’s not just about sight; it’s about initiation. One day, you wake up inside a dimming world, and it feels like being sealed in a dark room where the walls breathe and the light switch refuses to exist. You wait for the return of what was lost, until you realize—
the darkness isn’t punishment.
It’s a portal.

Behind my eye, there is a hidden universe. A place where light folds in on itself like silk. It’s a kind of velvet void, ancient and sentient. It hums with the songs of all things unseen. I used to think half of me had gone missing—but no, half of me simply went elsewhere. That part of me began listening instead of looking. Feeling instead of chasing. Knowing instead of seeing.

They call it blindness. I call it witchcraft.

Because now I can sense storms before they gather. I can feel people’s truths crawling beneath their skin before they speak. My intuition sharpened into blade and balm. My one good eye stares into this world, while the other gazes into the one beneath it. Together, they make me whole.

I don’t talk about my vision much, not out of shame but devotion. This eye is my familiar, my oracle. It sees without needing to see. It reads the room, the wind, the pulse of the air. I’ve stopped wishing for symmetry. Perfection is dull; perception is divine.

People tell me my eyes look like the sky arguing with itself—one dusk, one dawn. Sometimes they say it feels like falling into a galaxy. Maybe that’s what I am now: a galaxy rearranged.

There’s a strange sensuality in half-light, a soft ache that glows where sight ends and spirit begins. I’ve made a home there. I’ve learned that beauty isn’t in what we see, but in how we sense.

So when they ask, “How does it feel to lose vision?”
I tell them:
I didn’t lose.
I transmuted.

Behind my eye lies the night, the whisper, the knowing.
And when I close the other, I see everything.

Lesson: The Power of Partial Light

Disability is not a deficit—it’s a different kind of doorway.
We live in a world that worships symmetry, speed, and sameness, but those who move differently—who see differently—carry sacred sight. They remind us that wholeness has never meant perfection.

When you lose one sense, the others rise like ancient guardians.
When one path closes, another—often quieter, wiser, more luminous—opens.
The lesson is this: we must stop romanticizing “normal” and start revering variation.

The body is not broken just because it bends a different way.
The mind is not lesser because it perceives through shadow.
And blindness—whether of the eye or the heart—can become its own teacher if you let it.

Those of us who live with visible or invisible differences are not asking for pity.
We are asking for presence.
To be seen not as lacking, but as luminous in a different frequency.
Because every so-called limitation can become an instrument of intuition, creativity, and divine perspective.

Behind every altered sense is a portal to deeper knowing.
Behind every scar, a star waiting to be recognized.

When Love Demands Too Much: The Grief I Buried Beneath His

By Selahmon Risingsun Photography by RDNE Stock project

What happens when you’re left to grieve not only the person,
but the weight of carrying everything they could not?

Today began in light, but it ended in shadow.
Facebook — that tireless archivist of memory — unearthed ghosts I had tried to lay to rest.
A photograph of him appeared, then a reminder of his late mother.
Her words to me surfaced, like spirits rising through water.

She was not just his mother.
She became my confidante,
my witness,
my sacred ally when the nights grew long.
I leaned on her when addiction was the third body in our bed.
I poured my questions into her inbox like prayers:
How do I hold him together?
How do I keep us from breaking?

But clarity comes with distance.
Now I see:
I was the one holding us up.
I was the one arranging therapy,
chasing AA meetings,
dragging us both toward a healing he never tried to hold.
I was the altar,
the offering,
the sacrifice.

And when she died,
I carried his grief too.
Mine was silenced.
My tears belonged to him.
My strength was spent outward,
never inward.
I dissolved.
I disappeared.
I drowned in silence.

Years later, the storm came.
Tears, long overdue,
wept not just for her,
but for myself.
Because back then, I was too busy bracing his body
to let my own shake.
Too busy smothering my sorrow
so his could breathe.

It is a bitter revelation:
while I was fighting to be strong for him,
he never once tried to be strong for me.

This is not condemnation.
It is testimony.
Addiction is a merciless captor.
Grief is an unforgiving guest.
But love — true love — cannot survive when it rests on only one back.
Grief, buried, will always seep back through the cracks.
And healing cannot be outsourced.

I write this for the ones drowning quietly in someone else’s ocean.
For those mistaking endurance for intimacy.
For those confusing sacrifice for love.

Here is what I’ve learned:
When you do all the work,
you do not save the relationship.
You only lose yourself.
And sometimes the most sacred act of love
is not in holding on,
but in finally letting go.

---

Lesson

Love is not martyrdom.
It is not meant to consume you,
to drain you,
to hollow you out.
If you find yourself carrying both your grief and theirs,
know this: you are not failing.
You are awakening.
True love requires two hands, two hearts, two souls rising.
And when only one is willing,
the holiest act is release.

When the Walls Come Down

Written By Selah Risingsun Photography by Julia Malushko

There is a strange magic in the moment before collapse.
Everyone else runs when the old towers begin to sway.
But some of us — the ones with ash on our hands and fire in our veins — stay.
We do not run from the dust; we inhale it. We let it mark us.
We hold up our hands like lanterns, we press record, we take pictures. We witness.

For years, I built my life as if it were a fortress, stone upon stone, secret upon secret.
Family, lovers, silence, ritual — stacked too high to see the ground.
And then, without warning, the beams gave way.
No earthquake. No fire.
Just the inevitable undoing of something that had forgotten how to breathe.

I thought I would be afraid.
I thought I would scatter like birds at the crack of thunder.
But something older, something sparse and guiding, whispered: Stay.
Stay in the ruins. Stay in the smoke. Stay and see.

So I stripped myself bare,
casting off layer after layer like serpent-skin.
A demolition I did not cause but could no longer resist.
I walked into the wreckage with my own two hands,
taking pictures — not for nostalgia, but for proof.
Proof that death and rebirth can be twin flames.
Proof that the ground beneath the ashes still belonged to me.

By the time the dust settled,
I had seen what most are too fearful to see:
the skeleton of the old and the quick pulse of the new,
rising out of the same soil,
rebuilt faster than grief,
taller than sorrow,
a temple where a tomb once stood.

---

Lesson in the Dust

To every woman who feels her own walls trembling:
your body will always whisper first.
A knot in the stomach, a tightening of breath, a dream you cannot shake.
Listen. That is the spell. That is the warning.

Do not fear the collapse.
Do not run from the falling bricks of your old self.
Stand in the dust.
Breathe it in like incense.
You are not only the one being undone —
you are the witch, the witness, and the builder of what comes next.

Demolition is never the end.
It is the clearing for your awakening. 

The Circle Returns

Written by Selahmon Risingsun Photo by hello aesthe

I tried to run from the roots.
Tried to outrun the ghosts of my bloodline.
Four years of silence carved between me and my father,
a silence born of wounds,
boundaries,
and the kind of pain you tuck away like knives under the bed.

I swore I’d never come back.
But circles are sacred.
And life is a circle.

Here I am.
Not because I lost—
but because the circle called me home.

The girl I was once trembled in shadows,
but the woman I am now stands in firelight.
Her eyes are not the same.
Her bones have been baptized in storms.
She knows that return is not regression.
Return is resurrection.

We try to break from our family’s threads,
but threads become roots,
and roots always remember.
The stillness of this moment says:
stop fighting.
Look again.
See what has grown in the ruins.

The past has claws, yes.
But I do not bleed for it anymore.
The grudge is a chain.
And I am not meant to be bound.

So I forgive—
not to erase,
but to exhale.
I release—
not to excuse,
but to live.

This is the alchemy:
to turn bitterness into breath,
to turn history into healing,
to turn a wound into a window.

Full circle is not a prison.
It is a spell.
It is medicine.
It is where I remember that roots are not cages.
Roots are where the magic begins.

Lesson

Return is not defeat; it’s initiation.
Look with new eyes.
Let forgiveness free you and boundaries keep you whole.
Judge the now, not the story then—are they repairing, am I growing?
If yes: root and rise.
If no: bless and go.
Either way, I become.

"The Truth About Empaths No One Talks About (From Empath Diaries)

Article written by © yourrrr_soul Photo by Hasnain Babar

"...many people think that an empath is a person who has grown up in love, harmony and understanding and therefore can feel  everything. 

That’s not exactly true.

The strongest and most talented empaths, on the contrary, grew up in narcissistic families where they were underestimated, their abilities devalued, where they were not heard, silenced and where no one understood them. 

They grew up in families where emotions were punished and where emotions were considered shameful and where it was customary to hide them.

These children smiled in the company and cried at home, but no one paid attention to it. 

The strongest and most talented empaths grew up behind a narcissistic facade with parents who did not know how to love and often thought that love was control."

Empath Diaries ©yourrrr_soul

If this is you you should to remember:

you’re not “too emotional.”

You’re not “too much.”

You’re a miracle of resilience.

Affirmations for the Empath Who Is Reclaiming Their Power

• I honor my emotions — they are my guidance system.

• My sensitivity is not a weakness; it is my superpower.

• I release the shame that was never mine to carry.

• I am safe to feel, safe to speak, safe to exist fully.

• I choose people who respect my heart, not silence it.

• My intuition is sacred, sharp, and always right.

• I am not who hurt me — I am who I became despite it.

It depends on us how our children’s lives turn out  and it is not the children’s fault that their parents are cold. 

When you are an empath who grew up behind the narcissistic facade you don’t get mad at your parents. 

Children love their parents for what they gave them life. 

You draw the main lesson in your life - a lesson on self-worth. 

You will never prove your worth to anyone ever again. 

And you also know exactly what parent you will never be for your child.

Oleksandra Fomichova (yourrrr_soul) is a Ukrainian writer and the author of the memoir “Under My Skin.” Her work explores twin-flame connections, healing from narcissistic trauma, and the alchemy of self-love through pain, irony, and spiritual awakening.

Instagram: @yourrrr_soul

Website: https://q170810.wixsite.com/under-my-skin-twin-f

Real Life Integration: The Everyday Witch

Written by Epifania Arriagada Photo by Emily Underworld

There is a truth many of us avoid saying out loud.
We are all witches in one way or another.

Some of us live fully in the craft with candles, herbs, sigils, covens, moon charts, and altar rooms that look like museums of inherited magic. Some of us are wild witches who practice in the quiet and the unseen. And many of us fall somewhere along that spectrum, moving back and forth depending on the season of our lives.

The point is never how much you own or how elaborate your rituals look. The point is the heart behind the work.

At its core, the simplest spell we will ever cast comes from our mouths and our intentions. A whispered prayer. A sentence spoken with conviction. A promise to ourselves that we honor. These are spells too. They do not need ceremonial candles or séance strength. They only need our good will and belief in ourselves.

What more powerful force exists than intention that comes from truth.

Tradition has given us so much. It has shown us the ways of the past and the rituals our ancestors built with their hands, their bodies, and their hopes. Their teachings are gifts and we should use them. We should learn from their mistakes, their victories, their rituals, and the ways they found power in a world that tried to silence them. But we must also grow. We are not meant to live only as replicas of the past. We are meant to evolve.

Many witches live a split life.
At work, they clock in, answer emails, pay bills, raise children, and carry responsibilities that feel completely separate from their spiritual selves. Their magic stays tucked in pockets and drawers, hidden behind schedules and social expectations. The witch in them lives in the shadows because the world taught them it needed to.

But integration is simpler than we think.
Start simple.
Stay simple.
Start difficult.
Grow difficult.
It does not matter.

The craft is art.
The craft is play.
The craft is permission to be fully ourselves.

If lighting a candle before work helps you connect, do it.
If speaking a blessing over your morning coffee feels right, do it.
If your magic comes in the form of protecting your peace, honoring your boundaries, praying for your children, writing a truth in your journal, or speaking life into your own name, honor that.

There is no correct way to be a witch.
There is only your way.

Let your practice fit into your real life.
Let it be yours.
Let it be fun.
Let it be sacred.
Let it be light.
Let it be powerful.

Most of all, let it remind you that magic was never something distant.
It was always in your hands.

When You’re a Girl on a Twin Flame Journey

By Oleksandra Fomichova
Pen name: yourrrr_soul
Instagram: @yourrrr_soul
Originally published on Medium: Read the original article

“Twin flames aren’t just a fairy tale. For a girl on this journey, pain is real, invisible battles are constant, and the ultimate lesson is learning to love yourself.”
Self-love is the magic that heals the deepest wounds.

Do You Know What It Means to Be a Girl on a Twin Flame Journey?

You may have heard about twin flames, and maybe you’ve been told it’s just a beautiful fairy tale. Many people don’t believe they exist because twin flames are so rare. But rare doesn’t mean unreal.

Twin flames are real, and the greatest proof of their existence is the endless pain you carry for years, a pain that never fades away.

So what does it mean to be a girl on a twin flame journey?
It means being a constant target and a trigger.
It means nobody around you believes you, and worse, you feel invisible because the world keeps trying to convince you that you don’t exist or that you’re just a joke.

Crazy? Exactly.

Time goes on, and slowly, a girl’s heart almost stops beating. Yet she doesn’t stop loving. She doesn’t stop feeling. In fact, she begins to love and feel even more deeply. And then she realizes the truth: love must begin with herself.

That’s when the magic happens.
Her wounded heart begins to shine.

The Awakening Within

The twin flame journey proves one thing: self-love heals even the deepest wounds. Love can heal the world, but it has to start with you. Because if every person truly loved and valued themselves, there wouldn’t be a single unhappy soul left on earth.

And maybe, we go through this pain only to finally understand that.

This reflection is inspired by my memoir Under My Skin, a raw, ironic, and spiritual story about twin flames, pain, and transformation.

Editorial Reflection

For readers of Bruja Magazine, Oleksandra’s story is both medicine and mirror, a reminder that the alchemy of love begins with truth. The New Moon in Scorpio is a portal of emotional depth and shadow work, making this the perfect lunar window to release her words back into the world. The Waxing Crescent in Sagittarius, just days later, will carry that truth outward, expansive, daring, and bright.

Let this story reach the hearts that need it most, those learning that self-love is not a luxury but a lifeline.

I Picked Him Up Today…

Written by Leah Hannon

I picked him up today. I didn’t think it would hit me so hard. The drive there felt ordinary: red lights, traffic, even passing his old apartment. It was more sad than gut-wrenching. But when I pulled in, I froze. I couldn’t go inside. I didn’t want to see the tchotchkes. I didn’t want to see the cards. And I absolutely didn’t want him in my car. Not because I didn’t want to be with him, but because I did.

Still, I did what I had to do. I went inside. The woman at the desk asked for my ID. Confused, I asked why. “So the right person goes home with you,” she said. Fair enough. I signed the papers, gathered his things, and a kind man helped me carry him to the car. I buckled him into the front seat. No sense putting him in the back. By then the tears blurred the windshield.

My kid had suggested going through a drive-thru since he was coming home with me. You know what? That was brilliant. I got a Coke and some fries. He loved Coke. And fries—well, potatoes in any form. It felt like the perfect tribute. I managed to hold it together until I got home, because it is hard to drive when you’re crying.

Once I got him home, I settled him in the spare room. I looked around and thought about how we would eventually have to make it usable. But that was a problem for another day. I sat down at my computer, and that’s when my heart cracked open.

I sobbed for our dads, for what they had lost. Then I smiled for what they had gained. I thought about their kids and grandkids, how proud they were of them. I even felt a small, guilty relief—no more trips to that Walgreens where everyone seemed dumber than a box of hammers. The thought made me laugh through my tears. I remembered their stubbornness, Irish and German tempers shaking fists at the people they loved most. I chuckled at all their antics over the years. But mostly, I felt the warmth of knowing how much they loved me, my man, and my kid. How special we were to them. How much we still mean. Always.

I cried again for what we had all lost—for their families, for their friends, both now and twenty years ago. And I smiled once more, imagining them together, raising hell and probably instigating half of it.

I picked him up today. And it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Image courtesy Leah Hannon

‘Mercy’ by Stephanie Alvarez

Written by Epi Arriagada. Photography and Narration by Stephanie Alvarez. Visuals by Epi Arriagada

Artist Feature: Stephanie Alvarez

Stephanie Alvarez is a poet whose work dwells in the borderlands of grief, transformation, and desire. Her writing does not shy away from darkness—instead, it inhabits it fully, letting readers witness how pain splinters and reshapes the soul. What sets her apart is the way she threads resilience through despair, allowing even the heaviest words to carry a strange and haunting beauty.

Her poetry feels like a mirror to the body’s inner weather: frozen stillness, sudden fire, and finally, the soft possibility of awakening. Each piece offers a visceral reminder that brokenness does not end the story—it becomes the very material from which new worlds are formed.

Image credit: Stephanie Alvarez

Mercy

Only, lonely, lovely,
Hello.

Once upon a time became
30 below.

Hearts touched by Death’s cool kiss
Lay quietly still in
Hypnotically cruel bliss.

A deliberately coy trist
And a motion of the wrist,
All breaks down to this -

Loving, Unloving, Fateful,
Unfaithful, Missed.

Miscommunication plus
Misinterpretation
Equal grief stricken
Heartache times three.

Then comes the thaw.

Tiny winding splinters through veins
Inescapable pain
Inexplicably remains.

Climbing high and dropping low.
Rapidly, fire builds in the depths and rages,
Races,
Screaming towards the top.

Towards light and open air
And once it is there
It meets a flame.

No name, no hope.
No pain that any ear can hear.

Only lonely and lovely.
Hold me.
Hello, sweet Mercy.

Mercy is a portrait of heartbreak in motion, unfolding through images of freeze, fracture, fire, and fragile surrender. Alvarez begins with repetition—“Only, lonely, lovely”—a chant that frames the entire poem. These three words don’t just describe emotion; they create a rhythm, a pulse of contradiction where isolation and beauty exist in the same breath.

The first half of the poem carries the weight of disconnection. Relationships collapse into miscommunication and misinterpretation, and love is reduced to arithmetic: “Equal grief stricken / Heartache times three.” Her use of numbers to measure pain shows how heartbreak defies language—reduced to cold calculation when words themselves fail.

Then the thaw comes, and the poem changes shape. Pain is no longer silent; it moves like splinters in the veins, building into a fire that cannot be contained. Alvarez captures the body of grief—how it climbs, drops, rages, and races toward release. This physicality is what makes the poem visceral: it doesn’t describe pain from afar, it inhabits it.

Yet even the eruption offers no easy resolution. The flame that greets the reader at the peak is nameless, hopeless, and unheard. It is both climax and void, the raw space where suffering becomes too vast for expression.

Still, the closing refrain circles back: “Only lonely and lovely. / Hold me. / Hello, sweet Mercy.” The poem does not offer resolution in the traditional sense, but what it does offer is invocation. Mercy becomes the whispered presence that grief calls to—not the erasure of pain, but the grace to live with it.

Visual Interpretation

The video extends this cycle without explaining it: stillness in nature, the body at rest, a hand at the cold window, fire breaking through, and an awakening into a dreamlike world. These images move with the poem rather than define it, creating another way of entering its rhythm—quiet, eruptive, and searching.

The Petal’s Guidance

photo by KBRofficial

Artist Feature: Kat Robinson

“Poetry has been something dear to my heart from a young age. Every time I was dealing with a low point in my life, I turned to writing poetry. It wasn't until high school when I started sharing a bit of my work. Since then, I have worked on refining my writing and making poetry that makes people feel things. I hope these pieces resonate with you, and inspire you to make your own art.”
— Kat Robinson

Kat Robinson is a writer, photographer, and model based out of Phoenix, Arizona. Her work explores the quiet resilience of nature, feminine transformation, and the art of blooming through adversity. Whether behind the lens or on the page, she captures the beauty of becoming.

Her story is one of struggle and renewal. Through her creative practice, she has taken life’s lowest moments and transmuted them into art that is not only palpable but healing. You can see this journey of overcoming most clearly in her poetry, which carries the imprint of both shadow and light.

‘The Petal’s Guidance’

I let the flowers guide my soul
The perennials have always taken my breath away
For even though they wilt, they are still beautiful
May all the flowers continue to influence my heart
I cherish the lesson I’ve learned from the flora
Should your petals begin to fall
Prevail the storms and bloom again

Robinson’s poem radiates the quiet wisdom of nature as a teacher. She draws from the perennial cycle—bloom, wilt, and return—to mirror the human journey through hardship and recovery. What is striking is her framing of beauty not only in the blossoming but also in the wilting; she reminds us that imperfection and decline are part of what makes life sacred.

The language is gentle but directive: “I let the flowers guide my soul” suggests surrender to nature’s rhythm, while the closing lines shift into encouragement, almost like an invocation for resilience—“Prevail the storms and bloom again.” In doing so, Robinson redefines resilience not as resistance, but as an acceptance of cycles, trusting that renewal always follows loss.

The poem ultimately feels like both a reflection and a gift. It carries the intimacy of someone who has endured and come out transformed, yet it extends that transformation outward to the reader, offering a roadmap of how to turn fragility into strength.