The Priestess Guardian of the Holy Flame
You have always felt different. You see things others miss and feel more deeply than the people around you. You have always had the ability to hear beneath what is being shared.
You find yourself more at home in the forest than in most rooms, restored by solitude. You are drawn to the threshold places, where life moves into death and the seen brushes up against the unseen. You feel the pull of the moon in your body and the influence of the stars on your thoughts.
This is the flame you carry.
I know this woman because I am her. My journey began as a green witch. The plants were my entry point into the healing arts, my first language, nature my refuge.
In my later twenties into my mid forties I became the medicine woman, the community healer. Morning until night, working at all hours, sacrificing myself for the benefit of who needed me. I gave everything I had, and for a long time I believed that was what the calling required.
The death initiation asked me to lay everything down, step out of every role I had known myself through, and release the identity I had built across decades of service. In that devotional act I could finally feel what I had been carrying inside both of those roles.
The weight of the witch and the pain bodies woven through her history lived alongside the sacrifice embedded in my embodiment of the medicine woman, and the belief that had quietly organized it all: that to be a healer meant to give of myself completely, to be available to everyone, until there was nothing left.
The Priestess returned after that shedding.
Approaching fifty now, I deeply know myself and the medicine I carry. The witch and the medicine woman are integrated, woven within the tapestry of the keeper of the Holy Flame.
The Priestess holds the sacred inside the ordinary and bridges the seen and unseen as a way of being.
The pop priestess culture, drawn to the aesthetic of the sacred while avoiding the depth of it, had turned me away from the word entirely.
The Priestess Path I walk holds the light and the dark, because decades of witnessing nature and the patterns of humanity taught me that the flame is fed in the shadow as much as it is in the light.
If you recognized yourself somewhere in these words, the path is waiting for you.
