http://friendsoftheforestct.org/, https://friendsoftheforestct.org/wildflowerwomen, https://friendsoftheforestct.org/lig

Friends of the Forest, Essex, CT (2026)

09/14/2026

I have always been a collector of small things.

Not valuable things, necessarily. Things that feel as though they have already lived a life before they found their way to me.
An old key with no door. A shell worn almost smooth. A tiny bottle with a handwritten label. A pressed flower tucked inside a book. A feather found on a path. A stone from a place I want to remember. A little box that once held something precious, though no one remembers what.

I think there have always been people like us.

The ones who come home from a walk with something in their pocket. Who notice the small object half-hidden beneath the leaves. Who cannot pass an old curiosity shop without going inside. Who turn things over in their hands and wonder where they have been.

We are collectors of artifacts.

Not because we need more things, but because some things seem to carry a story.
And every now and then, you find an object that feels different.

You don’t know who held it before you. You don’t know why it survived when so many other things disappeared. You may never know its story at all.

Still, you keep it.

You place it on a shelf, tuck it into a drawer, or add it to the strange little collection that has been quietly growing for years.

And somehow, without knowing its history, you become part of it.

Maybe that is the magic of collecting artifacts.

For a little while, we become their keepers.

What small, strange, or beautiful thing have you kept simply because you couldn’t leave it behind?

09/14/2026

On a certain grey stretch of the coast, where the cliffs are old and the light comes down pale, there is a staircase cut into the rock.

It goes down.

Down past the gorse, down past the tumbled stones, down through the salt wind, flight after flight, turn after turn, until at the bottom it lets you out onto a dark crescent of sand, where the water comes up white and curling, and a single black rock stands out in the surf like something left behind on purpose.

The elders of the coast say the stairs were not built so that people could come down to the sea. They were built so that people could leave things with her.

Because long ago, the Sea Ancient made an offer to the women of the coast, and it was this: whatever you are carrying that has become too heavy, bring it down to me. Do not throw it from the cliff. Cliffs are for the careless. Come down the stairs. Come all the way down. Carry it down the whole long way, step by step, and by the time you reach my sand, you will know whether you are truly ready to set it down.

And the women came.

They came with griefs too old to name. They came with years that had gone wrong. They came carrying words they wished unsaid, and loves that had left, and versions of themselves they could no longer carry. And they walked the long stairs down through the salt wind, slowly, because the stairs demand slowness, and with every step, the elders say, the weight they carried got a little more honest about what it was.

Some of them turned back halfway. The stairs are good at this too. A woman who reaches the third turning and realizes she is not ready, that the thing in her arms is still hers, still needed, still unfinished, can turn around and go home with it, and no one calls it failure. The Sea Ancient does not take what is not given freely.

But the ones who came all the way down, who stepped off the last stair onto the dark sand, into the wind, with the water coming up white before them, those women found a second part to the offer.

Because the Sea Ancient does not take what you bring her and sink it. She washes it.

The elders say the water there runs in a way it runs nowhere else, curling around the black rock and coming back in, curling around and coming back in, and that is the Sea turning the thing over, the way she turns a stone. Washing it. Wearing it smooth. Taking the sharp grief-edge off it, the way she takes the edge off glass, until what is left is smooth enough to hold.

I cannot take it away from you, she told the first woman who came down the stairs. Nothing that mattered can be taken away. But I can carry it for a while. I can wash it in my water until it stops cutting your hands. And when it is smooth, when it is only a memory and no longer a wound, you will find it again one day, lying on my sand among the dark stones, and you will hold it, and it will not cut you anymore.

That is why the tideline there is scattered with smooth dark stones. Every one of them, the elders say, is something a woman carried down the stairs. A grief, a year, a name, a leaving, washed smooth by the Sea, set down on the dark sand, and left for the tide to keep.

If you are ever carrying something that has become too heavy, find the stairs. Do not throw it from the cliff.

Carry it down the whole long way, step by step, and let the stairs ask you, at every turning, whether you are ready. And if you are, if you step off onto the dark sand and the water comes up white and curling to meet you, give it to her.

She has been keeping things for women since the coast was young.

She knows how to wash what cannot be thrown away.

09/13/2026

NEW DATE: Sunday, September 27th - THREE spaces available to attend.

Gather with us beside the water in Essex for a September morning of broom-making, folklore and the slow turning toward Samhain.

Together we will create traditional hand-held whisk besoms from broomcorn, adding herbs, flowers, ribbons or small personal objects if you wish, while exploring the old symbolism of the broom as a tool of the hearth, home, clearing and protection.

Each woman will leave with the besom she has made and a Friends of the Forest Samhain Parcel, prepared to continue the ritual at home as October deepens and the darker season draws near.

Each woman will receive a Friends of the Forest Samhain Parcel, created especially for this gathering.

The parcel is not a favor at the end of the morning. It is the next chapter.

Inside the cotton Samhain pouch will be what you need to continue the ritual in your own home as October deepens: a Friends of the Forest herbal tea blend, a beeswax candle, a small hearth bundle of rosemary, mugwort, cedar and cinnamon, a Samhain ritual and broom blessing created specifically for the women of this gathering, and a few magickal treasures to be discovered.

The morning will unfold without hurry. There will be time for making, learning, conversation, stories and those quiet stretches that naturally appear when women sit together working with their hands.

If you’re joining us from out of state, consider making a day of it. Downtown Essex is a picturesque New England village where, after our gathering, you can wander the charming streets, browse the shops, and enjoy a lovely lunch by the water.

Limited to 12 women. It is highly suggested to register soon as this yearly offering sells out with a long waiting list.

https://friendsoftheforestct.org/events/a-samhain-gathering-a-morning-of-broom-making-ritual-the-turning-season

09/13/2026

The Earth Ancient was the oldest of all the Ancients.

She was here before the Sky came to crown her. Before the Sea came to hold her edges. Before the Forest came to cover her in green. Before the Fire came to warm her.

There were no gardens then. No tended beds. No roses climbing walls. There was only Earth, and all the things she had not yet grown.

And the first thing she chose to grow was not a flower.

It was a small grey-green herb, and she grew it at the edge of the first path — in the rough ground, in the dust, where feet would pass — and she grew it there on purpose.

She named her Eldest. The Mother of Herbs. The one all the others would come after.

The other plants did not understand. The rose, when she came along later, lifted her bright head and asked: She is plain. She is grey. She has no flower worth the naming.

And the Earth Ancient answered: She does not need them. And she is not plain. Look again.

The rose looked — and saw that the small grey plant, when the light touched the underside of her leaves, flashed silver. Not green. Silver. The color of moonlight. The color of the hour before dawn. Hidden on the underside, where only those who knew to look would find it.

I am the oldest of the Ancients, said the Earth Ancient, and I tell you this: the oldest things do not grow at the center. They grow at the threshold. I set her at the edge of the road because the road is where the world happens — the leaving, the returning, the walking in between. She is the first plant a traveler meets leaving home, and the last plant a traveler passes coming back.

She is the herb of the in-between. The herb of the ones who are going somewhere.

Then the oldest Ancient gave her three gifts, because she was first, and the first mother gives the first blessings.

The first gift was protection. The one who carries you will not grow footsore. The one who hangs you above her door will sleep without fear. You will stand between the traveler and the road's dark hours, the way you stand between the garden and the wild.

The second gift was dreams. She touched the silver underside of the leaves. The woman who sleeps with you near her pillow will dream true. She will dream the doors that are opening.

And the third gift was the oldest of all.

You will be the herb of the hedge — and the hedge is where the old knowledge lives. The knowledge not written down, that passes from one woman's hands to another woman's hands, in the low light, beside the road, the way it has passed since before there were roads. You will grow there. You will mark the place. And the women who are looking for that knowledge will find you at the edge of the road, silver-sided, standing in the dust — and they will know they have come to the right threshold.

She grows there still.

You have passed her a hundred times — at the edge of the road, beside the gate, along the hedgerow where the tended world ends.

You probably thought she was only a w**d.

The next time you find her, stop.
Turn one of her leaves over.
See the silver.

And remember what the Earth Ancient said: The oldest things do not grow at the center. They grow at the threshold.

She has been growing there ever since — along roadsides and field edges, beside paths and forgotten places, keeping her silver hidden beneath her leaves.

We know her now by another name.

Mugwort.

09/12/2026

Long ago, when the world was younger, the Sky Ancient had already made a great many things.

She had made the moon from a piece of her own cool light. She had made the sun from the brightest fire she carried. She had made the stars — the thousand thousand of them — and she had made her seven daughters, the ones she kept closest, the ones who traveled her country all year long.

Her country was vast. The blue country of day and the dark country of night, and the two painted thresholds between them.

But there was one part of her country that went unkept.

The deep hours.

The hours after the moon has set, when the whole world has gone black, when the small creatures wake in the dark and are afraid, when the women stand at their windows at three in the morning holding something they cannot name. The stars burn overhead, but the stars are far away, and faraway light cannot hold anyone.

The Sky Ancient looked down into the deep hours and saw that no one was keeping them.

So she made a keeper.

She made her out of the soft grey dark of the night country itself. She gave her the softest wings of any bird ever made — wings with edges like the hem of a woolen cloak, so that when she flew, she made no sound at all. The moth she passed would not know she had passed. The sleeping hare would not wake. Even the air itself would not know she had moved through it.

She gave her eyes the color of old amber — eyes that did not need the light to see, because they had been shaped in a country where light was never the point. Eyes that saw by warmth, by stillness, by the small trembling of what was alive in the dark.

She gave her two small horns of feathers at the top of her head, like the tips of two young trees — so that when she sat among the branches, the wood would think she was part of it.

She reached into the oldest part of her country — into the very first field of stars she had ever scattered, the ones that had been burning since before the world had a name — and she gathered a handful of their light, and she scattered it across her keeper's breast.

Small white stars. Dozens of them. Speckled across her soft grey feathers like the first snow of a winter that has not yet been named.

You will carry my first stars through the deep hours, the Sky Ancient said. The moon keeps the bright nights. But in the hours after she has set — when the whole world has gone black — you will be the only light moving through it. When the small creatures wake in the dark and are afraid, they will look up, and they will see you passing overhead with my first stars on your breast, and they will know that the night is being kept.

The owl said nothing.

Owls do not say anything. That, too, was a gift — the gift of the watching silence. The owl does not ask questions. The owl does not answer them. The owl only sits, on her branch, in the deep part of the dark, with the first stars scattered across her breast, and she sees.

She sees what the day never sees.

She sees the field mouse moving through the grass at the small hour before dawn. She sees the moth lifting off the bark of the old tree. She sees the woman standing at the window of her house at three in the morning, unable to sleep, holding something in her chest she cannot name.

She sees all of it.

And she keeps it.

That is her whole work. Not to fix what moves in the dark. Not to chase it, not to judge it, not to call the morning early to rescue it. Only to see it — with her amber eyes, with her scattered stars, with her soft unhurried wings — and to hold it in the keeping of the deep hours until the light comes back.

The Sky Ancient has never once asked her to do more.

The world is watched all day, she told her, long ago. The sun watches it. Every bright eye in the world is upon it from morning until evening. But someone must keep the deep hours. Someone must sit in the dark, unmoving, unafraid, with my first stars on her breast, and hold watch over what cannot sleep.

I made you for that watch.

The owl still sits in the deep part of the wood, on the branch she has always kept, with the Sky Ancient's first stars still scattered across her soft grey breast.

And on the nights when you cannot sleep — when you are standing at your own window at three in the morning, holding something you cannot name — know that she is out there.

Keeping the watch.

With the oldest stars of the world on her breast.

Holding the dark for you, until the light comes back.

09/11/2026

Long ago, the Earth Ancient gave the women of the world a small gift she has never spoken of aloud.

She taught their hands to plant more than seeds.

She did it quietly, in the earliest hours, while the first garden was still being dug. A woman knelt in the dark soil with a seed in her palm, and she was carrying something heavy that season — a grief she had not spoken, a hope she had not dared — and as she pressed the seed into the earth, the Earth Ancient leaned down and whispered into her cupped hands:

Whatever you are holding will go in with it.

The roots will drink it. The vine will carry it. And by the time the fruit hangs red and heavy on the stem, what you buried will have become something you can hold without breaking.

The woman did not understand. But she planted anyway, as women have always planted — left hand holding the root-end of what she grieved, right hand holding the root-end of what she hoped — and she covered them over with the dark, and she went inside, and she waited.

All summer the two vines grew.

The one her left hand had planted grew slower. It had heavier work to do. It was drawing up the grief, thread by thread, through its roots, softening it in the long green journey toward the light.

The one her right hand had planted grew faster, and leaned toward the sun, and flowered first.

And the blackbirds came to watch over both of them.

This is the part no one tells you about blackbirds. The world thinks they come to the garden to steal. They do not. They come as keepers. The Earth Ancient sent them long ago, in their dark feathered coats, to tend the vines while the woman is sleeping — to sit among the branches, five of them, six of them, turning their bright eyes toward the fruit, keeping count of what is ripening, keeping watch over what is nearly ready.

And the butterfly — the small white one who drifts between the vines without ever landing long — she is the soul of the garden itself, moving from flower to flower, checking that what was buried is becoming sweet.

By the end of the summer, the woman came out and found the vines heavy with fruit.

She lifted a tomato from the vine her left hand had planted — the slow one, the one that had been carrying her grief all season — and she held it in her palm, warm from the sun, red as a small heart.

And she understood.

The grief had gone in heavy. It had come up out of the earth as something soft, and round, and ripened, and red — something she could finally hold. Something she could finally taste. Something she could finally share.

This is why you garden, the Earth Ancient whispered, while the blackbirds kept their quiet watch among the branches. Not for the fruit. For the journey your held things make — down into the dark, up through the green, out onto the vine — coming back to you changed into something the world can receive.

Whatever you are holding this season — plant it.

The roots will drink it.

The blackbirds will keep it.

And it will come back to you as something you can hold without breaking.

(Art: Blackbirds in the Tomato Vines by WIndy Poplars)

09/11/2026

I think there are parts of ourselves that belong to the night.

Not in any grand or mystical way. They are simply easier to hear then.

The house settles. The emails stop. No one needs anything. The last ordinary tasks of the day are finished, or have been abandoned until morning. And somewhere in that quiet, another little part of the day begins.

This is when I notice things.

I remember something I meant to think about. I open a book and read much longer than I intended. I wander outside to see the moon. I stand at the window when the wind is moving through the trees. I watch for the red fox who visits every night. I light candles to see them flicker. I keep the house dimly lit to settle my busy mind. I listen to the sounds of night.

Small things. Private things.

Things that would look like nothing at all to anyone else.

I've been thinking about those hours lately, and about how many of us must have our own version of them.

The woman who always reads in bed after everyone else is asleep. The one who takes the dog outside and stays a little longer because the stars are bright. The one who lights a candle instead of turning on another lamp. The one who does her best thinking at midnight. The one who has conversations with the moon she would never admit to having.

There should be a word for that.

So I made one.

Nightkeeping.

The quiet tending of the self that happens after the day has gone still; the thoughts, rituals, wanderings, and small private things we keep for the hours after dark.

I especially like the keeping in it.
Because there are things we keep for the night.
And things the night seems very good at keeping for us.

09/10/2026

There is a marsh at the edge of the world where the mist lies deepest.

It settles there every autumn night — a long grey country of its own, poured softly over the reeds and the still dark water, so thick that by morning the whole marsh has disappeared inside it. The grasses are gone. The water is gone. The far bank, the leaning trees, the small island in the middle where nothing has ever grown — all of it gone. Swallowed. There is only the grey, and the silence, and the slow cold breathing of the dawn.

And every morning, before the mist has lifted — before the sun has climbed high enough to burn even the top of it away — a heron rises out of it.

She is the only living thing in that country who does not wait for the mist to clear.

This is the story of why.

Long ago, the heron belonged to the Sea Ancient, and fished her bright shallows in the clear light of day. She was good at it. She was patient, and still, and her eye was true, and the fish came to her shadow the way fish do. She wanted for nothing.

But one autumn the mist came down over the marsh and did not lift for nine days.

On the first day, the heron waited. On the second day, she waited. On the third day, she grew restless, and on the fourth she grew hungry, and by the fifth she was standing in the reeds with her head turned up toward a sky she could not see, asking the Sky Ancient when the grey would end.

And the Sky Ancient answered her: The mist will lift when it lifts. I cannot hurry it. It is doing slow work.

Then I cannot fish, said the heron. I cannot see the water. I cannot see the fish. I cannot see ten wingbeats in front of me. I am blinded until the grey is gone.

You are not blinded, said the Sky Ancient. You are only using the wrong eyes.

The heron did not understand.

The eyes in your head were made for clear days, said the Sky Ancient. For bright water and sharp light. But there is another sight, and it is older, and it lives deeper — in the feet, in the wings, in the long slow beating of the heart. The sight that knows where the water is because it has always known. The sight that finds the fish not by seeing them, but by remembering where they have always been. Rise into the mist, daughter. You know this country. You have known it all your life. You do not need to see it to move through it.

The heron was afraid.

But she was hungry, and she was tired of waiting, and so on the sixth morning she did the thing she had never done.

She rose into the mist.

She could not see the water. She could not see the far bank. She could not see her own wings at the ends of her own body. She flew blind into the grey — and found, to her astonishment, that she was not lost. Her wings knew the shape of the marsh. Her heart knew the height of the reeds. Her feet knew, when she set them down, exactly where the soft edge of the water would be.

She fished that morning, in the mist, and she did not go hungry.

And she has never waited for the grey to lift again.

She rises now, every autumn morning, before the mist has gone — a pale shape climbing out of a vanished world, sure of her way through a country no eye can see. And the women who stand at the edge of their own grey seasons, waiting for the mist of their lives to clear before they dare to move — the elders say she is flying for them.

You do not need to see the whole way.

You have known this country all your life.

Rise. Your wings remember what your eyes cannot.

09/10/2026

A new season of Mystic Brews & Literary Views begins this month in The Hidden Room, our Patreon community.

This is our book club for women who love books with a little something tucked inside them.

A bit of magic. A secret. An old house or hidden room. Folklore woven through the edges. Historical fiction that puts women at the center of the story—not at the edges of someone else's. Women with complicated lives, friendships, longings, secrets, and choices to make.

Sometimes there are witches. Sometimes ghosts. There is always a strong woman at the center of the story. There might be a mystery, old letters, a forgotten history, a strange inheritance, a garden, a forest, or something that cannot be entirely explained.

All the things I love when I go looking for a fictional book to disappear into.

Which makes our September book feel like such a lovely place to begin.

Our September read isThe Secret Book Society by Madeline Martin.

Set in Victorian London, it follows three women whose lives begin to change when they are invited into a secret book club—a place where books, friendship, and the company of other women offer possibilities their ordinary lives have not.

We read the book on our own, wherever we happen to be, and then for an hour each month wecome together. We talk about the story, certainly, but also about where it took us, what we noticed, what stayed with us, and all the wonderful little paths a conversation about a book can wander down.

Our September recommended tea for this read is Earl Grey with Cornflower, and we'll gather on September 28 at 6 PM ET.

Mystic Brews & Literary Views lives inside The Hidden Room, our private Patreon community. You don't have to read every book. You don't even have to finish the book to come to the gathering. This isn't school and there will be no quiz.

Just bring your tea and your love of stories.

A new stack of books is waiting for us.

https://friendsoftheforestct.org/bookclub

09/09/2026

There is a mirror that hangs in the deep part of the wood, where the light shines down green and slow through the leaves.

No one hung it there. No one polishes it. The frame is old gold, soft with age, and the wild white flowers have grown up around its lower edge and wound themselves into its corners, the way small living things will wind themselves into anything that has been still long enough to be trusted.

It is not a mirror for faces.

That is the first thing the Forest Ancient would tell you about it, if she were the kind to explain her keepings, which she is not.

It is a mirror for what the face is carrying.

A woman who wanders deep enough into the green country — and the elders say no woman wanders there by accident — might come upon it, hanging at eye level among the leaves, glowing faintly in the dim light, waiting.

And if she stops, and looks into it, she will see something she was not expecting.

Not her face.

Or rather — her face, but not held still. Not frozen the way the glass above a bathroom sink freezes it. In the mirror in the green country, her face appears the way it actually is: in motion. In weather. Blurred at the edges with everything she is carrying that day — the grief she has not named, the hope she has not said aloud, the tiredness, the longing, the small bright thread of joy she has been too busy to notice.

The mirror does not show her how she looks.

It shows her how she is.

And most women, the first time, cannot hold the looking long. They glance, and glance away. The reflection is too honest. It has no interest in the arrangement of her hair or the line of her jaw. It is interested only in the weather moving through her — and the weather, on most days, is more than she has been willing to look at.

But the woman who can stand there — who can keep her eyes on the blurred, shifting, honest face in the old gold frame until the green light moves once across the leaves — the woman who can do that is given something.

The blur slows.
The weather settles.

And for one still moment, she sees herself the way the Forest Ancient has always seen her: not as a face to be judged, but as a landscape to be known. Clouded in some places. Clear in others. Tender at the edges. Trailing the weather of everything she has lived through, and carrying, always, somewhere in the frame, a small white flower she did not plant.

The elders say the Forest Ancient hung the mirror deep in the green country for the women who have spent too long looking at themselves the way the world looks at them — as surfaces, as arrangements, as things to be corrected.

Come deeper into the wood, the mirror says, to the woman who finds it. Come where the light is green and slow. And look into me until your face stops being a face, and becomes, instead, a country you are willing to live in.

She has been hanging there a long time.
The white flowers grow around her frame a little further every year.
She is waiting, in the dim green light, for whoever finds her next.

Friends of the Forest

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