Who is the Bog Hag? This archetype, familiar to us, known in our bones, surfaced for me in late 2023 when I was skulking a thread about perimenopause that came up in my search results. A woman wrote something about embracing the Hag she was becoming, flipping the bird to expectations and taking up residence in her Hag hut. Yes. That will do, I thought, my heart opened and immediately wrote the poem that ends this letter.

The journey to the Dark Goddess is a natural part of any death transition — any difficult rite of passage that takes us out of our ordinary experiences and places us into a liminal cycle. Death transitions may be those transitions classically seen as negative — such as a serious illness or accident, death of a loved one, job loss or divorce — but even so-called positive transitions such as marriage or the birth of a child carry the weight of endings. Largely we navigate our c

Return is the third phase of an initiatory rite of passage. In myth it often includes a ceremony of homecoming, coalescence, community honoring. On return the initiate may ritually take a new name, something symbolic of the new role or work they embody after transformation. Return can be a time of mourning, grieving and celebration simultaneously. It is paradoxical, an ending and a beginning, often without a place of pause in the cycle of transformation, but still marking a d

Telling a story of empowerment around these embodied experiences has been essential to my work, and this passage about disability as a corollary for power affirms what I have been feeling and thinking for a long time.