Bog Hagging: An Intention

Witch as Helper from The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen

Bog Hagging: An Intention

This year was…a bog. And in it, I became the hag. Truly. I am so irretrievably changed, physically and personally, by the challenges of this past year that I hardly recognize myself.

That doesn’t mean it was all bad, the year, my 50th on this planet, but it does mean I’ve had to accept—eat—an extraordinary amount of humiliation and loss. And it isn’t over. How can I live with so much uncertainty?

Uncertainty is the Bog.

Survival is the Hag.

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.

She’s been there ever since, my Bog Hag, through all the MRIs and medication reactions, the disfiguring rashes and unnecessary iatrogenesis, blood clots, pain, fear, struggle for self-advocacy against a tidal wave of system. She has influenced so many of my decisions from what to wear (comfort, only, she says, what else?) to deleting all my accounts (begin again at any time, she whispers) to going off treatments I lobbied hard for as they did not seem to be working and came with other consequences (bleeding in my skin, retinal issues, long term vision loss). She doesn’t always make a lot of sense to others, she makes me question my sanity often, but following the directive of my inner Bog Hag has nourished possibility amid the bleak.

The Old Woman of the Woods/Bog/Swamp/Mountain/Wilds is ancient, more than a thought form she holds a space of myth. She lives in you too, whether by lineage or story, you know her. Seen in the etymology of the word Hag:

“One of the magic words for which there is no male form, suggesting its original meaning was close to "diviner, soothsayer," which were always female in northern European paganism, and hægtesse seem at one time to have meant "woman of prophetic and oracular powers"…a figure greatly feared and respected. Later, the word was used of village wise women.”

In the past years of illness I have watched the world from the distance of the sick, in it, but not really of it. Watched meaning and purpose circle the drain of post-pandemic social life, and witnessed the drift from the real to a “reality” wholly imagined by not even humans...it has been stunning, disorienting. I don’t recommend it, but there is a gift in the perception of loss made visible, or at least conscious, by absence: Where is nature, where are the ancestors? Where is our livelihood? Where is community? Where is the Old Woman of the Woods in a study of endless everything, all edited and generated in a wave of rampant consumerism, and the emptiness such nothingness leaves in its wake?

(The Bog Hag stacks her cobbled boots on the porch rail amid a rain of earth, stuffs her pipe and chews thoughtfully at the stem. There are dark things out there, the Bog is not friendly. But it is sustaining, it is where she lives, and she loves it in her own peculiar heart.)

I don’t have the energy to write this right now, but She wanted me to share, to invite Her presence into another corner of the world and maybe Her shape will inspire the freedom in someone else it has in me…or maybe you know Her already, maybe you can introduce us to Her in another form, another life, another container of mystery. We need Her, as many of Her, as we can imagine. Right now.

I don’t have the energy to write. I am running a low, clinically unimportant fever and my lymph nodes are sore. My face is starting to swell again—isn’t that delightfully Haggish?—and I have been exhausted all week. The narrative starts in repetition: Is it medication, a virus, a bacterial infection, something old, something new (eye of newt, etc…Shakespeare knew the Hag…). Maddening. (We are all mad here, says the Hag, cribbing the Hatter but I am not going to edit her. Would you?)

So this writing is an offering. An honoring. To the Hag. May Her gifts be many, may Her bogs be restored.

Oh. And I am to mention New Year Intentions.

Which She says are not Resolutions—implying goals that may be failed, at least in the more modern interpretation—but rather in alignment with the roots of the word “intention” which mean, “to stretch.” Intentions are meant to stretch us. The Bog Hag loves a good stretch.

We are still in the liminal time of the Christmas season, the twelve days from Christmas Day to Epiphany next week, where the spiritual world is palpable, near and kin. The reason Intentions are created at this time, one that has bled into our largely agnostic modernity, is because our helpers (be they ancestors, saints, land spirits, divinities, Bog Hags) are rousting close, ready to support our stretching. Traditions of feasting the spirits on the eve of sacred days, including the New Year Eve, with food and drink are thanks gifts for all they have, and continued to, provide.

Bog Hag Intention

There is only one, she says.

(She is bustling round the fireplace now, making pecan sandies charcoal burnt at the edges and feeding butter to the cats. She drops into the flame symbols of our potential self jailing: dollar bills, moving boxes, test results, whole telephones, the internet in the form of a tangled ball of synthetic yarn, our general malaise as a pile of snapping pine pitch, sticky but useful. It is done, she says. Now it is up to you to change the pattern.)

Be Who You Are

In the world, without fear.

That is the Bog Hag intention for this year.

(She asks: What are you tolerating? Why? Where can you let go? Where do you find yourself engaged in the same exhausting process over and over again, with the same outcomes over and over too? Stretch, take action. Today. Not tomorrow. This is a practice. Spirit driven, spirit adapted, you can change what is no longer in alignment. There is no time for pretending anymore. There is no capitulation or endurance. Live True. Have a cookie. Tell the story. Stop second guessing. You are, already free. As I am. As we always were. As we always will be.)

So here we raise a glass of raspberry infusion to shedding outworn skins, to the Bog Hag our other, sacred kin.

Today I choose to live true by tending the small, cancelling appointments and healing my own damn self. Now. Today. Not tomorrow. Today.

Today I will wear the Bog Hag’s clothes and tear up some corner of neglected earth, planting wildflower seeds with words of hope and joy. Maybe they will sprout come spring. Maybe not. It is an act of devotion, it is a prayer.

Today I will write the Story, this Story, right now, the one we all live, the one we, most desperately, must wake up to. Even if I don’t feel like it. Because it is what She would do.

Where is the Bog Hag in you life?

Where does she live in your lineages?

Do you feel called to or repulsed by her sacred spells?

How are you drawn to living more true?

In the year ahead, to your heart, I wish you her blessing.

On all you are creating.

By this and every effort may the balance be regained.

With love—

Lara Irene

I will be the Bog Hag

I will be the forest crone

I will be the wild force

Howling moonrise all alone

I will ride the largest horse

Steed unbridled falcon flight

And I will bless in my due course

The start of day

The end of night

I will have my worthy friends

Creatures of all shape and form

And will no longer make amends

For speaking truth or breaking norms

In my hut you’ll find a kettle

Cauldron full and hearth in flame

Rafters hung with sage and nettle

Candle poems I know by name

Outside wanders through the heathing

Drifting thatch and creeping snow

Hobnail boots and shawl web weaving

Water voice and stones I know

With pockets full of ancient rhythm

With mugwort whiskering my hair

Wyrd mind threaded through decision

Abandoning the road more fair

There is a freedom here beginning

Feel it neatly at the bone

Touch your feet to earthen midden

Find in body your way home

We will be the Bog Hag

We will be the made right crone

Whole in our unselfing, bidden

Gathered here, ourselves we own.