Baba Yaga The Wise

That is how the story begins… Not with monsters…Not with villains…But with women who were taught that devotion meant endurance. Women who believed that if they loved deeply enough, patiently enough, sacrificially enough, they could warm cold hands into tenderness and turn absence into home. My mother searched for love the way some people search…

Listen close, little bird, and try not to flutter so much. The iron teeth of my fence don’t chatter for no reason—they’ve tasted the salt of a thousand fools who believed a pretty word was a binding contract. You think a promise is a bridge? Bah! Most times, a promise is just a cage built…

Come closer, little flame-carrier—yes, you with the ash on your handsand the question in your throat. You think this is an ending. You stand at the edge of a burned-down house—job gone, lover vanished,chapter closed with a sound like bone against bone—and you call it ruin. I call it kindling. Do you not know me…

There are women who have been taught to apologize to the windfor the way it moves through their hair—and then there are women who learnthe wind was always speaking to them. I am Baba Yaga.I have lived in the marrow of bone and birch,in the tremble between breath and knowing,and I will tell you this:…

The Unbound Altar I have spent decades building a cathedral out of other people’s hunger. I wore the heavy velvet of “mother,” the stiff, beaded bodice of “wife,” and I painted my face until the mask became the only skin the world would touch. I was a river trying to fit into a teacup; I…

Child—I have watched you bow your head to stormsyou did not summon. “I’m sorry,” you whisperto the rain,to the wind that tangles your hair,to the silence of a room that does not know your name. You apologizefor the way your laughter spills—wild, uncontained,like a river that refuses the shape of a man’s map. Who taught…

In the high, breathing wilderness of the Montana wilderness — somewhere between the Glaciers and the Yellowstones —where the air tastes of pine resin and cold river stone,and the mountains hold their silence like a secret—  Encapsulating the blue skies in the frames of the ancient mountain ridges?there was once a woman who came…

Come closer, flame-hearted one…closer still—there are stories that do not belong to daylight,and this is one of them. You speak of the bear—but I see already you knowhe is not only one. He is many. He has come to youin different skins,different voices,different hands that have learnedhow to rest against youas though they had always…

I am older than the fence posts, older than the stories told about me— yet still I kneel in the grass to listen to the small, breathing truths of fur and feather and paw. Animals do not lie. They do not decorate their longing with pretty words the way humans do when they are afraid…