The Forest Witch
Plays the piano at midnight
and dances with the Sugar Plum Fairy
Collects fallen stars and plants them as seeds
in zones with armed conflict
Sings a requiem for a dead badger
Annoys her husband by wishing for snow
Places bouquets of frost flowers
on the graves of dead poets
Plays her swan bone flute by the lake
at sunrise
Goes mist walking
Sings home migrating cranes
Dismembers herself and gradually replaces
all bones in her skeleton with animal bones
Grows crow’s feet and raven wings
Flies her broomstick to the Blue Mountain
where her Witch Ancestors gather
Hears Grief as
the haunting Music of the Spheres
Stalks hunters
Merges with the Skogsrå*
Who seduces men who get lost in the Forest
(and turns them into trolls with cow’s tails)
Talks to her Venus Shadow
Invites the Forest to paint
leaves, animal tracks, extravagant textures
Plays her cello for birds and wild boar
Casts runes in Forest Temples
Shapeshifts into a spider
to mend broken threads in the Web of Life
Feeds the sins of the community
to hungry fungi in a Nordic forest
at midnight
Makes sacred by witnessing
Grows antlers and becomes
an upside down tree
Her long hair as roots touching the sky
Rooted in magic and miracles
in Divinity
(Eternity embedded in Beauty)
She is ENOUGH
There is enough magic to spare!
*Skogsrå (also Huldra) is the word for a powerful (female) being from Swedish folklore. She rules the forest and all creatures. Her name is ulda in Sámi folklore, further north.
Imelda Almqvist, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden
BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST
Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) will be published in June 2022.
The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.
Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.
Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time!
Website:
http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/
YouTube Channel: youtube.com/user/imeldaalmqvist
Online School: https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/almqvistimelda/
Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist
Imelda Almqvist
Wonderful! Thank you 😊
Utterly and entirely awesome, marvelous and uniquely magical. How we shapeshift to reenchant the motherheart!