Burnt Sage & Blunt Truths

  (A Non-Exhaustive, Unapologetic List) There are some life lessons you learn slowly. Over years. Through therapy. Through careful reflection. And then there are the lessons you learn when your body throws a coup, you end up in a hospital bed under fluorescent lighting, and your entire life quietly rearranges itself while you’re wearing grippy socks. This is about the second kind. No details. No dramatics. Just observations. Because when your trajectory changes in a week, you don’t get wisdom—you get clarity. And clarity is louder than wisdom anyway. Lesson One: Your Body Is Not a Democracy You can negotiate with your mind all day. Your body does not attend meetings. It issues statements. Sometimes those statements come with IV fluids. Sometimes they come with paperwork. What I learned is this: the body keeps receipts. And when it’s done being polite, it stops whispering. Lesson Two: Systems Are Only Kind When You’re Convenient Every system smiles when you’re compliant, pr...

  Hummingbirds are not meant to pause. That’s the first thing you need to understand. They are built for motion—furious wings, impossible turns, a metabolism that burns hotter than logic. They exist in a state of constant becoming. Even when they rest, they hover . Even when they feed, they work. Even sleep is a half-life of suspension. So when a hummingbird sits still—truly still—it matters. Not because it’s rare in a statistical sense, but because it violates the bird’s own nature. And nature does not break its own rules casually. Animal Instinct Is Not Symbolism — It’s Intelligence Modern spirituality loves to turn animals into mascots. PowerPoint spirit guides. Pinterest omens stripped of teeth and truth. That’s not how animals work. Animals don’t perform symbolism. They respond to pressure, energy, weather, territory, time, threat, abundance. Their behavior is not metaphor first—it’s data first . The meaning comes after, when we’re quiet enough to notice the pattern. A hummin...

I didn’t lose my patience as a personal failing. Seattle sanded it down with traffic, passive aggression, and people who can’t commit to a lane change or a human relationship. Let’s start with the roads, because that’s where the damage is done daily. Seattle drivers aren’t aggressive — they’re indecisive with entitlement. No signals. Sudden stops. Left-lane camping like it’s a personality trait. “Polite” driving that actually just traps everyone else in a shared purgatory of hesitation. Every merge is a gamble. Every on-ramp is a prayer. And if you expect predictability, you’re the idiot. That kind of environment teaches you one thing fast: anticipate stupidity or get hit by it. So you harden. You tighten. You stop assuming good intentions because experience has beaten that optimism out of you with a Prius doing 47 in the fast lane. Then there’s the people. Seattle is full of folks who are “nice” but not kind. Friendly but unavailable. Warm in theory, distant in practice. Everyone smil...

  Plant seeds where no one can see them yet. Everyone thinks Imbolc is about light. Candles. Brigid. Milk. Lambs. The soft-focus return of the sun. That’s not wrong—but it’s incomplete. Imbolc is not a bonfire sabbat. It’s a coal sabbat . This is not the fire that announces itself. This is the fire that survives. Right now, even if the calendar hasn’t quite caught up, the energetic shift is already underway . You can feel it if you’re paying attention—not in the sky, but underground. This is the season of: Inner fires that don’t need witnesses First roots cracking soil in the dark Quiet planning instead of loud manifestation Subterranean power —the kind that grows without applause Nothing here is flashy. Everything here is real. The Quiet Fire (and why witches miss it) Most people are exhausted right now. Burned out on resolutions. Burned out on “big magic.” Burned out on performative healing. And yet—something is stirring. Imbolc energy doesn’t ask you...

  This week felt off. Not dramatic-off. Not crisis-off. Just… misaligned. Like my words were half a beat ahead of my thoughts. Like I talked too much, explained too much, offered context no one asked for. The kind of week where you replay conversations later and wince, wondering if you overshared or just forgot how to be contained. When routines fracture, so do our usual guardrails. Travel will do that. Disruption will do that. Being yanked out of your normal orbit by decisions made far above your pay grade will definitely do that. You start narrating yourself because the ground feels unsteady, and narration is a way to check that you still exist. And then—unexpectedly—I ran into my first supervisor from the agency. From way back. 2018. A lifetime ago in the line of work we do.  And I was remembered. Not vaguely. Not politely. Not with the generic “Oh yeah, you worked there too.” I was remembered with specificity. With warmth. With stories. With affection that hadn’t ex...

It didn’t arrive with fanfare. It didn’t land in my inbox like something important. It was sitting in my spam folder. I almost deleted it without opening it, the way you do when you’re tired and done checking for signs that the universe hasn’t sent in years. But something made me pause. So I opened it. It was a letter. Formal. Careful. Written by people who do not waste words or hand out gratitude lightly. It thanked me for work I stopped talking about a long time ago. Work that required cooperating with investigators at every level. Work that demanded patience, access, and a willingness to keep showing up when it would have been easier—and safer—to disappear. Work that helped pull back the curtain on an organization that had learned how to look harmless, even benevolent, to those who didn’t know what to look for. The letter said, plainly, that what I provided helped move things from speculation to clarity. That it contributed to a formal designation made in 2018—after years of ...

There are moments when the land speaks clearly—not loudly, not theatrically, but with a precision that leaves very little room for doubt. Yesterday was one of those days. Dakota and I caught the Noon ferry out of Edmonds and proceeded to make our way to Highway 101, for what started out as a quest for views, turned out to be something quite different.  It started at Crescent Lake , where the smell of evergreens permeated the air and the water so clear it felt less like looking at something and more like looking through it. No wind. No surface agitation. The kind of clarity that doesn’t perform—it just exists. Crescent water doesn’t rush. It holds. It reflects exactly what’s there and refuses to embellish. And silence. The sort of silence that creeps up on you and steals your breath.  That was when the ravens appeared. Two of them. Identical. Silent. Close enough to register as intentional rather than incidental. Ravens don’t need to announce themselves to be felt. Their ...