Where there's fear, there is power.

In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.

If we are to reclaim our culture, we cannot afford narrow definitions.

Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

Our physical senses and our embodied brains allow us to perceive only a small fraction of reality. We cannot see microbes or untraviolet light, for example. We can hear only a small range of sounds. When we try to describe the otherworld of energies and spirits, we are limited not only by our bodily constraints but by the expectations, assumptions, and language patterns ingrained in us by the culture we were raised in.

The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.