Storytelling from the White Witch

Animals are like wet cement…everything that touches them leaves an impression.     

This was not a name or a path that I gave myself.  Like so many people find, your true self reveals itself to you over time, over trials and over all else.  Many of us spend a great many years standing alongside our truth rather than in it, an observer of our actions, a cautious participant in our own amazing unfolding.  Stepping in to your truth is not often an easy task but a necessary one to truly experience your life at its richest.  Sometimes you step into that truth and sometimes you fall and sometimes, you are pushed.

The White Witch is one who strives to do no harm and to choose her actions out of a desire to be one with nature. She gets much help from the natural world around her in this endeavor.  And she is often completely and peaceably unawares of her own spellcasting.  But cast a spell she does.  Her small actions often create ripples and her reach is far beyond her sight.  She is a manifestor, but her best work is done close to her home and almost without her conscious participation.  Others tend to draw her best work out of her as she loves to be of service.  But this can be her kryptonite as she will share her power easily with both friends and foes.  But nature and its creatures never betray her.

My personal calling was always to be of service to the animals in some way.  Following the traditional paths proved too disciplined for a distractible and restless mind like mine.  Though my heart longed to be a doctor to my furred friends and my body bent itself easily to the task, my mind was too often drawn to the remote corners of that world, where natural healing methods and wives tales and whisperers gathered and practiced their craft in the shadows.

But it wasn’t a natural place for me to reside.  I came with no magical gift or special sense.  I adhere steadfastly to the predictability of science and the reliability of experience.  It was years before the animals themselves would reveal to me that all I needed I arrived with and everything that came after only sharpened my vision.

I have been blessed with teachers of every kind and the universe gave me at least the curiosity to hang on their every word.  From my mentors and my teachers came my knowledge, but my knowing came from the horses, the dogs, the birds and the fantastic creatures I found beneath my hands.

It was actually a woman raised entirely on the back of a horse who first gave me the nickname White Witch.  Until that time, I only knew the white witch as the villian from  The Chronicles of Narnia, favorite books of my childhood passed on to me by my sister.  But a White Witch is anyone who strives to do the right thing in the name of nature, to do no harm, to exercise the will of nature and bring about the health and well-being of her creatures, be they animals or children.  Some are born, some are fashioned, but all are drawn by the magic of nature and seek the outdoors.

Perhaps you too, are a White Witch?  Were you drawn by the idea of magic and tales of animals?  Were you searching for the connection to nature and her ethereal powers?  Perhaps the stories here will reveal to you the White Witch within, just as they did for me.