![]() But the course has also encouraged me to reconsider my relationship with nature, both in how I regard and move through it. As a recreational mountain athlete, what I’m learning overlaps surprisingly with many of the ways I already relate to the outdoors. I’m currently enrolled in her 12-month online course “The Witches Year,” an introduction for anyone curious about incorporating elements of witchcraft into their daily lives. That’s the way my teacher, Natalie Rousseau, a 45-year-old hedge witch-a woman who practices outside the confines of Wicca or other pagan religions-from Pemberton, British Columbia, describes it. I’m talking about real-life, modern-day witches: people who study nature, its cycles, and the way it influences our lives in order to generate positive changes in ourselves and in the world. Not the kind of unfortunate soul that Christian zealots executed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the pointy-hat-wearing, spell-casting witch from fairy tales and movies. Except that I was doing it as a ritual, as a fledgling witch. In many ways, my walk was no different than any walk I’d taken on a chilly day in the mountains. And I walked in silence, because I was alone, and because I wanted to move in step with the stillness of my environment. I noticed the iridescent quality of the waning light. I breathed in the icy air, wiggling my ungloved fingers in my pockets to keep them warm. I observed the snow, light and fluffy from a fresh storm cycle. ![]() ![]() On December 30, 2020, the date of the Cold Moon, I took a late afternoon walk through the cedar forest at the edge of my neighborhood in Nelson, British Columbia.
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