Wildflowers & Witchcraft

A peek into one of my writing assignments plus EOY updates

Hi, friends 🦋

It’s so hard to believe it’s the end of the year. Did 2021 even happen? If it hadn’t been the most important year of my life to date, I’d wonder. 🤔

I hope you’re all able to hit the pause button in some way over the next couple of weeks. I for one am extremely excited about my husband’s ability to have a quieter schedule, so that we can spend more time together as a family. Violet’s first little Christmas! I shared a little holiday home tour on YouTube ICYMI. I was going back and forth about whether to do it or not, mainly because it’s the end of the year and 🥱 I’m tired (also rly working on indecisiveness as a trait which I have discovered for me personally is directly correlated to perfectionism – should we talk more about this sometime?! 💌 hit reply and let me know) but I decided to do it in the end because I wanted the memory of this house (since we don’t know how long we will be here) and V’s first Christmas here. In addition to the fact that many of you had requested it!

Last week I wrote about a writing course I took this year, and I was pleased to hear that a few of you are interested in taking it! I hope you will. If you do please say hello to Lynn for me, and be sure to report back and let me know how it went.

As promised, below I’ve shared one of my writing assignments from the class. Each week we were given a prompt to free-write from, and this was my assignment from week two. The prompt was, “My mother told me…” and for those of you who know anything about my relationship with my mother… 😳. At first it was hard to even think of something concrete that she did indeed tell me. But then I did, and I was surprised to see where the writing led me.

It was difficult not to edit this before sharing – I actually made a copy and started to edit it before deciding to leave it as-is – mostly because I never got the chance to edit it the first time. That’s because it was early on in the class and I was thinking we were still supposed to be free-writing only (I ended up learning some light editing was fine/encouraged.) There’s a lot I would now remove, mainly details that flowed out as I was writing but that I now recognize as unnecessary to moving the story forward, and lots I would expand upon as well.

It’s not the lightest piece of writing but it was a favorite – mostly because it led me to a place that I already knew I was interested in writing about and exploring further, which was my discovery of witchcraft (as earth-based spirituality) in my mom’s dying days.

I do still want to edit this piece so I will share that with you (paying subscribers 💋) when I do, along with notes on how I went about it. Please do let me know if that is of interest! I wish I could give each of you a huge (pre-Covid style!) hug to say thank you for supporting my work. Sometimes I question myself as a writer (especially in this season of my life when my brain feels like jello most days), or what exactly I am doing with this newsletter, if it is valued, if I should continue doing it, etc. So thank you for keeping me going.

A big thank you to everyone else for reading and following along, too. 💗

I am planning to take the next couple weeks off from writing here, and I hope you will also give yourself a break in whatever capacity is available to you. The solstice is Tuesday! Honor the way of Mother Nature and take time to rest, recharge, recalibrate.

So much love to each and every one of you.

x Sarah

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My mother told me we were witches, my sisters, Nikki, Jessica, and Leah, and me.