The Witch in the Thorn Grove: A Mother's Wounding and Wild Return
What happens when you become the woman your mother warned you about—and it saves you? A mythic weaving of the hawthorn tree, ancestral wounding, and the soul’s initiation through motherhood.
Near my home in Bourgogne, hawthorns hold spears along the forest edges, guarding the passage, the turtle doves, the song thrushes, their crimson berries that recall the tales of fairies.
I have a mind to reach up and grab handfuls of them to tincture a heart medicine, but they are not ready until the first frost glitters and pinches the ground.
Instead, I push my daughter in her carriage to sunnier places and prick my fingers on hedgerows of field roses. As I snap off their bulbous hips and the mossy scarlet pincushions left by the gall wasps to bear young, I remember my grandmother.
I never got to meet her, or hear her tell stories of her childhood in Italy, or of her journey to America on the big ship with her sisters, nor of her mother or grandmother, or of her experiences in child birth. I never got to listen to the wisdom that would weather grooves around her mouth.
Breast cancer took her life when she was just the age I am now, and my father was a young teenager. I share the BRCA gene that seems to have been at its center.
I often consider the unimaginable pain she carried, the way she must’ve begged and bargained with God, the way surrender came as an inevitable lullaby when she held and looked into the eyes of her three young children and my grandfather for the last time.
I speak to her as the winds sweep my daughter’s hair into wild tangles. I tell her about our lives here in France, about the medicine of the roses, and what a blessing it is that we have such an abundance. I thank her for guiding me to them. I ask her to look over my son’s heart, and for the strength to carry this heavy ancestral stone carved by severed love.
Though I do not hold a memory of her face, and she can feel further than the stars, she is in my hands as we walk along these ancient paths winding through freshly plowed fields and ivy bound wood. We hear the songs of my ancestors call out to the birds, guiding me to the roots of our wounding, found beneath the hawthorn, the rose, the blackberry, and to the medicine they offer in succulent jewels.
The rose family is one of guardians, triple goddesses, the dual nature of flowers, sweet fruits and sharp thorns.
Hawthorn is one of the harshest teachers, a queen who will take you through dark matter and terrifying storms, so you can reach the dawn that rises on the shores of your power.
She sets challenges of worthiness if you’re brave enough to offer your soft skin, to retrieve your medicine, and she will break your heart open, so you can hold and transmute the grief of generations.
Her leaves are dainty, and her five petaled flowers grow in delicate white and pink clusters, yet her branches bite and stab with thorns like daggers. In autumn, she bears her fruit like tiny red apples that are used to treat all heart-related matters and nervous disorders.
She is a pioneer, reclaiming land for the wild to return, and can root into the most difficult ground.
🌬️What This Offering Holds
In this offering, I will take you into my intimate journey with hawthorn— and into the way of the Great Mother, the goddess in all her forms— she who lifts up her fanged branches and beckons you through the doorway of initiation, the spiraled path of descent…and return.
For paid subscribers, this piece includes personal parts of my story as well as the matriarchs that came before me, the wound we’ve carried and the collective healing offered by this tree.
In addition, we will explore the Roman goddess of doorways and weddings, Cardea, who is symbolized by the hawthorn herself.
You will also receive:
A guided shamanic drum journey to meet with the spirit of hawthorn and the goddess
Instructions for preparing your own hawthorn tincture
A set of journaling prompts to deepen your reflection and ancestral connection
🌿 Who it’s for:
This piece is for those who:
Feel called to ancestral healing and reclaiming matriarchal wisdom
Are navigating grief, estrangement, or mother wounds
Long to connect more deeply with the magic of trees, seasons, spirit and the ancient goddesses
Carry a desire to break generational patterns and re-root into a new truth
Are curious about plant spirit medicine, shamanic journeying, or the sacred feminine
The Secret in the Wound
This past summer, while visiting my son in New Jersey, we were walking along the sidewalk of a shopping mall leaving a restaurant when he turned to me and said, “I know their secret.” He gestured toward a family ahead of us, and when I asked what he meant, he said, “Every family has a secret. You can see theirs—it’s an easy one. See how they walk, how they carry themselves, how they’re heavy and grumpy?” I laughed gently, surprised by his observation, and later winced, complaining of a knot in my shoulder as we reached the car. He looked at me as I buckled him into his booster seat, and asked, “Is that our family secret? You know, since Daddy always has a sore back too?”
I smiled, and replied, “maybe,” and then he pondered, “I wonder what yours is with your family, you know like with your parents.” After I got into the driver’s seat and buckled up, I craned my neck to look back at him and sighed curiously, “hmmm…” Knowing the answer would be too heavy yet for his arms to carry.
As I drove, I was struck by the way he intuited—that what he meant by secret was really wound. Something woven that whispers beneath the tapestry of families, invisible as it manifests through the body, through pain, until the black sheep goes searching for its name, and retrieves it on exile island.
The harshest parts of my story gave me a treasure map, X marking the path to that stone.
The wound of our lineage is marked by early maternal loss—of mothers dying too young, and children left without grief rituals, of estrangement born of rage, and the firewalls we place around our pain.
I am from one of those common American families, lost from our homelands in Italy, speaking English on stolen ground, forgetting the names and stories of our ancestors. So, what I know of this wound does not go far back, though I know cuts through an ancient cloth.
