Welcoming the Slow Return of the Dark 

We are thrilled to announce that we will be offering a Summer Solstice Writing Circle this June 13th! We invite our paying members to join for free! Not a member? Sign up here:

A bit on this session's theme of welcoming the return of the dark

We are working with the goddess witch Hekate to create some prompts that we hope will celebrate the longest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), while also leaning toward the dark half of the year and all of the magic we can make in these days of waning light. Hekate is the queen of the witches, the torch bearer at the crossroads.

What crossroads might we find on this summer solstice? How can we utilize this brightest day as our collective torch to light our way? 

Below we have the details for the writing circle, a few writings from the spring writing circle (thanks murder friends!), and a poem and prose piece about Hekate by carla and Dani.

What: A Witchy Summer Solstice Circle 

When: Saturday, June 13, 2026; 10 am- 12 pm (pacific time)

Where: Virtual! Across the Universe, Underground with the Mycilliam, Anywhere you have an internet connection!

Fee: Free to paid subscribers

Who: You! Also: carla joy bergman and Dani Burlison

Other info: Email us at CAW to sign up — we are capping this workshop at 20 participants, with sign-ups closing on June 8, 2026

Become the witch you wish to see in the world

From Below and in Three Directions: Nine fragments of Love for Hekate

by carla joy bergman

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Hekate Held Her Torch for Me

by Dani Burlison

1.

My hormones swirled as I walked my rural road to meet a boy at the edge of an orchard. I remember the sound of crickets and frogs screeching out into that warm summer night, a raccoon crunching on crawdads in the stream along the road. I remember a bat swooping low through the air, my favorite ancient oak tree looming over me. I remember how bright the stars glittered against that moonless night. I remember crossing a threshold from childhood and into something else as I stood at the crossroads of pavement and water and soil.

There was a moment in that dark night that seemed to last an eternity. A moment when my flesh stood up to meet the air with a shiver. We’ve all been there, from fear or excitement, that feeling of someone watching from afar. The feeling that grips us a second before someone or something reaches out to brush our skin with a cold outstretched finger. A startle, a gasp in our lungs. A rush in our blood.

I had no idea what that chill was from; maybe a ghost from the rumored haunted house sitting next to the creek. Maybe a phantom spirit that had crept down from the foothills to hunt the foxes and boars that often roamed those places. I wasn’t afraid. Something was guiding me, watching the road ahead for danger.

Stepping from the paved road and in between rows of walnut trees, the acidic smell of their hulls lingered, thick in the air. The boy wasn’t there. His car wasn’t parked down the dirt road that bordered the orchard. He wasn’t waiting, listening to Depeche Mode, as I had hoped. He must have been running late, I thought, as a courage suddenly filled me and propelled me deeper into the trees.

I walked until the road was out of sight, which in retrospect probably wasn’t far at all but my perception was skewed; the only light I had was the Milky Way. I stopped at a crossroads of orchard rows, felt the dew of the orchard weeds slippery under my shoes, closed my eyes and lifted my face and arms up to the sky. It was a rare moment of safety and freedom in my otherwise chaotic teen life and I soaked it up, standing tall, reveling in whatever was there protecting me.

2.

Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” blasted from the car and some of the boys snorted lines in the backseat of the gold Volvo and then passed the bottle of Southern Comfort around the circle, taking big final gulps of it before bolting toward the trail. There was a lightning storm forecasted and we were there to watch it after crawling into and out of a cave off of Highway 36.

The cave wasn’t a big secret, but it wasn’t open to the public, either. Only the locals around the Lassen area knew about it and there was a trail from a clearing in the ponderosa pines that led down the volcanic stones to its opening. It was dangerous, and we were here with our Slayer shirts and black eyeliner to spark adrenaline rushes to top off the rushes of booze and speed and whatever else the older boys had coursing through their skinny bodies.

My drunk boyfriend entered first and I followed close behind, pointing my flashlight to the walls and ceiling of the cave, looking for chunks of stone that could crush us or block our path out. I was claustrophobic, though I would never show a weakness around these guys. They all liked me because I was bold, a risk-taker, who often led them into abandoned houses looking for ghosts, and who drank and cussed and partied as hard as the rest of them.

As the tunnels in the cavern became smaller, I found myself belly crawling into icy air, far away from the group. Water dripped in a slow steady pace onto my curly hair as I pushed myself further than I should have gone. Always seeking just a little bit more of a high from pressing myself up against danger, I turned my flashlight off and widened my eyes. In that moment, I thought I heard a woman whisper an introduction, both a warning and a reassurance, that crept up my spine. I remember it feeling like ice at the back of my neck.

As I turned the flashlight on and backed out of the tight spot in the cave, the sound of thunder broke outside. We all scurried toward the cave opening and emerged to lightning breaking apart the sky over miles of dark forested hillsides. We howled at the sky, some of us dancing in circles, raising our arms overhead.

The boys kept passing the bottle until it was empty and someone smashed it against a boulder as the hail began pelting us. My boyfriend, the most wasted of the group, refused to give the car keys to any of the less fucked up boys in the group. He insisted on driving and anyone who didn’t get in the car would be left on the rural mountainside alone. I chose to sit in the backseat.

As we careened down the highway at what I later heard was 90 miles per hour, the lightning and thunder continued its theatrics behind us. The boyfriend swerved and banged his head to the music pumping out of the speakers in one moment, and in the next the car was upside down in the air. I remember a flash (had Hekate held her torch for me?) and then the car’s roof hitting a large boulder off the side of the highway. The car was flung up again and again—three or four times total—before landing on its side next to a cliff.

There were five of us in the car, some injured badly. I was able to crawl out through the sun roof, and made my way to the road. A couple of the boys were unconscious. I thought my boyfriend was dead. I just stood there, staring, a voice from somewhere telling me I had a big choice to make, that I should head down another road.

3.

We were on acid at the Santa Monica pier, watching the waves crawl up and pull back, over and over. A woman walked her two dogs near them, running back and forth in a game of tag with the sea. The dogs barked at the sea foam and seemed to jump in circles. Time and space felt obsolete except the sun was sinking and the sky was morphing from blue into gold into red into purple, so I knew it must be nighttime.

At nineteen, I was at a crossroads in my life, one of what would be many turning points; points of entry into what could have been other lives, with other people, with other ways of thinking and being and living. I never knew which direction to take so I often just took the direction toward drugs or bad men, and let life just carry me along.

I watched beachgoers pack their things, objects that looked like orbs of light or clumps of energy, even though the LSD was waning after a few hours of adventuring around my new home of Los Angeles with these goth friends from back home. We laughed, marveled at the first specks of stars poking through the night sky. I remember staying quiet, bouncing ideas and questions about the world around in my head, too confused about what next steps to take after I had experienced a blurry but horrific event a few months before. I tried not to think about what the person had done to me and instead let my body lean back into the sand.

I asked for a sign about staying in Los Angles, wondering if I’d be safe there alone if everyone kept leaving me. I heard a dog howl on the beach, women laughing in the distance, waves crashing against the pier. Then a gunshot. Screaming. A man yelling something from down the beach. I jolted up, trying to make out what was happening in the dimly lit night. Then sirens. As the police and paramedics made their way to the man lying, presumably dead, on the beach, I saw her near the waves. Her dogs by her side, a torch in her hand. She was facing me, whispering again, offering a warning and a sign it was time to go.

* 

Check out the entire zine curated by Dani and Alyssa Rose, Hekate: Queen of the Crossroads Zine in our Zine Library!

Below are some wonderful writings from our last circle!

Prompt: what can we learn from the land or water?

By Nicol Darling Udy

Mine is the sea-spring

Always mingling

Depth to foam

Breath to air

Captured and rising to meet the equalizing light of the high noon son

My sea thinks herself a teacher – an old knower, older than the land. A knower of the rot of spring time, caked away ‘neath the summer sun to crust, crackling finally in laughter only when she heaves out rain.

O’ foam filled lady

Learn yourself a lesson

Of the gentle loam’s love stroke

And the river’s load

In all your years can you call yourself unchanged?

By the passings land-side

Who chokes your throat with ash

And spits their own retching ejaculate into your depths

To impregnate their own vision

Of the permanently cracked world

Forever caked away, as they catch up all your heaving rain

Yield, bastards, yield! To the old lovers – loam and rain – who raise with love even your still-borns and hommonculi – to grow far beyond you

Prompt: quote about you can cut the daisies but never kill the spring

By Nicol Darling Udy

It was a basic exercise, not even worth grading, to simulate Daisy World – a dainty name for the simulation, one curve multiplying into another, of Earth returning to the catatonic place we say planets hail from

‘O ye who walk through the valley of Death

Fear not the cradling Dry Lands

Girding you on either side of your brief seasons

Of your spring time’

As students, we changed a few numbers to perpetuate, competitively, a longer lived spring time. Relentlessly, the simulation taught us

Everything goes to dust, and to call back the dead only wounds the now living,

by trading our daisies today for too much sun shine tomorrow

I think of the death-drive, and its instantiation in our use of the oil-corpse and the coal-corpse to call up days past for a faster burning tomorrow

O’ old man willow, first to be buried in the Carboniferous

Your swamp spell now goes spreading to bring us all to sleep

And deny goldberry spring sprit her pools and flowers

And my heart says to care not for some simulated death of spring, but to pick the daisies for winter and summer and fall, to leave them ‘bout her feet promising

That we know nothing of the passing of time save to compress it into undergraduate course work, to kill the sense of security in the turning of the years, to instill Death in students who must name dead, alien fore and after worlds.

Have I finally done enough to grow past my old lessons

And earnestly pray at goldberry’s feet in homage

To human time-scales made immortal?

*

Prompt: What can we learn from the land right now?

By Swift

There is much to learn from the land. The land shows us much on the current conditions of the world. Look to the land and you will see the health of the land. If the health of the land is good where you see it, that means theres still hope, that not everything has been destroyed by the bandits known as the ruling class or their cohorts. If the health is bad, thats another reason to fight back. The land is key to our survival. Just looking at the land, just observing it can teach us things including things that are beyond what words can alone tell us. There are some things that are impossible to fully depict in writing, even for seasoned writers like me, after all.  But what else does the land teach that I could bring up? Well. it all depends. Actually going out to live in the land, in nature itself is the greatest means for the land to teach you anything. Just being an observer though still teaches you to appreciate nature itself even just a little bit more. There are limitless things we can learn from the land right now without even going into any of the science on the ground or other geological subjects. The indigenous peoples of the world can best tell you all of this. they have been far more in tune with the land than any average white person ever has been and it is they who those of us who are not native should take guidance from.

Prompt: where do you see beauty amid the terror?

By Swift

I see beauty amidst the terror in so many places. Beauty is everywhere. I see it in my body, whether Im shirtless, wearing my new red princess gown, in my knightly plate armor, or whatever. I see it in the nature around me. I see it in animation, interactions, love, parks, theme parks, artworks, my drawings, plushies, animals, the cat who lives in the house I live in, I truly see it everywhere without giving it much of a thought most of the time.

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And finally this blog post by Graeme was started with the last paragraph that they wrote during the spring writing circle: https://www.sylvanartsrevival.com/blog/all-trees-are-sacred-sorta