http://www.witchinghourfarm.com/

Witching Hour Farm & Folklore, Bethel, OH (2026)

02/22/2026

The Ecology of Resilience series began with disturbance — with the ways wellness culture misunderstands both bodies and ecosystems.

Much of it was shaped by a recent flare and written from bed over the course of just a few days, where these ecological theories felt far less abstract.

The series moved through collapse and reorganization as processes rather than personal failures.

This final essay lingers in that reorganization phase, tracing what grows first after rupture and what kinds of conditions allow it to take root.

Read Pioneer Species and the Luxury of Not Knowing at the 🔗 in stories or b l o.

Thanks for going on this lil journey with me.

Creators tagged in each image when possible.

02/21/2026

Today the air smelled like wet soil and the sun was shining on my sleeping lavender plant in the most perfect way.

I think I’m gonna make it after all.

02/08/2026

When I closed my brick-and-mortar apothecary at the end of 2022, I didn’t fully understand how deep my burnout ran. I only knew that my body needed a change of scenery. What followed were two years of grief, intense fatigue, and worsening chronic illness symptoms, as the consequences of pushing past my limits finally caught up with me.

My vision was clear, but the cost of bringing it into form was not. The transition asked me to reckon with the stories I had internalized about identity, productivity, and health—stories that framed endurance as virtue and collapse as personal failure.

I gave myself time and space to experiment, to follow threads rather than plans. And the thing is, that s**t really worked.

Now you might be saying to yourself, well yeah, if I didn’t work and could just focus on following my heart I’d feel a hell of a lot better too, but I DID work. I still had to survive. I actually worked a ton. I even won a whole ass Emmy award as a producer in 2023.

And I lived happily ever after.

Just kidding. My clarity came with a double edge. I was right to trust my intuition, the change was necessary. My mind, body, and spirit needed the flexibility that freelance life offered. But flexibility without stability is its own kind of precarity—especially as a single parent, especially with an invisible illness, especially under late-stage capitalism. That whole socioeconomic status thing and those social determiners of health really come into play here.

Care, it turns out, is not something you can will into existence through insight alone.

Eventually, I found what once felt like an impossible thing: A regular-ass job I genuinely love. It also happens to be full-time, in an office. Which means many of the challenges I thought I had left behind are now resurfacing in a different ecosystem, asking different questions of my body, my time, and my capacity.

Care Is an Ecosystem emerges from this tension. It is not a solution or a blueprint because I don’t have either. It is an acknowledgment of what I do know: that care is relational, contextual, and contingent, and that no single structure can hold it all without cost.

I hope you’ll explore with me.

02/02/2026

Imbolc/Snow Moon

The stars really did align on this one.

Typically I aim to spend at least a portion of my day outside on Imbolc, looking for signs of a change in seasons as the promise of spring arrives.

This year Imbolc happened to fall at nearly the same time as the full moon in Leo, also sometimes referred to as the snow moon. True to its name, this year there is a thick blanket of snow in all the places I would normally hope to find the first green shoots of a purple hyacinth, yellow crocus, or a white hellebore poking up through the cold ground.

Imbolc doesn’t mark the arrival of spring, but its promise. I may not be able to see the hyacinth, crocus, or hellebore, but I know they are there, resting beneath their thick white blankets. I’m resting in the hope that change is coming, that spring is coming.

It’s a really difficult time to trust what can’t yet be seen, in the world as much as in the soil.

It’s been easy for me to find myself feeling more cynical lately because of… *gestures broadly*

And while I doubt it means I’m going to be any quieter in response to all that is going on right now, the arrival of Imbolc has reminded me that I can also choose joy as an act of resistance.

I am continually inspired and humbled by the world around me and that is precisely why I believe it’s worth fighting for.

I will plant and nurture the seeds of change with care and intention.

02/01/2026

I’ve always been drawn to the in-between places—the hedgerows, the hours when light is changing, the fields that refuse to stay neat and tidy. For a long time, I thought this was just a wild aesthetic preference. Now I understand it as a form of training.

Life has kept me at thresholds: between certainty and listening, health and illness, usefulness and rest. Out here, those thresholds are everywhere. Edges are where the most life gathers, and it’s the most exciting/unpredictable—where plants volunteer, where soil rebuilds itself, where rules take a backseat and relationship takes over. Nothing here is fixed. Everything is in constant conversation.

This is why the path of the hedge witch has always felt like such a sacred practice. To work the edges. To tend what grows outside permission. Animism, too, is not a belief I adopted so much as something that my life insisted on: nothing is inert, nothing is separate, and nothing thrives alone.

My latest essay “Liminal Lives” grows from this ground. It’s an offering from the thresholds—not a guide out of them, but a way to begin to consider living well within them.

I hope it resonates with you in your uniqueness and in consideration of the challenges you face.

🖤

🔗 in B l O

01/31/2026

Rejoicing for the promise of spring 🌱

01/25/2026

Living systems don’t optimize.

They diversify.

An ecosystem built for peak efficiency collapses the first time conditions change. A system built with overlap, variation, and uneven rhythms survives disturbance. Not because every part performs the same way, but because it doesn’t.

Resilience doesn’t come from streamlining life into a single ideal. It comes from making room for difference, slowness, redundancy, and ways of being that only make sense when conditions are no longer perfect.

This essay explores why optimization is incompatible with life—and what becomes possible when we stop designing worlds that only work for one kind of body.

🔗 in BlO

If you’ve ever felt like you were the wrong “shape” for the system (square peg in a round hole, anyone?), this essay might feel familiar.

01/18/2026

I remember standing in the middle of my little shop, trying to explain to a beloved staff member what I meant when I said that I loved what we had built with Queen City Alchemy, but I had to find a way to “rub a little dirt on it.”

I guess I should have known then that it was the beginning of the end. Everything was too light, too bright, too perfect, too clean. I had changed, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I needed more nuance. I needed a container for the complexity. I think I probably needed to scream.

I guess you can’t just rub a little dirt on something that needs to be finished.

You have to let it decompose.

You have to become the soil.

Resilience isn’t bouncing back.
It’s continuing after irreversible change.

New essay in the Ecology of Resilience series, Resilience Is Not Recovery.

Link in bio.

Stay tuned for next Sunday’s essay, Living Systems Don’t Optimize.

🖤

01/17/2026

Wellness culture has sold us a lie about resilience.

That if we just tried harder, optimized better, healed faster, smiled more (?), we could return to who we were before.

Ecology tells us a different story.

Resilient systems don’t recover.

They change.

They reorganize after disturbance.

They depend on redundancy, relationship, and care.

Chronic illness isn’t an exception to the system.
It’s an early warning signal.

The Ecology of Resilience is a refusal of bounce-back narratives, productivity morality, and individualistic healing myths.

It’s an attempt to think like an ecosystem instead of a machine.

This work is for anyone sensing that what we’re calling “normal” is already a collapse in slow motion.

I’m writing a series of essays on Substack beginning with this one exploring these concepts and more. If you feel so inclined, you can join me there 🖤

🔗 in BlO

01/01/2026

As the year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about an intention I shared back in January, written in the quiet stretch between my mother’s death and the first new moon of the year.

I chose a single word not as a goal or a resolution, but as a way to stay tethered to presence when everything felt unmanageable.

Noticing.

I tied it to the lunar cycle, like I often do with intentions, trusting that the moons would remind me to return to check in with how I was paying attention or if I had drifted.

What I didn’t know then was how much noticing would carry me.

This year asked me to notice joy and grief as it moved and changed. To notice my body’s limits and quiet capacities. To notice land, plants, seasons, and the small, living details that continue even when life feels paused. I noticed how often transformation arrived not in moments of complete clarity, but in subtler ways, through repetition, patience, and staying with what was already here.

And I noticed my mother everywhere.

In the way I slow down near a plant I don’t recognize. In the habit of watching birds longer than necessary. In remembering that attention itself is a form of love.

As we stand on the threshold of a new year, I’m super grateful I didn’t ask myself to become anything different in 2025.

I only wanted to see.

Happy New Year, sweet friends. Cheers to more opportunities to notice all the things together 🥂✨

12/22/2025

May you find peace in the promise of the solstice night,

That each day forward is blessed with more light.

That the cycle of nature, unbroken and true,

Brings faith to your soul, and well-being to you.

Rejoice in the darkness, in the silence find rest,

And may the days that follow be abundantly blessed.

Blessed Solstice 🖤

12/21/2025

As Sagittarius season comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the plants that help us seek truth. Not the loud, performative kind, but the slow, embodied wisdom that comes from lived experience.

Sage has long been a companion in this work. Salvia comes from salvere, to heal or to save, and carries a reputation for clearing mental fog and supporting memory. It is a plant of discernment and knowing what to keep and what to release.

Sagittarius is often framed as the traveler, the philosopher, the seeker of meaning beyond the horizon. Yet every journey toward truth requires moments of stillness. Inspired by a dear Sagittarius friend, these connections are where I am also finding myself returning to The Hermit card of the Tarot, who’s lantern is held high not to illuminate the entire path, but just enough for the next step.

Though The Hermit is traditionally linked to Virgo, their lantern feels deeply Sagittarian to me. A light carried in service of truth. Wisdom gathered through solitude. The humility of knowing we are always still learning.

Sage teaches this same lesson. It does not rush. It invites contemplation. It asks us to sit with our thoughts, our questions, our contradictions, and trust that clarity will come in its own time.

As Sagittarius gives way to Capricorn, the focus shifts from seeking wisdom to stewarding it. From questions to commitments. From vision to structure. What we have learned now asks to be rooted, practiced, and carried forward with intention.

Witching Hour Farm & Folklore

02/22/2026

02/21/2026

02/08/2026

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02/01/2026

01/31/2026

01/25/2026

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