Heron Brook Haven

10/30/2025

So many of our modern day festivals have become so far removed from the original essence and the roots of what the festival was about.

These points in the calendar, these moments of celebration, were always about connection to our soul, honouring the land and our journey upon it.
And yet, as I look on the modern consumerist versions, it seems to be the opposite.

Buying into practises and things that damage the earth and our bodies.

Increasing disconnection rather than connection.
So if on this beautiful day and night of death and rebirth, new beginnings and letting go.

This festival of honouring our deaths and the path of our ancestors, this festival of fire; you find yourself eating piles of deadening sugar, surrounded by plastic wrapped junk, with no thought of connection to life, to heart to soul.

I invite you to carve out just 20 minutes of your time, to either light a candle, walk in the woods or make a mandala or a shrine under a tree; made from leaves, nut casings, lichen, feathers; whatever feels right to you, that represents all you have been through and all that you are growing towards.

Or make time to sit in candlelight, firelight or moonlight and just listen and feel into what has been and what you wish to move towards.

Honour in some way your life and the life of those who came before you, especially the ones who touched your heart with love and grief and carved a space in your bones for life to fill you with it’s beauty.

On this day especially, honour the wise ones; the witches whose knowledge of plants, nature, birth, death, seasons and beauty have brought so much to this earth.

It is those ancestors who brought forth much wisdom, and yet we still degrade their memory and celebrate the terrible killings of our wise ones through mockery and hate.

Let the young girls and boys know, that a strong wise woman, ‘a witch’ is a wonderful being indeed.

Break down the distorted misunderstandings and break free of celebrating a hideous belief, that witches were devil worshipping baby eaters, but were instead, our earth based wisdom our strong women.

Just take a moment if you can to connect to something more beautiful, more real.

Reclaim your knowing and understanding.
Your heart and soul will thank you for it.

~ Brigit Anna McNeill

Art by Tijana Lukovic, “Samhain”

10/23/2025

"Long before the broom became a Halloween symbol, it was a sacred household tool — a bridge between the everyday and the enchanted.
In the old villages of Europe, the hearth was the heart of the home, and sweeping was more than tidying. It was ritual. Each stroke of the broom cleared not only dust, but energy — brushing away stagnant spirit, grief, or misfortune. Women would sweep their thresholds at dusk, whispering small prayers to keep harm away and invite good fortune in.
It’s said that the first “witch’s broom” was born not from flight, but from intention. During the festivals of spring and autumn, women would dance through the fields beneath the moon, straddling their brooms as they leapt and circled — not to fly, but to bless the soil, calling fertility and renewal into the land.
The broom itself was a symbol of harmony: the ash handle for strength, birch bristles for purification, bound by willow for flexibility — masculine and feminine joined in sacred balance.
Over time, these moonlit dances were misunderstood. The image of women “riding” their brooms through the night twisted into fear and superstition. Thus the legend of the flying witch took root — a distortion of something once holy.
But beneath that shadow lies an older truth. These were Wise Women — healers, midwives, herbalists — whose power was found in care, intuition, and connection with the living earth. The broom was never a symbol of wickedness. It was a tool of protection, transformation, and boundary.
Before rituals, they would sweep the space clean — not to erase, but to prepare. To make the ordinary sacred. A broom placed by the door guarded the threshold, just as a candle still lights the way for prayer.
In folklore, the broom is a sign of liminality — of standing between worlds. To leap over it is to cross a threshold, to step into a new chapter. (Even now, “jumping the broom” in wedding rites carries that same blessing of transition and union.)
So when you see the witch with her broom silhouetted against the autumn moon, remember —
she is not fleeing.
She is rising.
She is dancing between worlds, sweeping the path between them clean.
The broom was never meant to frighten.
It was meant to bless."
Via: friends of the forest

10/19/2025

The mother wound resides within each and every one of us. Only when we are willing to face it, honestly and with the strength and power of woman, will it be removed from our lineage, the Sisterhood. As long as one carries it, it still lives and breathes down in the dank, dark recesses. As long as it does so, the r**e, plundering, abuse and disrespect of all the daughters will continue. I have chosen to be a destroyer of that line. Will you?

To be a daughter
is to find the wound your mother carries
and try to give it a name,

only to find there is no way to name it
without feeling a generational rage
so powerful

that you can hear the echos
of grief and fury
of every woman
in your lineage before you.

~ Nikita Gill

Art by Julia Jeffrey
Stonemaiden Art

10/18/2025

What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely.
~Christopher Reeve

10/10/2025

We are all spiritual beings, some of us are just more aware of our soul consciousness and our connection with the universal soul, this usually goes hand in hand with the opening of the heart.
There is a misconception that to be spiritual means to be positive all the time, "good" all the time, hanging out in the light as opposed to the dark, when in fact it means being willing to bypass the fearful ego in order to be authentic to your "self", all of yourself sometimes at the expence of looking "bad".
We cannot pretend to be other than we are in any given moment without the price of energy depletion, but we can choose to honor that place and bring love to it as best we can.
Spiritual discipline is anything that you do that enables you to conserve and enhance your energy and to take charge of your mind so that you can see beyond it to your true reality which is love and connection.
Such practices should enable you to establish that as your place of balance.
As human beings we dance around that place like bees around honey, sometimes flying off and sometimes landing, it's all part of the human experience as we learn to become fully established in our heart.
© Caroline de Lisser

10/09/2025

"It gives me a deep comforting sense that things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal."
~Helen Keller

photo:Zalman Wainhaus

10/06/2025

10/04/2025

"There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things."
~M Bookchin

09/23/2025

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09/13/2025

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08/29/2025

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08/28/2025

Come. The way awaits.
So does all that you are and will be.