I give gratitude to all the places, human and nonhuman midwives, and doulas who helped me bend the laws of time and space and birth this book.
Thank you to the human realms—my friends, allies, family, teachers, students, and Witches.
Thank you to Sage Maurer for caressing the pines open in the deep northern woods of Vermont and helping me see the green path that led me back to the nettles in my great-grandmother’s hands and the linden trees of Poland. Words will never encompass the magick of who you are: teacher, sister, friend, ally, guide, poet, mystic, love. I am forever grateful for your generosity and friendship.
Thank you to my covens and the gardens I tend, land I love, Oak I teach under. Thank you Maggie Lochtenberg for your incredible work on the art for this book—I will forever delight in the trasmition and mutual delight of shared visions we caught from the ethers and that you so beautifully transcribed into the art that blesses these pages. Thank you to my many sistars who support me and my work and love me even though I work so much: Thank you Paula, Jade, Jesse, Valeria, and all my green Gaia witches whom I adore. Thank you to Jill for fishing this book from the deep waters of my being and the team of amazing women at The Quarto Group who made this book possible.
Thank you to the trees from whom this book is made. Please forgive me for any harm I have caused, for any beauty I write pales in comparison to yours. I do pray a miraculous force of love and magick ripples from these pages made of your body, awakening the wild hearts of readers and that currents of healing and devotion return to the lands from which you came and to the flesh of our Earth Mother. Thank you, siblings, for my daily breath and your participation.
Thank you to all that is invisible that partook in the birth of this book and the experiences that filled the wells of my being from which I draw healing nectars that I pray nourish thirsty or curious souls. The gratitudes to that which is unseen belongs in worlds beyond words.
I give gratitude to all the places and lands that held me as I stretched myself to write this. My sister Paula’s hearth and the fire she tended where I began in the mountains of Yosemite on the Winter Solstice. The ridges and rocks I summited to ignite the channels of creation during the pregnant void of winter. Gratitude and reverence to the healing moonlit waters of hot springs and delighted otters that seduced the writing further after Imbolc. Thank you, Flora: I adore you, beloved daughter, miraculous spark, catalyst of transformation. You have changed me. Thank you, moja kochana cÓreczka. Gratitude to my mother and father, my chosen family, and my community who helped with Flora so I could squeeze in moments of writing. Blessings on my home where I labored into the nights of the Spring Equinox and blessings on my parents’ home, where I read this one last time before releasing it in the night of the Solar Eclipse and July new moon. Deep bows to the reality of bending the laws of time and space, and all the unromantic moments of pushing a book out, afraid to share something so intimate and afraid of wavering in the fear of human judgment.
With gratitude to all the deaths and rebirths in my life that have fed my soul with flavors bitter and sweet. To the wholeness, ripeness, and complete mystery of life. All my devotion to our beautiful, beloved Earth Mother; to the plants, my teachers, healers, and guides. Thank you for all you have given me and taken away. One day, I will be the most delicious compost, exhaling songs of sweet decay into your fertile flesh. In the meantime, may I marry the soil and the stars in a great love song of my life. May my life be a living prayer that brings healing to those who have come before, and those who are yet unborn.
And so it is.
Marysia Miernowska
These gratitudes were cast on the other side of the lunar and solar Beltane portal
On a day it rained in May, in Topanga, California
With a black cat curled on my lap.