One, two, three—four! Juicy generations of witchy, blond women! 

Like Russian dolls nested, we give rise to each other, before we know each other, when we are naught but possibilities swirling in the void. 

The opaline possibility of me was within my grandmother, Wanda. Wanda the wild, Wanda the wonderful, who dyed her hair and wore red feather boas to company Christmas parties. Wanda who I barely knew yet birthed my own mother, the goddess Diana. 

Diana the daring, the dedicated, the devoted. Diana the dancer. Diana whose style I once labeled as Tinker-Punk. Delicate in constitution and build yet strong and determined. Diana who has struggled to reclaim herself to nourish our roots and prune back the unhealthy branches of our family tree.

The Justice fruit ripens sweetly, taking nearly four decades to grow into this name. I, who hold my name as a most honored virtue, as a calling. I should have been a lawyer, but no, I am a healer, and instead of taking on rascals in the court-room, I fight demons in the underworld. I play with pain and magic and weave tapestries of new possibilities from the most unlikely materials. 

The most beautiful of those materials I have had the honor to play with is the very fabric of Destiny. Destiny, who came as she often does, before I was ready, when I was least ready, and in most need. She came in through a tiny window and brought light and hope into a world that was toxic and covered in graffiti, conceived in a small room, painted black with weird, drug addled depictions on the walls. She woke me from my toxic trance and asked for me to care for myself again so I could care for her. 

I was scared and scarred, and not ready. Yet, she came!

I knew her before I ever saw evidence of her in a plus or minus sign of a pregnancy test, which I never took. I knew her before I heard her heartbeat, or looked into her deep, blue-moon eyes, knew her before she spoke her first word, delicately, as she did, from rose-bud lips, or took her first steps, haltingly and with great determination. I knew her as my own womb seed, deeply part of me and whole and distinct and divine and individual as is each fruit that ripens on the sacred tree.

There they are the four of us, wild women, tender and brave with our shared and individual gifts and pain. But Wanda is gone from this world— her fruit fallen from this tree. She has gone back into the soil to feed the future and the future is Juniper! 

Juniper, my granddaughter, and a tender, bright, fierce blossom she will be. Conceived in the mountains summer, young loves seed, unplanned—deeply loved. She will root where she is planted and she will thrive. We will water her soil and feed her roots for she is our Destiny! 

Quite literally now, they share a body and my young fruit, just twenty-one today, a mother will be, well before spring buds sprout through tough, Montana soil. 

Junipers are tough, beautiful, medicinal and fragrant,

So shall this womb-fruit be.

I am in love again, though I resisted at first. Fear is funny how it works in my mind. If I resist what is, can I control it? No. But I can feel it, this fear. Fear for my daughter, though bearing children is the most natural of miracles, it can be dangerous, scary and isolating. If nothing else, it is intense! Incubating life, sharing a body with another being, feeling all that may ever be!

Before I knew of this fruit to be, I stood with my own my blessed daughter, on Mother’s Day this year, by the river, near the house that was her childhood home. We stood on pine-needle carpeted forest, under great arching trees, in shadow, in dappled sunlight, sparkles on the water and I wondered at this being who my body grew, who does not, nor ever has—belonged to me. 

I touched her, round and warm, gentle and funny, and deeply loving and touched my own body– in awe. And we laughed together as I pointed at her and made gestures at myself. Mystified! How did this happen? She is a woman, a fully formed fruit, no longer a seed in my body or a blossom on my tree.

I feel her as I feel myself. I am the rock in that river and she flows ever around me, shaping me as I shape her course, ever so slightly, slowly and with great devotion.

I have had to cut psychic cords from her before, for when she is in trouble, her pain and fear and confusion, would tear at the fabric of my being as if it were my own.

This love needs boundaries. There can be no love without them, not even between mother and child and I have learned this too— with my own mother. 

I mother naturally, effortlessly. It is my nature to take things under my wing and mend them, including my mother. 

My stability outweighed hers, as a child, and it weighed heavily on me. Sad to say, too young to know, I probably did the same to my own fruit, blessed daughter but as is intimated in her name, we are not destined to carry forth the same traditions, so I heal and mom heals, and Destiny stands tall in the clearing she and we have made. 

We dig deep—we wild women. We are not satisfied with a surface life. 

We want the well, to become the well, to be well sourced in life, in love— in motherhood. 

My daughter speaks to me of witchcraft, and my heart soars! Not of manipulation but the natural kind that cannot be silenced, the call of her bones and womb, the need to protect her home and family with salt and herbs, rocks and plants, and locks on her doors and boundaries. 

She struggles and I hold her. And I hold my own rage and fear. I hold it and transmute it and I feed the soil and water her roots and give her all the room she needs to grow and I prune branches to let in more light and feed her encouragement as I can. 

I am fiercely protective of our little grove, carving out the space for this new tree to take root and flourish and spring new seeds that my daughter carries within her now. I watch her grow and glow and ripen before my very eyes– blooming woman, fruiting in motherhood. 

This is about care. This is about protection and mostly– this is about opening!