This is my story and this is the way I choose to tell it today…

A long, long time ago, in a land far from this land, a wise woman lived on the very edge of a village. Really, you could say that the wise woman’s cottage was on the edge of the wild forest, rather than the edge of a village, because the wise woman seemed far more at home in the forest than she was in a civilised village with civilised people who smiled at your face but talked behind your back.

However, the people of the village tolerated the wise woman because she helped them with her knowledge whenever they asked her for help. She helped with birth for both humans and animals. She helped to ease dis-comforts of aching joints and dis-ease of mind and body. She always had either a wise potion or a wise notion to hand when it was needed and she lived in peace alone in her cottage with her animals at the edge of the wild forest.

But one farmer in the village distrusted the wise woman and talked against her. He was as old as the wise woman and the village whispered that he disliked the wise woman because once, when they were both young, she had refused to marry him. Now when they were both old, he would neither forget nor forgive her. Every time he saw a chance to harm her or to talk against her in the village, he would do so.

One fine day the wise woman was laid up in bed, having suffered some injury the night before. The old farmer demanded that the wise woman be arrested and tried as a witch. He said he had seen a witch hare dancing in the moonlight the night before and shot at it with silver buttons for bullets, because everyone knows only silver can stop a witch. The old farmer said that the witch hare fell down shrieking, but then jumped up and ran off. And everyone also knows that you will find the witch hare in her real, human, form the next day, but with injuries caused by the silver bullets.

“Here you are!” rejoiced the old farmer “and you are indeed a witch and will die for it”.

“And fool you are” retorted the wise woman. “You still don’t know that if you harm an animal, you harm yourself – if not in this life then in the life to come! Now while it is true that you harmed me last night, it was not in the way that you believe. I took the injury that was rightly yours, because you are foolish and didn’t know the secrets of life. But if you wish to claim what is truly yours, I can do no more to help you!”

With that, the wise woman got up from her bed, fit as a flea, and the old farmer ran off in fear. When he had gone the wise woman opened the door and sent her spirit out into the wild forest to call the injured hare. Soon it came limping to her cottage door, where she took it inside and healed its wounds.

The very next day the old farmer was hit with a falling tree and badly hurt, but the wise woman visited him every day with her herbs until he was well again. From then on, the old farmer changed his ways completely. He never shot another hare and if he heard anyone speaking ill of the wise woman he would hush them quickly and say “There are many secrets in this life we know nothing about. Hush your fears now!”

And the wise woman continued to live on the edge of the wild forest and to help the villagers with her good works. But sometimes, when the night was fine and the moon was full, she would open her cottage door and let her spirit run away free, away into the forest to find her friend the hare. Together they would run and play and run again, and once again the wise woman would know what it was like to be young and to be free of the aches of age, and to dance again, free and joyous under the full moon.

Bright blessings