Dedicated to my beautiful friend, Ashley. I love you!
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Once upon a time…
They called her The Withered One, though no one remembered her name.
She lived alone at the edge of the village, in a stone cottage wrapped in ivy and silence. Children whispered rumors that she once danced in firelight and sang to trees, though none had ever seen her do either. For years, she moved like a shadow, tending herbs that no longer flowered, drawing water from the well without ever sipping, and walking barefoot through fields as though seeking something she had forgotten.
No one noticed the strange flower by the well.
It was unlike anything that grew in those parts, its petals curled tightly in upon themselves, the color shifting from ash-gray to a whisper of lavender at dusk. Only she could see it clearly. And only she seemed to care.
Each day, she crouched beside it and hummed, not a song exactly, but a sound buried so deep it barely touched the air. The flower trembled at the sound, as if straining to remember what it once was. As if mirroring the woman who sat beside it.
Winter had gripped her heart for too long. A winter not marked by snow, but by silence. The kind of winter that follows deep loss, the kind that buries a name, a voice, a will to bloom.
But then came Beltane.
On that morning, something stirred.
It wasn’t a voice, or a visitor, or the warming wind that rustled the trees. It was a pulse, a thrum beneath the soles of her feet, an ancient rhythm rising from the roots. She stood at her doorway, unsure why tears clung to her lashes like dew, and felt her body turn, drawn not by mind or habit, but something older than both.
She followed it.
Through fields where the first wildflowers opened in yellow joy. Past oak trees whose leaves quivered in anticipation. Her bare feet left faint impressions in the dewy grass, and with each step, the frost inside her began to crack.
The path led her to the Wellspring.
Hidden for centuries, known only to those who had truly forgotten themselves. The water shimmered like liquid moonlight in the sun. The moment she saw it, something inside her bowed, without instruction or thought. She fell to her knees, scooped water into her hands, and brought it to her lips.
It tasted of memory. Of rain. Of birth.
And as the water slid down her throat, warmth spread through her ribs like light unfurling in a dark room. Her breath hitched. Her hands trembled. Her skin, so long dulled by grief, began to shimmer faintly, like petals catching dawn.
The thrum grew louder.
She stood and raised her arms to the sun. Her spine arched toward the light like a stalk finding its way out of the earth. She opened her mouth, not to speak, but to sing. The sound came raw, wild, full of color and ache and life.
It was the sound of becoming.
She danced. For the first time in decades, she danced. The wind wove ribbons through her hair. The flames of Beltane, invisible but real, rose from her footsteps. They didn’t burn. They kindled. They remembered.
And in that remembering, she bloomed.
Later that evening, the villagers gathered at the well for the annual firelight feast. Children noticed something first. The strange flower, the one no one had ever acknowledged, had burst into radiant bloom.
Its petals blazed with colors never seen before: molten gold, sunset coral, starlit indigo. And in its center, etched into the pattern of the bloom, was the shape of a woman—arms raised to the sun, feet rooted in water, heart wide open.
But the woman herself was gone.
No footprints. No note. No trace.
Only the flower. And the well. And the wind that sang like a voice returning home.
From that Beltane onward, a new flower bloomed by the well each year.
And sometimes, when the fire crackled just right and someone dared to sing, the petals opened wide enough to reveal her again.
She who bloomed beneath the sun.
Enjoy an ancient remembering and feel into the music that calls to the wisdom that is within us all.
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