12/14/2025
In the old stories, when the wild daughter nears the end of a seven-year cycle, she must recall the “forbidden places” where she was undone and remade.
Forbidden means “against awareness.” Reflection on the forbidden places allows the wild daughter to become aware and watchful, able to behold the living poetry of her wonder story, positioned to understand the lessons learned, the deep wisdoms she mined from the dark.
Here, the wild daughter’s most recent initiation is nearly complete, and she now assesses what she has refused to risk loving about the world, about her people, her purpose, herself.
This time is the dark moon of the soul, the early winter of her healing. Between the ever-after and once-upon-a-time, she is. It is a time of resolution and revolution, of melting back into the source of things and shapeshifting into a form that lives closer to what she loves.
The forbidden places are thin lands, liminal grounds common to the old tales where the veil is thin not only between the living and dead but between who the wild daughter was and must now become.
These forbidden places might be physical grounds, locations of spirit, or both. When she reflects on these familiar fringe lands where the ache was great, she senses her new orientation. She begins the new journey and readies herself for what may come. She re-members her personal myth, reorganizing the patterns of memory, finding new characters and new subplots, seeing now through wiser eyes.
Upon reflection, she might remember a “wintry sea,” a haunted and rough place where she forgot her own name, where the flesh was stripped from her bones by underwater currents, relentless storms, and hungry creatures who lovingly picked clean the dried must-bes and should-haves. What she learns from the grief sea is surrender, sacred solitude, her own belonging to the great ancestral story.
The wild daughter might recall a “woodland hut,” a healing house where the hidden helpers were afoot, a secluded place where she was not alone but held by many hands, resourced by song and story until her own hands, severed so long ago, finally grew back.
The wild daughter might recall the “good mother’s grave,” the place she laid her sweeter self to rest. She might remember the “spinning room” where she pricked her finger and met her fate, falling into a deep and initiatory sleep, or she, on the cusp of her renewal, may recall the “cave of descent” where she faced her shadow sister, all she refused to be.
In these incubatory spaces, the wild daughter followed an old map, the ancient dreamer’s road. She walked the otherworldly dirt path through the ghost-filled borderlands. Her primal impulse to let the old self die so the new self might live pulled from the ordinary and spirited her away into the dark.
When she reflects on these forbidden places, she reflects on her own undoing. Reflection means to “throw back light,” to bend back. Here, the wild daughter throws light into the dark wombs where she was undone and remade, crossing the last threshold where she can best see the truth of things, where all possibilities in life return.
And it all ends to begin again.
“Stories make us curious about the impossible. In a fairy tale, the presence of magick is not only required; the whole story unfolds around its presence. When we meet a story full of wonder, a part of us senses the truth of the Otherworld, the possible within the impossible.”
The Night House: Folklore, Fairy Tales, Rites, and Magick for the Wise and Wild.
©️2025 Danielle Dulsky, New World Library
Available wherever books are sold. Audiobook available 2/2/2026.
