'Folklore Heart'

Before "witch" became a death sentence, they were called the cunning folk — the village wise women who knew which plant stopped bleeding, which root quieted fever, which herb brought sleep, which one brought dreams. They were the first point of contact for illness, grief, difficult births, and questions that had no other address. They lived at the edge of the village, between the domestic and the wild, because that was the job: to stand in between.

The persecution was systematic and deliberate. The knowledge was not destroyed — it was driven underground, encoded in recipes and remedies and old songs, carried by women who knew what they knew and kept it quiet and passed it to daughters who kept it quieter still. It is being recovered now. The old ways are not lost. They are just waiting to be spoken aloud again.

This is for the woman who has always known more than she was supposed to.