Welcome to Wild Witch Rising: The Story Behind the Rise

A story of heartbreak, survival, rebuilding, and the long road that became Wild Witch Rising.

Wild Witch Rising did not begin as a business plan. It began as a return.

There were years when life became more about surviving than living. There was heartbreak. There was fear. There were responsibilities that had to be carried whether I felt strong enough to carry them or not. There were people to take care of, things that had to be handled, and days when simply getting through the day was enough. Somewhere inside all of that, pieces of me became quieter.

I do not think we always realize when that happens. There is rarely one dramatic moment when we suddenly lose ourselves. It happens slowly. We become what everyone needs us to be. We solve the problem. We keep the peace. We care for the people we love. We survive the thing in front of us, then the next thing, then the next. Eventually, you can look around at the life you have built and realize you are somewhere inside of it, but you have not heard your own voice in a very long time.

Mariah and I lived through some of the same difficult years. We experienced them differently because we were standing in different places inside the same story, but they changed both of us. There was trauma in those years. There were things we had to find our way through. There were parts of ourselves that had to be rebuilt. The rising was never mine alone.

For me, returning did not happen all at once either.

It came in pieces.

It came through the sea. Through herbs. Through candles burning in quiet rooms. Through learning again to trust the feeling in my gut when something was right or wrong. Through remembering that there were ways of knowing that existed long before anyone told us to doubt ourselves. Through ritual, ancestry, the moon, the land beneath my feet, and the simple act of paying attention again.

I started finding the woman who had been buried beneath all those years of responsibility.

Not a new version of myself.

Me.

That distinction eventually became everything.

Wild Witch Rising began taking physical form from a very simple thought. I wanted a spell shirt, but I did not want it to be just another shirt with witchy words printed across the front. I kept thinking, if I opened a package containing something magical, what would I want to receive?

I would want the thing itself to mean something.

I would want to know the intention behind it.

I would want a ritual.

I would want to participate.

I would want to open the package and feel like someone had considered the entire experience instead of simply selling me an object.

So one shirt became more than a shirt. There was a spell card, an activation, a ritual, a bay leaf. Then another idea came. Then another.

Most of this did not begin in some beautiful studio with shelves perfectly arranged for photographs. It began quietly, in my little shed, with supplies everywhere, things being tested and changed, ideas scribbled down, mistakes made, recipes adjusted, designs abandoned, and a ridiculous number of moments when I wondered what in the hell I had gotten myself into.

Somewhere along the way, the question changed.

I stopped asking what I could sell.

I started asking what kind of place I wanted to create.

That is when Wild Witch Rising became real.

I wanted to build a place for people who had lost pieces of themselves and were finding them again. For the person who had spent years being a mother, a partner, a caretaker, a survivor, an employee, the responsible one, the strong one, or whatever else life required and suddenly realized there was still a wild human being underneath all of it.

I wanted a place where magic did not require permission.

I wanted a place where ritual could happen at a kitchen stove, beside the ocean, in the garden, at an altar, or standing barefoot at the back door.

I wanted a place that respected the old ways without pretending we were living in another century.

I wanted something rooted in the sea and the land, in family stories and ancestral resilience, in intuition, in handmade things, and especially in the stubborn human ability to begin again.

That is where the name came to mean so much.

Wild was never about being reckless. To me, wild is the part of ourselves that refuses to be completely domesticated by expectation. It is the voice that still knows who we are underneath all the roles we perform.

Witch is not a costume here. It is attention. It is relationship. It is noticing the seasons, the plants, the tides, our own intuition, and the unseen threads connecting one generation to another.

And rising does not mean reaching some perfect healed version of yourself where nothing hurts anymore.

Rising means you came back.

Maybe slowly. Maybe bruised. Maybe angry. Maybe uncertain. Maybe carrying scars nobody else can see.

But you came back.

Wild Witch Rising has grown far beyond that first shirt. Mariah became part of building the visual world and the stories around it. Allen began creating things from wood with his own hands. Ideas became rituals. Rituals became products. Sea water was gathered. Herbs were dried. Fires were blended. Cyndi began to develop scents for the Aura Mists. Boxes were built. Cards were written. Shirts were printed. Things failed and were made again. We learned skills we never expected to need. We changed our minds a hundred times. We laughed, argued, worried, experimented, started over, and kept going.

And I cried.

A lot.

Because there is something terrifying about taking something that lived safely inside your imagination and putting it into the world where other people can see it.

For a long time, Wild Witch Rising belonged only to us. I could change it, protect it, dream about it, and keep making it better without anyone outside our little circle ever knowing whether it succeeded or failed.

Launching it meant opening the door.

That has been far more emotional than I expected.

This dream has lived with me through hard seasons. It has given me something to build when parts of my life felt uncertain. It has reminded me that creation can be its own kind of healing. Every card written, every herb dried, every package planned, every ridiculous late night spent fixing something that should have worked the first time became another small piece of the road back.

So when I say Wild Witch Rising is about remembering, reclaiming, and becoming, those are not marketing words.

I lived them.

I am still living them.

So is Mariah.

Maybe you are too.

I do not want this place to tell you what kind of witch you should be. I do not want to hand you another identity you have to perform correctly. There are enough places in the world telling us how we are supposed to look, believe, behave, heal, age, create, love, and live.

This is not one of them.

Come as you are.

Come curious. Come tired. Come powerful. Come uncertain. Come pissed off. Come peaceful. Come with a beautiful altar or no altar at all. Come with twenty years of practice or with absolutely no idea what you are doing.

You do not have to prove that you belong here.

Wild Witch Rising exists because sometimes we lose ourselves.

And sometimes, against everything that tried to bury us, we find our way back.

That is the rising.

Welcome to Wild Witch Rising.

I am so glad you found the door.

With love, from one rising soul to another.

Holly
Founder, Wild Witch Rising