The Witch & Hare…

There are moments in stories where a woman is named a witch, not because she’s stirring something in a cauldron and speaking to the moon, but because she knows something she hasn’t explained. Or she lives alone. Or she simply doesn’t behave as she’s expected to. 

It doesn’t take much.

She’s always noticed, observed too closely, and spoken about in lowered tones. 

Once named a witch, she becomes a pattern. Reappearing across places and centuries. Not always the same woman but always carrying something that resists easy understanding. A woman at the edge of things. A woman who listens more than she speaks. A woman who refuses to soften herself into something acceptable.

When the boundary between knowing and being known becomes thin, intuition becomes suspicion, silence becomes secrecy. 

And so the stories gather.

There’s a story in the northeast of England, in a place called Easington Village, about a wily hare who couldn’t be caught. Huntsmen chased it again and again, but it always got away. Until one day, it was cornered and one of the huntsmen’s dogs bit its hind leg. Injured but skilful, the hare escaped and fled into a nearby building on the village green. The huntsmen followed in hot pursuit, but inside the building they found no hare. Only an elderly woman, living alone, binding a bleeding wound on her leg.

The hare was gone.

The woman remained.

And so she was named.

Witch.

Some might say the witch holds power. Others might say she’s dangerous. Plenty would say she doesn’t belong.

But maybe, just maybe she’s something else entirely.

Perhaps the witch is what remains when a woman can’t be fully explained. When her knowledge has no approved language. When her way of being resists being folded neatly into the world around her.

She’s not understood, so she’s named.

And once named, she persists.

Not always in form, but in memory. In the unease that gathers around certain women. In the instinct to question, to watch, to fear and to define.

The witch is not only a figure of folklore, she’s also a habit of thinking.

One that lingers.