Friends of the Forest

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Where story, folklore, and the natural world come together.

Through original stories by Kathleen Lowe, seasonal publications, gatherings, and handcrafted offerings, women are invited to slow down, wonder, & reconnect with our natural world. Friends of the Forest is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that helps reconnect women with the Sacred and more-than-human world. We provide engaging, sensory immersion experiences in nature to help women cultivate a healing reconnection with our natural world by incorporating creativity, connection with nature, mindfulness, personal development, and equine wisdom. Rewild your sense of wonder for the more-than-human world, and rediscover how Mother Nature provides sacred guidance through life's circular and seasonal journey. We welcome you to connect with nature, live with the seasons, tune into your body’s needs, and explore a little earth magick with us.

11/02/2026

There is an old belief in the Hidden World that November remembers things the other months have forgotten.

She remembers the houses that once stood at the ends of country lanes, the names of orchards that have long since disappeared, and the voices of people who used to call us in from the cold.

That is why November has always been a month of nostalgia.

There is something about the way the light falls through bare branches, or the smell of woodsmoke drifting across a damp field, that can return us to a place we have not visited in years.

Some say this is because November's light has been used before.

It has been in other rooms. It has stood in other kitchens, lain across other fields, gone in at other windows, and by the time it reaches us in the last weeks of the year it has the look of a thing that has been somewhere and come back with something to tell us. Nothing in it is new. Everything in it is remembered.

A song heard unexpectedly. The scent of an old wool coat. The sound of rain against a window in a house we once knew.

And suddenly, there we are.

Not simply remembering, but standing for a moment in another time.

The Ancients say it happens because November leaves the hedges thin.

During the brighter months, the world is so busy growing, flowering and gathering that we seldom notice the gaps. But when the leaves have fallen and the earth begins to quiet, the smallest things find their way through.

The warmth of a kitchen that no longer exists.

Some memories arrive with happiness, others with a little sadness, and many carry that curious mixture of both for which nostalgia is only half a word.

November makes no distinction between them.

She gathers what the passing year has stirred and what the years before it have left behind — from the backs of cupboards, from the sleeves of coats nobody has worn in years, from the one drawer in every house that no one opens. And occasionally, when she thinks we might like the company, she returns something to us.

Not always something important.

Sometimes it is the sound of someone laughing in another room, or the feeling of being very young on an afternoon that seemed as though it would last forever.

There is no need to hold on to these moments, nor to make sense of why they have returned.

But there is an old rule about them, and it is worth knowing.

A memory taken out and looked at too often thins, the way a photograph does in a pocket. And a memory with nowhere to be thins faster still — which is why the ones that come to us unasked are always the faintest. They have lost whatever house they belonged to, and they are looking for another.

So the Watchers say: do not visit one more than once a winter, and if one comes to you unasked, give it something to live in. A stone. A key. An empty jar on the windowsill. Something small enough to sit on a shelf and plain enough that nobody will move it.

Because a memory that has been given a place is not lost. It is only living somewhere else.

And November, with her rain-soaked coat and her pockets full of forgotten things, knows that some parts of our lives are never entirely lost.

They are only waiting for the right kind of weather to find their way home.

11/01/2026

November arrives wearing the things her sisters have left behind.

From September she has borrowed a soft wool shawl, though the pale grey has darkened with rain and the edges are beginning to fray, and there is still a little warmth in it that does not belong to her. From October she has inherited a long brown coat, once splendid with copper and gold, now faded to the colour of wet bark and fallen leaves. There are still copper threads in the lining. She has never had it relined.

Her dress is made of weathered linen, the colour of fields after the harvest, and her petticoat is trimmed with the last brown ferns of autumn. The hem of it is never quite dry, not from the first week to the last.

But it is her boots that tell the most about her.

They are old, heavy, and forever wet, with mud along the heels and bits of moss caught in the seams. She has walked through a thousand November rains in those boots, and although she has been offered new ones, she insists the old pair are perfectly comfortable. There is frost on them in the mornings. By the afternoon they are wet again. Nobody has ever seen her change them.

Her hair is silver and rather untidy, held in place by a blackthorn twig that the north wind is forever trying to steal. She has wanted that twig for a very long time. It is the only key to the paths that are not on any map.

Her pockets are deep. Deeper than they look. Things put into them in October are sometimes not found again until March.

Inside them she keeps walnuts, dried rosehips, a few stubborn leaves, and the last seeds gathered from the garden before the frost. There is usually a little something for the mice, who have learned to wait for her beneath the hedgerows — they know her step from a long way off, and hers is the only footfall in the village they come out for.

Around her shoulders she wears the early dusk, which grows longer with each passing evening.

Where she walks, the evening comes early. Farmers at the top of a field have learned to finish the row when they see her at the hedge, and not one of them could tell you why the light goes first at that end of the field and last at the other.

Sometimes she pauses beside a cottage window to admire the candles being lit within, pleased that someone has remembered to welcome the darkness with a little light.

A candle put in a window in November burns longer than it should. She is fond of being welcomed, and she repays it.

The Forest Ancient is always glad to see her.

She waits beneath the oldest tree — older than the river, which has moved twice — and November stops there to shake the rain from her coat and tell her which creatures have gone to ground and how deep, which streams are running high, and where the last mushrooms have come up in the night.

November has work to do.

There are roots to settle, and they are settled by hand, one at a time, the way you settle a sleeping child. There are sleeping creatures to look in upon, and bare branches to inspect before the first snow arrives. There are stories to gather from the empty fields and old footpaths — stories that would never have been heard beneath October's noisy leaves.

She carries those home in her pockets, with the seeds.

Nothing that spends a winter in her pockets comes out the same in the spring. A seed comes up somewhere other than where it was put. A story comes up as something else entirely: a rumour, a verse, a name for a field that nobody remembers choosing.

And though some people find her rather gloomy, the Hidden World knows better.

For November is not an empty month, nor a sad one.

She is simply a woman who understands that the world has its quieter seasons, and that a great deal of the work is done where nobody thinks to look.

So if you meet her walking along a woodland path, with rain dripping from the hem of her coat and those old boots squelching through the leaves, you might walk with her awhile.

She knows the whereabouts of things that have long since disappeared, and remembers the names of places no one visits anymore.

And if she takes your arm and leads you down a path you don't remember seeing before, well, November has always known a few ways through the woods that the rest of us have forgotten.

10/31/2026

There are women whose names we will never know, whose faces we will never see, whose voices have been silent for centuries. Yet somewhere in the long passage of generations, their lives became part of ours.

I wonder sometimes what they would make of the world we inhabit now. The freedoms we take for granted, the places we can go, the things we are allowed to become. How many of them lived with possibilities they could only imagine? How many had no time even to imagine them?

We stand on the shoulders of women who lived through worlds we can scarcely comprehend. And perhaps, in ways we will never know, we are living some of the lives they wished for.

Samhain is a time when the distance between the living and the dead was traditionally believed to grow thin. I have always loved that idea. Not because I expect the past to return, but because I don’t believe it ever entirely leaves us.

There are the ancestors whose lives made ours possible, and there are those we knew and loved, whose absence we still feel. There are stories that have survived for generations and others that disappeared with the last person who remembered them.

And then there is the mystery of all that has been forgotten.

Tonight, perhaps we can make a little room for all of them. For the women who came before us, for those we loved, for those whose stories were never told, and for the lives that quietly shaped our own.

Not everything needs to be remembered by name to have mattered.

Blessed Samhain. May we honor what came before us, cherish what remains, and never forget that we are part of a story far older than ourselves.

-Kathleen

10/31/2026

On the last night of October, the deep country did not go dark the way other nights went dark.

As the dusk came down, house by house, the women went through their rooms with a taper, and they set a candle in every window that faced a road, or a lane, or a field, or the black edge of the wood. Not one candle. Every window. The small one over the scullery. The narrow one at the stair. The one in the room no one used anymore. By full dark, each house stood in its place with light in every eye of it, and the lanes ran between them lit like rivers, and a woman standing on the hill could count the houses of the whole valley without ever having learned to count.

People will tell you the candles were for the living. They were not. The living knew their own doors in the dark, the way you know the shape of your own name.

The candles were for the ones who had been away a long time.

For this is what the years do to a house, and the beloved dead remember it no longer. Hedges grow tall where once the road was clear. Trees fall. Rooflines change. A door is painted a color it never wore before. The dead come home at Samhain across a country that has been slowly rearranging itself all year, and the dark is very dark, and the houses sit hunched along the lanes like sleeping animals, one like another, and it is easy, so easy, to walk past your own.

So the women lit every window, and every window meant the same thing.

Not welcome — the welcome was the table, and the lantern with the face, and the plate on the step. The candles said something before all of that, something more basic, something a traveler needs before any welcome at all.

Here. This one. This house, and not the next one.

They were addresses made of light. Each window a letter, each house a word, and the whole valley, on that one night, spelled out in flame for whoever was reading it from the road.

And the old ones said that on that night, if you watched from the dark lane, you could tell which houses were being approached, because their candles stood straighter as the beloved dead drew near. Flame leans toward what is coming, the way grass leans before a walker. No one could prove it. No one needed to. The women kept lighting the windows all the same, and they went on lighting the ones in the rooms no one used anymore, because those were the rooms that mattered most. The unused room is the one the dead remember best. It is the one that has not changed.

You do not need a valley, or a lane, or a house with a dozen windows. You need one candle, and one window that faces the dark, and the last night of October.

Light it at dusk. Set it where the road could see it, if a road were passing. And do not think of it as decoration, and do not think of it as grief.

You are not calling anyone. You are leaving the light on.

There is a difference. Calling asks something of the one who comes. Leaving the light on asks nothing. It only says, to whoever might be walking the dark between the countries, tired from the year's long road, unsure in a changed world which door is theirs:

Here. This one. You are expected. The way is lit.

The women of the deep country knew the difference, and they taught their daughters, and their daughters taught theirs, and that is why, on the last night of October, the valley still spells itself out in flame, window by window, house by house, for whoever is reading from the road.

10/30/2026

There is an hour that belongs to no clock.

It comes only once a year, on the night before Samhain, when October has nearly finished her business but November has not yet arrived to take her place.

No one knows precisely when it begins. Some say it happens between the last stroke of midnight and the first breath of the following day. Others insist it can only be found by those who have forgotten to watch the time.

But the creatures of the Hidden World know.

For them, the Thirteenth Hour is a rather important occasion.

Doors that have remained locked for centuries are opened to let in the night air. Old paths, long since swallowed by brambles, return to their former places. The little folk bring out their finest coats, and the Ancient of Small Things makes her annual inspection of everything that has been lost since the previous October.

She is particularly busy with buttons, spectacles, forgotten names, and the occasional misplaced promise.

The Forest Ancient is said to walk among the trees, waking the oldest roots to hear what has happened aboveground. The Sea Ancient sends messages inland in the pockets of shells, while the Sky Ancient makes certain that the stars are properly arranged for the occasion.

And somewhere, in a house that no longer appears on any map, thirteen guests gather around a table set for twelve.

The thirteenth chair is always left empty.

It is said that during this hour, ordinary things may behave in extraordinary ways. A key might turn in a lock it has never fitted. A book might fall open to a page you have never read. Something you lost many years ago might appear exactly where you have already looked a hundred times.

There is only one rule concerning the Thirteenth Hour.

Should you happen to notice it passing, you must never ask what time it is.

For the moment you do, the clocks remember themselves, the old paths disappear, and all the curious inhabitants of the Hidden World must hurry home before November catches them out.

So tomorrow night, if the house grows unexpectedly quiet, or you hear a small sound from a room where no one has been, pay it no particular mind.

For not everything that disappears is lost, and not everything that returns was ever meant to be found.

10/29/2026

Of all the Ancients, she is the one most easily missed, although it is said that nothing in the living world escapes her attention.

She is older than the first forest, older than the first tide that reached the shore, and so small that she can pass beneath a curled autumn leaf without disturbing the dew upon it. Her hair is the silver of old cobwebs, her coat is made from the soft brown velvet found inside chestnut shells, and she carries a little satchel whose contents have puzzled the other Ancients for centuries.

For while the Earth Ancient attends to the deep places, the Sea Ancient keeps her old company with the tides, the Fire Ancient tends the flames that warm and transform the world, the Sky Ancient watches over the winds and the wandering clouds, and the Forest Ancient knows the secret affairs of trees, the Ancient of Small Things has been entrusted with everything that might otherwise go unnoticed.

And there is rather more of it than anyone imagines.

She knows where the last firefly of summer goes when the evenings grow cold. She knows why certain stones hold the warmth of the sun long after dusk, and which hollow stems will shelter a sleeping insect through winter. She knows the whereabouts of every seed carried away by an autumn wind, although she has been known to lose her own way in a particularly interesting patch of moss.

The other Ancients sometimes find her difficult to understand. She has missed gatherings that occur only once in a hundred years because she was watching a spider mend its web, and once kept the Sky Ancient waiting through an entire thunderstorm while she examined the silver lining of a snail's trail.

But there is a secret about her that even the oldest Ancients seldom speak of.

Long ago, when the world was still finding its shape, the great Ancients were given their keeping. Earth took the mountains and the deep soil, Sea took the waters, Fire took the living flame, Sky took the winds and the wide heavens, and Forest took the green and growing places. Yet when their work was divided, there remained a thousand thousand little things that belonged to no one. The first pearl forming inside an oyster. The pale curl of a fern before it opens. The single drop of water held in the cup of a flower. The tiny heartbeat inside an unhatched egg.

The Ancients gathered to consider what should become of them, but before any could speak, a small figure stepped out from beneath a stone and began placing these forgotten wonders into her satchel.

"I shall keep an eye on them," she said. And she has been doing so ever since.

There is an old belief that on certain evenings, just as the light leaves the woods, the Ancient of Small Things walks the world with a needle made from a blackthorn spine and a thread finer than spider silk. Wherever something delicate has been disturbed, she pauses to make a little repair. A broken web between two branches. A loosened cocoon. The fine silver seam of a snail's shell. Even the frost upon a winter window, when its beautiful fernlike patterns have been interrupted by a warm hand.

She cannot mend everything, nor does she try. She knows that breaking and falling and changing belong to the world as surely as growing does. But she has a particular fondness for things that have not quite finished becoming.

And sometimes she leaves something behind.

A perfectly round pebble where no pebble was before. A feather caught upright in the moss. A tiny shell found miles from the sea. Such things are called the Ancient's leavings, although no one has ever been certain whether she places them deliberately or simply forgets to empty her pockets.

The Ancient of Small Things has never offered an explanation.

But it is said that anyone who finds one of these little treasures and carries it home will begin to notice things they had overlooked before. The green stars of moss beneath their feet. The sound of a beetle moving through dry leaves. The extraordinary workmanship of an empty nest after the birds have gone.

And somewhere, deep in the folds of the living world, the little Ancient will smile to herself. For she knows a secret the others took many ages to understand.

The great wonders of the world may belong to the other Ancients, but every great wonder is made of a thousand smaller ones.

And it is said that should she ever cease her quiet tending, the world would not lose its magic all at once. It would disappear a little at a time, in ways so small that no one would notice until they began to wonder where all the wonder had gone.

10/29/2026

In the Celtic Tree Calendar, Reed (Ngetal) is associated with this time of year, when the natural world grows quieter and we begin turning our attention inward.

Reed has long been associated with the voice, the search for truth, and the wisdom of knowing when to speak and when to listen. Growing along the edges of water, it bends with the wind without surrendering its roots. There is something rather wonderful in that lesson, especially as we move through the changing seasons of our own lives.

During our November gathering, we'll explore the Reed's folklore, symbolism, and place within the Celtic Tree Calendar. We'll consider what it means to trust our own voices, recognize what is true for us, and move through times of change with greater clarity.

And if you were born during the Reed's traditional calendar period, you may discover some particularly interesting connections between this tree and your own nature.

You don't need a November birthday to join us! All are welcome, whether you've been exploring the Celtic Tree Calendar with us throughout the year or are simply curious to learn more.

Come spend a Wednesday evening with us as we explore the quiet wisdom of the Reed.

🌿 **Wednesday, November 4**
7:00–8:30 PM Eastern
Held virtually via Zoom

Join us for an evening of folklore, reflection, and connection.

https://bit.ly/4in0T30

If you're unable to join live, you can still register and will receive the recording, along with all materials and the PDF guide. Because of the intimate nature of our circle, the recording will be available for a limited two-week period following our gathering. After that, access will gently close.

10/28/2026

On the last night of October, when the table inside has been set and the silent supper eaten, there is one more dish to make, and it does not come into the house at all.

It goes out.

A plate of the harvest, plain and good. Bread, broken by hand. A little of whatever the year's fields gave. And beside it, a cup of clean water, or milk if the house keeps a cow. Set on the doorstep, or the windowsill, or the flat stone by the gate, in the last of the light, before the door is barred for the night.

The Forest Ancient taught this after she taught the silent supper, and she taught it because of a gap in the older custom that only she had noticed.

The silent supper feeds the beloved dead of the house. The ones whose names are known, whose chair is remembered, whose place is set by the people who loved them. But on the night the doors of the year stand open, the beloved dead of the house are not the only ones traveling.

The roads are full that night. The Watchers hold the doors open, and the way between the countries is walked from dusk to dawn, and most of those who walk it have somewhere to go, a window with a candle in it, a lit face on a gatepost, a quiet table keeping their chair.

But not all.

There are those whose houses are gone, fallen or sold or forgotten. There are those whose families have died out, and no one left alive carries their name. There are those who were strangers in life, travelers and wanderers and the ones nobody claimed, and they are no less beloved of the Ancients for it, but no chair has been set for them, and no lantern wears their face.

The Forest Ancient could not abide it. That on the one night of the year when the whole beloved dead come walking home, some should walk and walk and find no door expecting them.

So she taught the women of the deep country to put the meal outside.

Not for their own dead. Their own dead were fed at the table within. The plate on the step was for whoever came past in the dark and had nowhere else. It was hospitality with no name attached, a seat saved for a stranger, the door of the house opened one hand's width further than family.

And the old women said you could tell, in the morning, whether the plate had been received. The food was never gone. It sat there whole, the bread unbroken by any visible hand. But if you lifted it, if you looked closely, you would know. Something had gone out of it. The flavor, the blessing, the soul of the meal, taken cleanly, the way a berry looks whole after a bird has kissed it.

The cup, too. Sometimes the water sat lower in it than water should, in a night with no wind.

What remained was given to the earth at sunrise, as all such offerings are, and the step was swept, and the house went into November with its work done.

For this is the thing the Forest Ancient was teaching, under the custom. A house is not measured by what it feeds its own. Every house feeds its own. A house is measured by what it leaves on the step, for the ones who are still traveling, still unhoused, still walking the long road between the countries with no candle anywhere lit in their name.

So on the last night of October, after your own table is cleared, make one more plate.

Break the bread by hand. Fill the cup. Set it outside in the last of the light, and say, if you like, only this: for whoever is passing.

Then close the door, and let the night do the rest.

Someone is always passing. That is the oldest housekeeping there is.

10/27/2026

I've written many stories about the sea as part of the Hidden World, alongside the stories from between the trees. I've gathered 20 of these ocean stories together into a special volume of The Hidden Manuscripts: Between the Tides.

These are stories of the ocean we know, but also of the one that lives in the imagination, in old folklore, and in those curious little mysteries that make us wonder about the natural world.

Some of you have already met the Sea Ancient, followed the story of the first seahorse, wandered through the underwater forest, or discovered why the ocean keeps certain things for herself.

I've now gathered these stories into a special edition called
Stories from the Hidden World Between the Tides, a beautifully illustrated collection of 20 stories inspired by the sea, its creatures, its ancient rhythms, and the folklore we create to make sense of its mysteries.

I've always believed that stories can change the way we see the world around us. Perhaps the next time you find a shell, watch the tide retreat, or notice a little creature in a rock pool, you'll remember one of these tales.

That's really why I write them.

This collection has been a labor of love, from the first stories to the illustrations and the many hours spent bringing everything together into a book you can hold in your hands.

Between the Tides is now available in print and as a PDF download for your reader through Blurb.

I hope you'll enjoy wandering through these pages as much as I've enjoyed creating them.

https://www.blurb.com/b/13057394-special-edition-stories-from-the-hidden-world-bet

10/27/2026

First, I want to thank all the new people who have found their way to Friends of the Forest. It means so much to me to see this community growing and to know that so many of us share a love of nature, folklore, old traditions, and the mysteries of the world around us.

I also wanted to explain a little about The Hidden Room, our community on Patreon, and why I created it.

As much as I love sharing stories on social media, it has become an increasingly noisy place. Between the algorithms, advertisements, and bots collecting and repurposing creative work, I wanted somewhere quieter and more personal. A place where our stories wouldn't simply disappear into an endless feed and where we could build genuine connections.

The Hidden Room is an extension of The Hidden World I've been creating through Friends of the Forest. It's filled with folklore, seasonal discoveries, The Keeper's Journal, Sunday Sanctuary, our monthly book club, and opportunities to gather and share.

I also want to explain why there is a paid membership.

An enormous amount of time goes into creating everything I share. There are hours spent researching folklore and old traditions, writing original stories, developing journals and seasonal invitations, preparing gatherings, and bringing new ideas to life. Much of this work happens quietly, long before anything is published.

The paid membership helps support that creative work and makes it possible for me to continue developing The Hidden World and offering more of it to this community.

There will always be free stories and opportunities to explore, because sharing this world with others is something I genuinely love. The paid membership is simply a way for those who enjoy this work and want to wander a little further to help sustain it.

More than anything, my hope is for The Hidden Room to become a place of friendship, curiosity, and wonderful conversations, away from the constant noise of social media.

Thank you for reading, sharing, commenting, and being part of this little world. Whether you've been here for years or have only just discovered us, I'm so glad you're here.

https://friendsoftheforestct.org/wildflowerwomen

Wild blessings always,
Kathleen

Address

Essex, CT
06426

Telephone

+18609041933

Website

http://friendsoftheforestct.org/, https://friendsoftheforestct.org/wildflowerwomen, https://friendsoftheforestct.org/lig

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