I know that a lot of people find the term problematic due to the connotations many people associate with it, but I love the term “baby witches.” I also love people to whom the term applies. But then, I also love babies.1
To me, I think of babies and I envision of little humans facing the world for the first time with curiosity and a sense of awe and wonder. Everything is new to them and they’re often eager to explore it and try to understand it. This is the similar to the way I feel when I interact with “baby witches.”
As someone who has been exploring the Craft for two and a half decades now, I love watching people come to it for the first time. I love to see the excitement and curiosity in their eyes. I love the awe they experience as they perform their first spell — and their sense of triumph when they reap the rewards of their first successful spell. I love the amount of concern and attention they often give to making sure they “get it right” when planning their first ritual.2 Like their infant counterparts, they are encountering this new world they’ve found with a sense of wonder.
That’s something that I sometimes have to work to recapture as a more experienced witch. It’s too easy to forget just how wondrous doing ritual and encountering the gods can be after a while. So I appreciate the “baby witches” in my life that show me what that’s like and inspire me to take a moment to rekindle that sense of awe and wonder.
(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. See Yvonne Aburrow’s post announcing the challenge for more details.)
Footnotes
- Until it comes time to change a dirty diaper. I changed my sister’s oldest daughter’s diaper once. After that, i decided that was not part of the job description for being an uncle. ↩︎
- I will seemingly contradict myself a tiny bit to offer this advice to less experienced witches: Try not to worry quite so much about “doing something wrong,” though. The Craft is a learning process rather than a high stakes game. You will make little mistakes, but the vast majority of them will be of little to no consequence. ↩︎