Baba Yaga & her Nettles

I sting you so you pay attention...

Whilst I have been called Nettle as a nickname and knew of this “dangerous” and much-despised stinging plant growing up, it was not until I drove myself to, quite appropriately, the “dangerous” and much misunderstood Susun Weed’s farm that she truly made herself known to me.

I recall driving onto Laughing Rock Farm feeling very little laughter inside of me. I was terrified. Not only had I been made to sign an indemnity form saying I would not sue Susun for her “unconventional” ways of teaching, but I was also driving a large 4x4 car (American 4x4, might I add) that my fiancé had bought me and that I recall felt very out of place in the rustic farm setting I was driving into.

I recall the indemnity form saying something about the use of anger as a medicine for initiation…

As I drove up the driveway, in a state of fear and frenzy, with (still to this day) very little car peripheral vision, I accidentally reversed into a patch of her weeds.

“LOOK WHERE YOU ARE DRIVING,” Susun bellowed at me, banging on the window of my car.

I got such a fright I almost pooed in my pants.

I already dislike driving - driving a huge car, on a small piece of wild land, in front of Susun Weed - a recipe for disaster.

I parked the car and scuttled over to Susun, my people pleaser in full activation, “I am so soo sorry, it’s not my car…”

“Well then you shouldn’t be driving it,” I think she might have grunted.

There was a weird pause after that, probably because her grunt was in some way a truth bomb that would later have me hand the car back to my fiancé - and my engagement ring.

“Welcome to Laughing Rock Farm,” she beamed over at me with a rather eerie kind of joy.

My stomach turned.

“Thanks,” I managed.

I associate my meeting of the spirit of nettle with my meeting of Susun Weed.

Something about the sting that calls one to attention.

Something about the misunderstood nature of these rather… potent beings.

Nettle at face value looks like dark green pavement weed. She is considered a nuisance, useless, most people pull her out or poison her.

Some get caught in her patch and cry out in agony.

Most do not choose to meet her.

Susun at face value is considered, these days especially, a mad abusive cult leader. A dangerous woman. A witch to be feared. Whilst I personally do not dive into the details of these allegations, I know she too has a “ruined” reputation.

She is not someone you would actively seek to meet.

“I give death to baby goats. I make potions. I am a scary person. Please stay at a distance if you are frightened of me. That is the best way to deal with Baba Yaga. There is a reason the witch lives alone. Her friends are few, but they are real friends. My friends are not on my side; they are in my spiral. I invite you to find the place in the spiral that suits you. But do beware! If you come too close you may be eaten, and all that will be left is the truth...” - Susun Weed

My meeting with Susun Weed, and the weeds, was indeed a meeting of the archetypal forces of Baba Yaga.

A true shamanic initiation.

A meeting, ultimately, with death.

What followed on from this first encounter is both enlightening and destructive.

Both heartwrenching and emancipating…

A mystical meeting that lit my path ahead… (and burned down any bridge or belief that stood in the way).

They say that if you choose to remain a victim, then Baba Yaga is the perfect villain.

For she is indeed there to devour you.

There to devour all that is false within you.

And most of us, let’s be honest, are quite happy to keep living the illusion.

The beautiful lie of our own demise - especially as women.

I recall my very first morning waking up at Laughing Rock farm with the sounds of bleating goats, buzzing bees, and old women cackling. We were invited to meet the nettle patch and harvest some nettle to dry out for our herbal infusions. I recall being encouraged to sing, infact, we were likely made to sing — singing was essential during my stay with Susun.

However awkward, however strained, we sang, and we sang, and we sang…

“Do not approach the Goddess without gifts of song,” She would sing to us.

“When we harvest the plants, we sing, when we prepare our meals, we sing. We let it be known that we are grateful for their lives, for their medicine...”

We sang songs to the spirit of the green and we sang songs to the dancing green woman. We sang songs that filled our hearts with peace, we sang songs that filled our dance with ease.

The songs started working on me, as did the nettle.

The singing and the stinging.

As I sat down on the dirty earthy ground, surrounded by women and weeds, an ancient kind of wonder sprang forth from within me, a warmth that began to melt my New-York-Citied cool-ness.

My uprooted South African-ness.

My so very disassociated woman-ness.

Arriving on Susun’s land and singing to these green plant allies did something to me, it unlocked an inner stirring, an ancient remembrance.

Our days were filled with foraging for wild salad, learning the language of botany, as well as brewing up litres and litres of nourishing herbal infusions. We sat in circle and passed around the talking stick, every day learning to be wiser, sharper, clearer. We met our edges, we faced our fears, we laughed and we laughed, and sometimes we went stark raving mad.

We were stripped of our stories and our silly little identities.

It was humbling.

And scary.

And totally and utterly liberating.

The more I drank the green dark nettles, the more something ancient began to call me. It was as if an ageold intelligence was working on my mitochondrial memory. Nettle has been food for humanity for millions and millions of years. Food for the land for even longer. My ancestors drank nettle, she was known as threshold medicine. She, the bringer of life to dead soil, she the medicine to help us pass the passage from winter to spring.

“Tender-handed stroke and nettle and I sting you for your pain.

Grasp me like a lad of metal and soft as silk I remain...”

Nettle demands your attention.

Harvest her with uncertainty and yes, you will be stung.

Harvest her with an understanding of her medicine, and aha, you will thank her for her bite.

What I came to learn through my communing with nettle, was that life is very much about finding the gift within the wound.

Turning a trigger into a treasure.

Being willing to let die the lie, in order to unearth the truth.

So quick are we to make our problems and our pains our identities — clinging to them tightly —unable and unwilling to receive the remedy we so hastily condemned as poison.

We point fingers out there, desperately looking for someone or something to blame for our suffering, and yet, all this time the opportunity was waiting just on the other side for us to claim it.

“Do not misunderstand me.

I do not seek to harm.

There is ancient medicine in this sting.

Delivered from my body to yours.”

When nettle stings you, she quite literally offers up her life as medicine in the form of histamines and serotonin to support not only our physical ailments such as arthritis, rheumatism, and chronicpain, but energetically she brings aliveness back to tissue and cells that have lost the will to live.

When I first sat at nettles feet and sang songs to her green leaves, I felt numb.

Out of place.

I was cold within my being.

Uncomfortable and afraid of her sting, I avoided her sharp focus. Her call to enter the void. I did not want her keen green sting to pierce the bubble I had placed around myself, around my life.

Rushing had been my strategy up until this point.

Distraction.

Busy, busy, busi-ness.

I had blasted my nervous system with every stimulant I could get my hands on—from the sweet seduction of nightlife and dangerous partnerships to the reckless chaos of superficial “friendships” that mirrored my own self-abandonment.

The adrenaline and dopamine of a fast-paced outwardly fantastic life had leached the life force from within my kidneys and now there was no more juice left to squeeze.

I was burnt out.

Bled dry.

My life before this meeting had been one fast-moving whirlwind of things happening to me, of life taking me on a rollercoaster ride that I for some reason had no idea how to take back the steering wheel of.

“I invite your precious attention, your magic from all that seeks to unduly claim it.”

Years had quite literally flown by and I could not tell you where my attention was.

What had happened just the month prior, the week before.

I was everything but present.

I was floating above my body, high on heels and substances that separated me from the sensation of soil beneath my feet.

It was easier to float up there than come down to Earth and feel the pain and grief of a life lived so distantly - so dangerously.

When nettle stang me, she demanded I come back down to earth and quite literally take responsibility for my human body.

For my humanity.

“I only ask that you stay with the troubles of these times long enough so that some ancient heartbeating can be heard once more…”

There is nothing like grief to activate your awakening.

Nothing like the ache of another heartbreak to open you up to love.

In my attempt to bypass the darkness, the hurt within and around me, I only caused more harm.

A love and light approach to healing which had fuck all to do with actual healing.

For as long as I could remember I had chosen to swallow my words, stomach my rage, be nice.

Be the ever-forgiving and appeasing good girl.

It was during my time at Laughing Rock farm that for the first time in my entire life I witnessed the heat of women’s fury. A volcanic rage that shook the very bones of my foundation and my understanding of what it means to be a woman.

An alive and awake woman.

For the last however many centuries we have quite literally been living within a system that has subjugated, objectified, and desecrated womanhood, placing it inside a pretty pink neat little box.

For as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was fit inside of this box.

I would starve and strip and swallow literal shit in order to appear “well.”

I was so good at performing, getting on the stage of life to present the picture-perfect, well-mannered, ever-beautiful woman.

I was the ultimate prize placed on a pedestal so willing to do whatever was necessary to please you, and you, and you…

And you.

By exiling my own inner Baba Yaga, I had exiled the messy, scary skeletons of my closet. I had quite literally put out the fire of my own life and wondered why I felt so cold inside.

One evening after our most delicious shared meals of wild-foraged salad and dandelion lasagna with freshly made goat cheese, we were invited to choose a Goddess card laid neatly down at the altar.

I remember looking down at the earth altar—bundles of dried nettles and thorned roses laid as offerings below.

I lifted a card and turned it over.

There staring back at me was…

Kali.

Of course, I thought to myself, as a chill ran up my spine.

“For the coming days you will commune with your chosen goddess and present her to the group on Sunday during our evening ritual,” Susun beamed.

That week my chores included turning the compost heap and seeing to the milking of the goats. I recall one morning hearing a dry cracking sound under my rusted spade as I crunched down onto something in the compost heap. Curious, I dipped my hands into the dark, moist mulch and pulled out a small, cracked…

skull?

On closer inspection, I realised that I was indeed holding a baby skull… a goat skull?

………….

Later that night at dinner I pulled one of the older apprentices, who had been living at the farm for a few months, aside.

“I have a weird question to ask…,” I said quietly.

“Goh-awn,” she said, hunching in closer.

“I think I found a baby goat skull in the compost heap this morning… do you know why that would be?”

“Was it burnt?” She asked cautiously.

“I’m not sure… why?” I responded.

“Susun lost a whole lot of baby goats last year when an apprentice accidentally burned down the barn… She was devastated, you know how much she loves her goats...”

“Ahhh..,” I nodded, relieved I had not brought the question to Susun herself.

As much as Susun made you laugh she was also absolutely terrifying. The last thing I wanted was to remind her of this tragic incident… or so I thought.

My days at Laughing Rock farm flew by, our mornings always began bright and early with Tai Chi classes and Seneca wolf prayers to the rising sun. We were fast approaching our Sunday ritual and I still had no clue how I was going to present Kali to the group… I mean Kali… the Goddess of death and rebirth? Of liberation and transformation? How on Earth was I going to pull that one off?

The night before our Sunday ritual, I tossed and turned in bed, wide awake listening to the heavy breathing of the other apprentices. I could not sleep. I kept wondering about Kali, about death…about those bloody skulls.

The next morning I woke up at the crack of dawn and made my way over to the compost heap. On my way, I intuitively grabbed a plastic bag and a spade. I passed the communal fire and dug into the dark char, collecting a small plastic bottle worth of ash. I knew Kali would ask of me to be stripped bare… the ash would come in handy.

As I began my turning of the compost I listened tentatively for that same crunch… that cracking sound.

It was a mixture of both relief and horror when that sweet, familiar sound finally came—a kind of twisted fascination - and realization - that yes, I was indeed going to collect these skulls.

One by one, I plucked out the baby goat skulls—hands buried in dark, stinking soil and shit, cleaning maggots from their tiny bones. As I rinsed the last bits of rotting flesh from each one, I still to this day wonder where on earth I’d found the guts to go through with it…

When I felt like I had enough, I continued on my walk back into the dark woods, back to my little tent where I slept on an old rickety wooden platform and prepared my “outfit” for the evening.

One by one, I threaded my garland of skulls, binding them with old nettle fibers twisted into yarn. Carefully preparing my mala of severed heads…

As day turned to night and we were all invited into the cottage where we would be performing our rite, there was a buzz in the air—nerves and excitement surrounded the space as each woman prepared her prayer-formance to their chosen goddess.

When it came to my turn, my stomach dropped. I felt sick with nerves. All the other goddesses had been so beautiful, so graceful, so… enjoyable. Aphrodite with her sensual, naked pleasures. Green Tara with her soft, compassionate gestures of love…

I got up and slipped into the next room where we were given space to prepare—everyone else still in the hall, eagerly awaiting the next sister’s offering.

It was then and there that I let the full wrath of the days prior overtake me. All the times Susun had cracked me open. All the moments my nice girl got exposed. All the ways I had contorted myself into the perfect, precious student—so desperate to be liked.

Liked by the group.

Liked by Susun.

I stripped off my clothes—my fears and my woes—and poured black ash over my body. With my own homemade coconut oil, I rubbed coal across my face, black as night.

I anointed myself with the very darkness I had spent so long trying to outrun.

My feet were bare and filthy, my nails caked with compost-heap slime. I was, quite literally, a dirty, filthy woman—a whore, a witch, a bitch. I grabbed my garland of goat skulls and cackled.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I was both shocked and enlightened.

Fuck it, I thought.

Let’s do this.

I got onto my hands and feet and crawled my way into the hall, immediately putting off the lights in the room…

Everyone fell silent.

What happened next is hard to remember… and even harder to put into words.

Let’s just say—I let myself be fully taken. Led by a madness that once got women burned. An ancient hysteria that was used to name us witches, to lock us up, to erase us. I laughed and I screeched, flickering the lights on and off. I ran straight for Susun and roared in her face, the skulls around my neck, her baby goats, clattering in a chorus of chaos.

I was Kali.

And Kali was me.

…

I read years later in an article by Susun Weed that a shamanic initiation begins with having a teacher you deeply admire and having that same teacher push back on your attempts to emulate them.

When I left Laughing Rock Farm I both loved and hated Susun equally. I believe she felt the same about me. On our final day when we were handed our books, signed by Susun herself, I paged mine open to find a single word,

“Wow!”

My connection with Susun has waxed and waned over the years, like the natural ebb and flows of life. There were many times I placed her on a pedestal, and many more times I had to pull my image of her back down to earth—confronted with the reality of her own human flaws.

She initiated my rite of passage from dependence into sovereignty.

From a beautiful lie to some ugly truths.

Like nettle who grows in the disturbed places, in the drought-ridden and poisoned spaces, I was called to open the closet of my own life and not look away.

Nettle blood had stained my skin and like the key in the tale of Bluebeared that could not be wiped clean, I had to open the door and face the skeletons before me.

“I am nettle.

I cannot be erased.

Remember that when all feels it has been forgotten.

I have persisted.”

Through the rich green dark blood of nettle infusion, I was nourished back to life.

Through the piercing sting of truth that poured from Susun’s mouth, I was awoken from my slumber.

Like her taproots that travel deep into the earth to find nutrients, nettle invited me to descend into my own darkness — and rise with my power intact.

Along the way, I was made witness to a root system—an underworld mycelial web, feeding and being fed by its kin—a living demand to grow beyond my illusion of aloneness.

As I prepared to leave Laughing Rock Farm, bags of foraged dried nettle in tow, I felt a sense of connection to all of life that has remained with me ever since.

A kind of magical door had been opened that can now never be shut…

And just like the nutrients that make their way through nettle’s roots and up to the dry, hungry soils above—where she shares her minerals with her starving plantkin—I too have been asked to find the gifts in my wounds. To reach right into the heart of them, gather their remedies, and serve them up as medicine.

This was the start of my work—
as teacher.
As witch.
As woman.

---

***

RADICAL WOMAN 2026 INITIATION:

https://www.annettemuller.love/radical-woman-2026

A big thank you to Lucy Ní hAodhagáin O’Hagan (@wildawakeireland) for your channelled wisdom of the nettles that inspired so much of this piece.

And the biggest gratitude to my always favourite wild witch bitch of a teacher Susun Weed, forever in gratitutde for your wisdom.

If you wish to begin drinking and imbuing your cells with the magic of nettle, my ode to nettle in the form of this beautiful business is open (SA only, for now): www.wildnettle.love (totally inspired by my devotion to nettle & the weeds).