Before the Bloom

A spring equinox reflection on the spiral path of the feminine

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of feminine initiation.

Not the kind we often imagine—elaborate rituals with candles and chants—but the quieter, subtler kinds. The initiations that arrive in the body. In the blood. In the seasons that ask us to become something we haven’t yet become.

The older I get, the more I understand that real initiation rarely feels triumphant. Often, it begins in tension. In discomfort. In the quiet ache of something we can no longer deny. In the moment you say no more, before you even know what comes next.

Spring does this.

Even when we’re not ready, it starts pushing green through the cracks. The body responds before the mind does—there’s a restlessness, an unease, a sense that something has already begun beneath the surface.

But here’s the truth about blooming: it doesn’t begin in the light.

The Creative Descent

The cycle of creation begins with descent.

A visit to the underworld. A brush with shadow. A touch of death.

This is the energy of menstruation, childbirth, the dark moon, the empty page, the lost thread. This is winter. This is waiting. This is what we often label as negativity, but what I now see as necessary.

You see, the wise woman intimately knows the home of her negativity—but she doesn’t live there.

She understands that descent is part of the spiral—not a detour, but a doorway.

Death meets us in life wherever we are vulnerable, hurting, afraid, or unsure. As John O’Donohue writes:

“One of the faces of death is negativity… you can be quite destructive to yourself, even when times are good.”

It’s in those moments of inner death that our deeper instincts have the chance to emerge.

But negativity isn’t a flaw. It’s a signal. A threshold. A passage into deeper wisdom.

To transfigure negativity, we turn to the light of the soul. And one of the most powerful ways I know to do that is through creative practice.

Writing. Movement. Making. Voice. Breath. Ritual.
Not to fix ourselves. But to listen more deeply.

Creativity, too, follows the underworld path—through confusion, incubation, and emergence.

Paradoxically, the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to hide—grief, self-doubt, anger, fear—often hold the deepest keys to our vitality. What we deem “negative” becomes the compost for what we are becoming.

There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in one, I will indulge the other.” —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1931

The Maiden Isn’t an Age—She’s a Frequency

We’ve been taught to think of the Maiden as a stage of life. Something linear. Youthful. A phase we grow out of.

But that’s never felt quite true to me.

I think of the Maiden as a frequency. A current. She’s instinct before conditioning. Desire before strategy. Boldness before permission.

She’s the part of you that remembers what it felt like to want something just because. To create without worrying if it would be good. To leap before calculating the outcome.

And she returns, again and again, whether you’re twenty-five or seventy. Not because you’re regressing, but because you’re cycling. Because something in you is ready to move. To speak. To act.

And this season, she’s stirring. She arrives with spring.

This is the energy I’ve been feeling rise in myself—and in the women around me. The creative urge that doesn’t wait for clarity. The inner nudge to move, speak, make, or change—before you even know why. Something ancient is waking.

And this is exactly why I created Meet Your Maiden, a Spring Equinox gathering I’ll be hosting on March 22nd live on zoom. It’s part of the larger body of work I do as a women’s leadership coach—helping women reconnect to their instinct, their voice and creative power, and their deeper rhythm of becoming. It’s not a class or a course—it’s a threshold. A space to feel the Maiden in your body again. To remember how it feels to act on instinct. To step into what you’re already becoming. If these reflections are stirring something in you—you already know if you’re meant to be there.

Persephone’s Descent, and the Spiral Path of Return

In Greek mythology, Persephone is often remembered as the girl stolen from a sunlit field—dragged into the underworld by Hades, made queen of a realm she never chose. This is the version many of us were taught: the victim story. The girl whose power was taken.

But there is an older telling—one far less known, and far more honest.

In this version, Persephone is not abducted—she descends. She hears something stirring beneath the surface, something calling from the underworld, and she follows it. Not with fear, but with knowing. Not in chains, but with choice. She walks willingly into the mystery—not to be broken, but to be initiated.

Persephone’s descent isn’t a cautionary tale—it’s a map. She teaches us that descent is not failure, but a passage. That wisdom lives in the dark. That the Maiden isn’t just innocence—she’s courage. She’s curiosity. She’s the one who dares to walk into the unknown, because something deeper is pulling her forward.

Venus and the Pentagram in the Sky

This spiral path isn’t just myth. It’s written in the sky.

Every eight years, Venus draws a perfect pentagram in the heavens—a five-pointed star traced through her retrograde cycles. It’s not random. It’s geometry, it’s rhythm, it’s ritual.

The pentagram of Venus

And every retrograde, Venus disappears from the evening sky. She descends—just like Persephone—into the unseen. And when she re-emerges, she becomes the morning star again.

This season, she’s doing exactly that. As I write this, Venus is in retrograde. And the Spring Equinox is here. The mythic, the cosmic, and the seasonal are all converging.

The return of the Maiden. The descent of Venus. The tipping of the Earth toward light.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s timing. It’s pattern. It’s rhythm we’re inside of—whether we name it or not.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. The way this work—the descent, the creativity, the remembering—isn’t separate from anything. It’s mirrored everywhere. In the sky. In our bodies. In the way we keep circling back to the same truths again and again, only a little deeper each time.

Perhaps this is what the return of Venus and the rising of the Maiden ask of us—not new resolutions, but new relationships to our rhythm. To let spirit move not through plans, but through practice.

Creative Practice as Access to Spirit

There’s a tradition I love, passed down by Starhawk, that speaks of three aspects of being: the rational, the playful, and the spiritual.

It is know by the wisdom keepers of this tradition that the path to spirit is not through the rational—it’s through the playful.

That changed everything for me.

Because it means that our creativity—our making—isn’t a side note to the sacred. It is the sacred. It’s how spirit moves through us.

Creative practice is how we transfigure what we carry. It’s how we alchemize the underworld into something we can touch and hold and share. It’s not decoration—it’s integration.

Barbara Kruger, The Future Belongs to Those Who Can See It (1997)

And so I return to this again and again—not just because I’m an artist, healer, or a coach, but because it’s how I stay close to what’s real. It’s how I remember the parts of myself I’d otherwise lose in the noise of the world.

I know there’s so much urgency in the world right now—so much rightful rage, heartbreak, and injustice. And still, I believe that returning to rhythm is not a retreat from the world, but a way of reentering it differently—less fractured, more embodied, more attuned to what’s real and what must be protected.

Closing the Spiral

Maybe that’s the real work of this season—not to rush forward, but to listen more closely to what is already shifting within us.

Not to force clarity, but to recognize the moment before it arrives.
To feel our way into rhythm again. To let the body teach us what the mind doesn’t yet know.

If the Maiden is returning now—as myth, as archetype, as frequency—perhaps she’s not asking us to do anything dramatic. Perhaps she’s only asking us to notice the ways we’ve quieted our instinct, softened our edges, stepped out of sync with ourselves.

And perhaps meeting her isn’t about becoming something new at all.
Maybe it’s just about remembering what was never lost.

If you feel called to sit inside that remembering in community—to be witnessed, to move, to speak from your body rather than your plans—you’re invited to join me for Meet Your Maiden on March 22nd. A Spring Equinox ritual. A return to the instinct of your creative action. The making of your life. A beginning that’s already begun.

With love & fire,

Christina