Becoming Baba Yaga

I didn’t find Baba Yaga.
She found me.

In the wreckage. In the woods. In the quiet rage that followed survival.

They called her a witch.
They feared her wildness.

They told stories about her house on chicken legs like she was a monster

But they never told the story of why she lived alone, or what she’d endured.

And that’s the part that broke me open.

Because Baba Yaga isn’t evil.
She’s exhausted from being everyone’s transformation.

She’s the woman who’s been burned by the village,
shunned for knowing too much,
and left to make medicine from the ashes of her own body.

She’s the mother, the crone, the monster, the healer.
The survivor.

She doesn’t coddle. She tests.
She doesn’t explain herself. She protects herself.
And if you survive her forest, you don’t leave the same.
You leave whole.

So no, not every woman will feel this in her bones.
But the ones who’ve been exiled, erased, gaslit, and broken
The ones who’ve had to claw their way back into their own skin
We see her. We are her.

To the ones who’ve been called too much or too angry,
too loud, too quiet, too soft, too cruel—
This is your love letter.

You are not too much.
You are just becoming.

Becoming Baba Yaga: 

A Love Letter to the Women Who Refuse to be Silenced, Dismissed or Diminished.

"The old witch herself had been through more transformations than we can count. Once a goddess fallen from reverence to a mysterious protector of the forest, then nothing more than an herbalist hiding away doing the best she can with what nature provides. She witnesses dark and the light transform everyday with her horsemen bringing about the change. She’s present for the transformation of life into death and of the beyond into a new life at birth. She seems bent on changing other people, not giving them a say in the matter until she’s satisfied that they can be sent off on their way. 

Baba Yaga can rage or find the patience of the stars. She can be an old woman or a monster. In her transformations she might be both. But fear is in the eye of the beholder or shall we say in the manipulations of the teller of tales? The storytellers have sown the seeds of chaos into something stronger and we are left with the remains. We can be horrified by them or inspired."

— Excerpt from Becoming Baba Yaga by Kris Spisak

May 25, 2025

Author Acknowledgement

Excerpt from Becoming Baba Yaga by Kris Spisak.
Used under fair use for commentary and transformative purposes.
Explore more from the author at kris-spisak.com