Entering the Tiger’s Den A Crone’s Counsel on Risk, Ritual, and Remembering Who You Are
It is a cool spring morning—one of those grey-laced ones where the mist clings to everything, even the eyelashes. I just returned from the walk to the mailbox, clutching a soggy flyer and three pieces of junk mail. The neighbour’s daffodils are leaning drunk against the fence. Nuit, my cat and companion in all things shadow, has already gone back inside to warm her paws by the old stove.
I start thinking about the cub.
Not a real one, mind you—but the metaphorical kind. The one that keeps showing up in dreams. The one you can’t catch without walking straight into the place that scares you. The den.
There’s an old saying from Japan—one that makes the back of my neck straighten every time I hear it:
“If you do not enter the tiger’s den, how can you catch the cub?”
And while I didn’t learn this line in a temple, or from some lofty scroll, it landed for me again while baking cookies with my granddaughters one afternoon, flour dust rising in sacred puffs as we talked about fear. Real fear. The kind that comes when you want something with your whole being… but getting it means risking the comfort you’ve grown used to.
The Crone’s Dilemma
Do We Still Brave the Den?
There’s this idea that as we age, we’re meant to slow down. Back away. Soften. But I’ve found the opposite is true.
As a Crone, I’ve learned that the risks don’t stop. They just change shape. You’re not leaping into love like you did at 25, but you might be standing up in your community, risking rejection to speak a truth no one else will name. You’re not climbing mountains anymore, but you’re walking back into the psychic forests of your childhood, gathering what was dropped, reclaiming what was buried.
And every single time—it’s a tiger’s den.
The Den Is Not Punishment. It’s Passage.
What the Japanese knew—what every mystic and matriarch eventually learns—is that the thing you’re seeking doesn’t live in the realm of the easy.
It lives where your voice shakes.
It lives where your hands tremble.
It lives in the conversation that’s been waiting fifteen years to happen.
To refuse the den is to refuse the birth.
And here’s the kicker—it’s not just for heroes on epic quests. It’s for you, right now, in your kitchen. In your inbox. In that meeting. In that quiet moment before sleep when the truth knocks, gently but persistently, and says:
“Are you coming, or not?”
Through the Lens of Rites, Rewards, and Reciprocity
Across cultures, we’ve marked transformation through deliberate trials.
The sweat lodge.
The walkabout.
The first bleed.
The first silence.
The naming of a truth aloud.
What I’ve seen, in my spellwork and my own bones, is that people crave these thresholds. They ache for meaning, for something that says: This mattered. This changed me. I was afraid, and I did it anyway.
And yet… in our modern world, we hide the dens. We pave them over.
We call them “breakdowns” or “career pivots” or “content creation burnout.” But underneath, they’re all the same story:
The old way is too small.
The new way hasn’t been born.
And the only way out… is through.
So What’s the Cub?
For some of us, the cub is the truth we’ve never said aloud.
For others, it’s the art we’ve been too scared to make.
For others still, it’s freedom. Healing. Leaving. Beginning.
You don’t have to slay the tiger. You just have to show up.
The Risk Is Real. But So Is the Reward.
The den isn’t empty.
It’s alive.
It watches you.
And it knows if you’ve come with reverence, or just for conquest.
To enter well, you must bring presence. Willingness. Humility. And maybe, a little laughter. I mean, what else can you do when your knees are shaking and your cats are circling your ankles and you’ve burnt the cookies again because you were too busy typing your truth into the void?
Who Will You Be When You’re Brave Anyway?
This week, I entered a tiger’s den of my own.
I said something I’d been holding back for months. I cried. I cracked. And then I laughed with a Gen Z witch on TikTok as her potion exploded and it reminded me—sometimes the risk is the spell.
Sometimes, you enter the den not to win—but to remember who you are when you stop hiding.
And maybe that’s the cub after all.
The Crone’s Counsel
Don’t wait for the fear to go.
Don’t wait for the den to disappear.
Go in.
Go gently.
Go trembling, if you must.
But go.
Because the thing that calls to you lives there
not outside the gate.
Not behind the screen.
But inside the wild, sacred den of your own becoming.