The hedge

Hedges require work

I'm a hedgewitch. Don't be misled by this phrase into thinking that this is some ancient tradition handed down from village wise women of old. After the explosion of interest in the new age, pagan, and occult and magical subjects in the 60s there was no way that the coven initiation system run by Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wiccans would be able to accomodate everyone who wanted to 'learn' witchcraft. So people began to look to the archetype of the village wisewoman (Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca draw on the coven-based witch religion archetype found in Margaret Murray's books), to create a magico-religious tradition where the individual could work and learn alone or with others in different numbers, while not needing to find a high priestess willing and able to initiate. The word 'hedgewitch' comes from Rae Beth's book of that name. It is not a book I personally particularly like - it is very much Wicca for one, and over-emphasises male-female polarity for my taste. But this movement took off, and now 'hedgewitch' mostly refers to practitioners who work alone or with others not in a formal coven structure.
In a sense the work 'hedge' creates a problem because sometimes it is used to refer to what could better be called Green Witchcraft, a much more herbalist type of witchcraft. If I can't feel pavements under my feet and see street lights, I have a panic attack, and can't sleep in the country because it's too quiet.
The answer is that the hedge is not always a literal hedge but can be illustrated by the idea of a real hedge. A hedge is a liminal place separating one from another. By crossing the hedge you go into a different place, in a magical sense into different worlds, where you see things differently and come back transformed by the journey and what happened to you. A traditional hedge is something requiring much work and being built up into an almost impenetrable barrier over years or even centuries. If you try to get through this barrier, you will almost certainly come up against insurmountable odds, which would make it seem very unlikely that you will succeed in your journey. The challenges you meet in, on , and through the hedge are the initiatory traumas that the hedgewitch passes through and returns transformed. They can never be predicted beforehand, but hints that this is happening would include that you experience illness, pain, loneliness, and have to make decisions with no real assurance of the likely outcome.

A different sort of hedge

For this reason I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to be 'taught' hedge witchery, although teachers and guides (whether people or in other forms) will appear as you need them. Each hedge witch's hedge is very individual, it is never traversed by anyone else, and what is learned ultimately cannot be put into words, because the hedge witch has a series of life-changing experiences tailored to his or her own life. And this is why hedge witches are all different, because the hedge is different. It can be found in our romantic relationships and work lives. Anywhere where we can be forced to cross a boundary into another world can be found the hedge.
Of course this experience has wider implications for the person's life, and he or she will certainly have to lose things along the way. The witch will also find that it is necessary to break some dearly-held conventions. This is, of course, the essence of the left hand path, but it is also the way in which people exceed limitations and access previously unthought-of resources of strength and creativity.