Welcome to the Cozy Cottage Life blog- I'm Jessica, and I share content focused on making your home and life as cozy as possible.

Meet Jessica

Are you struggling to find reconnection to your own ancestral practices?

As a full-time working mother of five kids with a mortgage and the usual dose of 21st century responsibilities, I know how modern life can leave you feeling disconnected. On a deeper level, I believe that we are all suffering from the deep disconnection caused by our switch from living close to nature with our ancestral practices to a post-industrial society. For people of European descent, those nature-based traditional spiritual practices can seem lost to the mists of time. Indeed, for descendants of Northern European immigrants to North America like myself, it can seem that European culture is a legacy of domination and violence. But there is another, far older tradition that we can connect to and heal ourselves. We can come back into right relationship with the earth and one another.

Find a resource for healing and connection to the land

As a child of European settlers in North America, have you ever felt the longing to go back “home” to a land you’ve never seen? Or perhaps learn the ancient Celtic language that hasn’t been spoken in your own family for over 100 years? Have you picked up books on so-called nature-based European spiritual traditions to find them lacking?

Indeed, many of the things we supposedly know about European pre-Christian practices are interpreted for us through the lens of Victorian “romantic” upper-class scholars- a deeply racist and patriarchal moment in time. It’s true that much of what we know today of these very old ways come to us in bits and pieces through myth, place names, intact practices brought to the Catholic tradition. This is because there was a deliberate effort to completely stamp out folk magic and healing, particularly in the Celtic-speaking areas. Holding on to tradition was punishable by death.

I have training in original folk practices of Northern Europe, and my lifetime interest in the subject has led me to extensive research. I offer a non-dogmatic approach to these nature-based practices that people from any religious background can adopt. My deepest desire is to help bring you the resources you need to form a genuine connection to the land and practices of our ancestors (of blood and bone or simply affinity). This work is open to anyone with a desire to learn more.