✨ Meeting an Elder: My WitchCon 2026 Experience with Zsuzsanna Budapest

Today something unexpected happened. I found myself deeply moved by an elder I had never met. I was sitting at WitchCon, ready to listen and learn, when Zsuzsanna Budapest appeared on the screen. Wrapped in soft white, flowers woven through her hair, she radiated that unmistakable presence of someone who has truly lived.

There was no showmanship. No pretense. She simply was.

She opened by saying, “I survived youth,” and I swear the air in the room shifted. It was simple and humorous, yet beneath the words was a lifetime of truth. Her youth was not gentle. She lived through oppression, upheaval, and the kind of spiritual loneliness only a born mystic understands. She survived things most people do not come back from. And she spoke about it with the peace of someone who has already done her battling.

As she shared, I felt something inside me recognize her. Not in a fan-girl way. In a soul-way. In a “I know this path because I have walked my own fire” way. She was speaking from ground I have been climbing toward my entire life.

Then she led an ancestor meditation.

And I felt my lineage standing behind me in a way I have never experienced with such clarity. My father. Bunny. The women who raised them. The women who could not raise themselves. The ones who kept going anyway. It was as if she opened a doorway I have been circling for years.

She lifted tarot cards one by one. A queen. A king. A spark. Without knowing it, she named the roles I have been stepping into.

Mother energy.

Elder empathy.

New fire beginning.

I realized that I was not simply watching an elder teach.

I was witnessing a mirror of who I am becoming.

This moment alone was worth the entire WitchCon ticket. It was a reminder that my path is shifting from surviving to leading. From holding my pain to holding my lineage. From walking through darkness to guiding others into their own light.

Meeting Zsuzsanna Budapest today was not an accident.

It felt like a quiet initiation.

A passing of the torch I did not know I was ready for.

And now I do.