I made my first altar to Hekate in an Altoids tin.

Which feels funny to write down, like devotion is supposed to begin in marble, iron, or moonlit stone. Like the first offering has to be grand enough to prove I mean it.

But that is not how this began.

It began small. Practical. Hidden in my hands. A little tin. A little threshold. A portable shrine for a goddess who has always known what to do with doorways.

I made it after a nightmare.

In the dream, I was in a large house searching for someone who was not there. Instead, I brought something back with me: my mother, possessed and fetal, clinging to me with warped hands, panting like an animal in pain. I had to pull her off because someone was coming down the hall, someone dangerous, and I needed to shut the door.

When I turned around, she lunged at me with the face of a white dog.

It was one of those dreams that does not leave when you wake. It stays in the room. It sits behind the ribs. It makes the ordinary world feel thin and watched.

So I made the altar.

Not because every nightmare is prophecy. Not because fear should be fed until it becomes religion. But because sometimes the psyche sends up a flare, and sometimes the body knows before the mind can explain. Sometimes you do not need to know whether the threat is literal, ancestral, emotional, spiritual, or some awful soup of all four. Sometimes you only need to say: nothing follows me through this door without being seen.

That is where Hekate met me.

At the threshold. At the hinge. At the place where the door must close, and the hand has to become steady enough to close it.

I did a protection spell that night. Nothing enormous. Nothing theatrical. Just enough to name the boundary and ask for teeth at the edge of it. Just enough to say: this house is mine. This body is mine. This sleep is mine. Whatever came through the dream does not get to wander freely through waking life.

And the strange thing is, it seemed to work.

For days, I had been noticing a red-winged blackbird on my way to work. He had become part of the morning: fence, bird, road, breath. Then suddenly he was gone. In his place, I started seeing and hearing crows around the house.

Maybe that means nothing. Birds have their own lives. They do not exist to decorate my symbolism, rude of them honestly.

But also: I noticed.

And noticing is part of devotion.

Crows feel different. They are not soft omens. They are not gentle wallpaper. They are clever, loud, communal, watchful. They gather where something needs attention. They do not ask permission to be heard.

After a dream about a mother-monster, after a spell for protection, after building a tiny altar to a goddess of crossroads and ghosts and keys, the crows felt like an answer with black wings.

Not a promise that everything is safe.

More like a reminder that I am not unguarded.

I think that is what drew me to Hekate in the first place. She is not comfort in the simple sense. She is not the hand that says there is nothing in the dark. She is the torch that says: yes, there is darkness. Look anyway.

She does not require me to be fearless. She asks me to be honest.

I am tired of pretending protection is only necessary when there is a visible enemy. Sometimes protection is needed against old patterns. Inherited fear. Guilt wearing a loved face. Nightmares that drag family-shaped things into the room. The part of me that wants to keep the door open because closing it feels cruel.

But a boundary is not cruelty.
A locked door is not hatred.
A small altar is not a small devotion.

Sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is make a threshold and mean it.

So yes, my altar is in an Altoids tin. For now. It is tiny and imperfect and probably not what anyone imagines when they think of devotional grandeur. But it is mine. It exists. It opens and closes. It holds intention. It gives me somewhere to put the fear so the fear does not have to live loose in my chest.

And maybe the crows are just crows.

But when I hear them now, I think of Hekate's torches. I think of the door in the dream. I think of the spell. I think of the difference between being haunted and being warned, between being afraid and being protected.

I think of a goddess who does not flinch at monsters.

And I think: good.

Let her stand at the door. Let her see what tries to enter. Let the crows call from the roofline. Let the little tin become a gate.

I am listening.
I am learning.
I am protected.