Way of the Witch-Fractal
To live as the Witch lives is to allow your world to be shaped and reshaped by those swelling, cresting, and ebbing wilds to which you already belong. To live as the Witch lives is to continually remember, as the magick maker’s journey is not solely one of knowledge acquisition but so often one of simple recollection. Whatever particular ancestral medicine runs in your blood, whatever hallowed recipe of many lands, songs, and ceremonies has brewed you, you are a wisdom keeper with much to gift this wounded world. You are a holy confluence of many fertile and fast-running rivers of lineage and land knowledge. What I offer here in these pages is an invitation to awaken that wisdom, that wild and soulful meaning you already embody, to find sanctuary in time’s cyclical movements as you would in the warm, firelit home of an elder healer.
I invite you to use your magick to silver-thread not only your own story but also the collective love story we are all living right here, right now, at this pivotal moment when the human community must, simply must, fall in love with this planet. The story has for too long been one of unrequited longing, dragging on and on like a many-millennia-long play ordered in act after act of horror and greed against indigenous people, against the sacred elements — with the wild earth, all the while, waiting for us with an aching patience we do not deserve. Perhaps the play’s plot will shift like this: The human animal, faced with the prospect of living in a world of rising seas, will open its ears to the subtle whispers of the beauty beneath its feet; will fall to the ground weeping and begging for forgiveness; and will resolve to do all it can to repair, restore, and rejuvenate what will otherwise be irrevocably lost.
A problem of such magnitude cannot possibly be solved using the same strategies that created it, but what if the way we define these wounds is also part of the injury. Scholar and educator Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” No more can we rush away so quickly from the ache, for our shared scars are sacred portals where we just might meet the medicine we need, where we can again know what it means to belong not to a collective trauma but to the whole of our cocreated story. We can look one another in the eye here on this hallowed ground, Witch to scientist and believer to skeptic, and say, “I see you. You are hurting, and I am hurting, too.”
We are witch-fractals casting our spells and speaking our truths in the name of not only our own liberation but that of all people. We must embrace the knowing that we can be fully empowered, fully and wholly sovereign creatures, but still acknowledge whatever privileges we may have and how racialized trauma and cultural context affect our lives. We can act in ways that are just, center voices that are not our own, and use whatever powers we have been graced with in this life to heal our Earth, the mother that bore us. We can dig out the deep, buried medicine that runs in our blood. We can mend, and we can find the immense pleasures and bountiful treasures that are ours to claim. There is not only discomfort to be found in the unknown but a necessary and humbling delight.
Hag Lesson #3
Joy lives in mystery.
We rush so quickly to solve the unsolvable, to run toward the familiar, but our elders teach us to slow our pulses just a bit, to hear what stories we can, and to listen to those whose input was not valued when this world of ours was built. The poison lies in the absolutes; in the immutable decisions; and in the stubborn refusal to admit that we do not know what good means, that maybe, just maybe, there is no solution that does not begin with the strange sanctuary of slowness, and that, importantly, slow living does not mean apathy. May we cease to equate our I-don’t-knows with our I-don’t-cares, and may we reframe what it means to be wild, empowered, and free.
Wander ’Round the Path
Linear time is the enemy of magick, at best, and the catalyst for hard-edged individualism and colonization, at worst. Perceiving time as only linear encourages fierce movement toward a given goal and the concurrent ignorance of our creaturely cycles. Such rigid thought patterns take us away from the past, from innocence, from memory. The vilest philosophies were used to validate colonial conquests, bound by common and insidious threads of rot called distance, speed, and dominance. We have heralded the stories of ambitious heroes who begin with nothing and end with everything, all the while reinforcing the circle as servant and the line forward as king.
Witches tell the small stories, though, and Witches live on the fringes of society for a reason. If they are too far removed from the wilds, their souls starve and they lose their sense of belonging. If they are too isolated from the human collective, they are unable to effect change, to weave the world they hope will come to fruition. They dance in the great between. They live on the edge, you see. They live on the edge, though not often by choice, to witch their worlds from the inside out. And, to my mind, the greatest lesson the elders, Witches, mystics, and healers can share at this pivotal moment is that of long vision and spiraling time. In Grandmothers Counsel the World, Carol Schaefer writes, “The Grandmothers teach us that time is not linear in the Spirit World. All time exists at once, enabling the seeing of events far into the future.” This does not mean aggressively and adamantly choosing spiral time over linear time but rather choosing to see the world cyclically when possible — knowing that all birth is also a death, every beginning is an end, and there is a holiness to the dark, to the shadow, which is only wicked when it is shunned and shamed.
What if we loved to live this way? What if we befriended the circle-round again? This is the spiraling path of the embodied Witch, where linear time is often an illusion and each morning’s dawn is akin to the new moon, to spring, to youthful joy and conscious innocence. We are sacred workers and magick makers at noonday, feeling the pulse of the full moon and the high fire of summer burn bright on our inner altars, before dusk calls us toward the holy, autumnal energies of the waning moon. We rest, at long last, in the blessed lightlessness of night, our daily dose of wintertide, held in the arms of the dark moon. This is our dawn-to-dark dance, our opportunity to be dreamed alive not once but over and over again.
You may be thinking that the proverbial real world does not permit such slow movements; how our schedules, calendars, and deadlines rule over us without ever getting our vote; and how helpless we all are to live the way we like. But here is precisely where those on the fringes come into play, entering into our collective story of becoming not with penetrative ambitions of victory but in deep song, sharing their rebels-in-time ways with those who care to listen. We become outlaws by letting our lives breathe as much as possible, by feeling into the emptiness as much as the full, by pushing against and tenderizing the hard edges until they begin to give way. Reflection and rest are radical, and the very systems we wild hearts wish to counter rely entirely on our lack of both.
Given the weight of what is at stake, cultivating a more nourishing relationship with time may seem like a small task, but what if those brief moments of pause are where incremental revolutions begin? What would become of our exhausting quests for perfection if we fell in love with imprecision? This is a lunar journey of becoming, a journey with no destination.
This book is a story of your eternal transmutation, and I invite you to both dream awake and be dreamed alive. Let the place to begin find you, then scry your own way forward. Just like the practice of Witchcraft, this book asks you to begin whenever and wherever you are called, regardless of geography, past study, or access to material resources. You do not need to live in a place where all four solar seasons are neatly defined and easily predicted, for all thirteen moons live within us, just as all the elements, directions, and deep archetypes of light and shadow run in our very blood. Do not look to nature to show you how to feel; rather, look to where nature meets you — look to that space of coming-togetherness, and tend to the spirit of the moment.
Hag Lesson #4
Nonlinear movement is rebellion.
You may find yourself in the dead of winter but feel strongly pulled toward