As we crafted Grain Mothers from clover, mint and meadowsweet to honour until Samhain, and knotted poppets out of corn husks, and talked through knots of feelings and tendrils of ideas, we did some field recordings. These became what we’re thinking of as a kind of meditation. We invite you to put it on in…
Author: risa
EP 96 WF Rebecca Barnstaple and Joseph Fx DeSouza: Dance Is A Healing Medicine
For this full moon in July, I reached out to dance researcher Rebecca Barnstaple after seeing her incredible work presented at a virtual conference about dance and Parkinson’s. We watched videos of people regaining ease of movement when they listened to music; when they thought of the way they moved around a set of obstacles…
WF LITHA 2021 Earth Bound Futures: QUEER The Heroes Journey and Find Your Inner Ally
For solstice and as a celebration of STRENGTH this Litha, we spoke with Tanya and Skye of Earthbound Futures. It took me forever to edit because I kept writing down astonishing things they said. We spoke of wrestling and facial hair and radical self acceptance and chronic pain in our bodies and in the larger…
Ep 91 WF Annwyn Avalon – We Are The Sacred Chalice And The Sacred Well
Annwyn Avalon, water witch, asks how can we – within our own practice, lives and cultural structures – create something that is supportive of other water protectors all over the globe. In conversation with Risa, Annwyn shares how she came to the path of the water priestess and her vision for how people all around…
EP 90 MW Scott Cunningham – There Can Be No Monopoly On Wisdom
This one goes out to the queer, and to the lonely. For so many of us who deviated down the occult aisles, Scott Cunningham was our first. We likely didn’t know he was gay, that wasn’t part of what he shared, but he made this other crucial choice that opened a magic and unexpected door…
EP 87 WF Dr Marina Magloire – Oh My Body, Make Of Me Always A Woman Who Listens
“Being a Black Woman is a way of listening, a radical form of receptiveness to the lessons that history teaches.” Dr Marina Magloire takes Risa on a beautiful trip through Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing, the ways Cecile Fatiman and Marie Laveau remain multiple and uncontained, Carl Sagan and the voices in the archives. This episode…
EP 86 MW Cecile Fatiman and the Haitian Revolution – Vodou: The Leavening Agent for Liberation
This episode is about how – at the heart of a revolution unlike any other the world has ever seen – there is a story that became a seed at the heart of a national identity… a story of a secret ritual, and a priestess of the Lwa. And it’s about how our rituals, our…
EP 83 WF Dr Julia Skinner – Collaborate With These Beings That Have Been Waiting To Support You
In this episode Risa talks with Dr Julia Skinner of Root Kitchens about fermentation, alewives, Cerridwen and the brew of knowledge, the framing of women and women’s work, and the meditational and transcendent potential in collaborating with the vast universe of beings that live with us, in us, all around us, supporting us at all…
EP 82 MW – Diane di Prima: The War Is The War For The Human Imagination
In this episode Risa falls in love with Diane di Prima and explores a “secret history of intellectual and spiritual evolution as essentially aimed at human liberation” with “anarchism, gender equality, communal property and sexual freedom” interlinked and nestled at the heart of this project. (Calonne 639) And she reads a lot of Diane’s poetry…
EP 74 Full Moon with Saleema Nawaz: Songs For The End Of The World
Risa talks with Saleema Nawaz, author of the weirdly prophetic and deeply lovely and hopeful Songs for the End of the World about coming out as a witch in our teens, tapping into the vast ocean of inspiration, living in a world you spent years imagining, and writing (and magic) as an encounter with fear….