This week we published three new pieces on the Missing Witches Zine: One a storydream from a past life memory, an image of floating over the self. One a true story of real magic, a psychic in the woods, an exposer of charlatans who meets a real seer, a love story. And the last an essay on spirals in ancient goddess-worshipping culture, and a theory about the emergence of eternity. All three trace outlines of what we could call witch physics if we felt like it here, though it’s been called other things elsewhere, time layering and singing truths. Trancendance as an emergent property of complex systems.
This week as we are spiraling out into eternity, we are also labouring in our bodies to shovel snow and haul wood, we are remembering we are strong, we are tuned to sweat and breath and the work of surviving.
In a recording we did with Kristine Gorman in the coven this week, (artist creator of the Visionary Woman Tarot - an electric conversation which will go live on the podcast for New Year’s) one of the insights she shared was the need for us each to make a healthy ecosystem. This is one of the pieces we can keep from this year of heartaches: each and every one of us needs our own healthy ecosystem, we need to find and nurture it and fight for it for the individual and the collective.
How is your tiny ecosystem? How can you flourish? Who are you flourishing with?
In ancient Cucuteni culture, they made spiral communities, painted their walls and their homes and the goddess figures on their altars with spirals, and every 70–80 years they packed up what they could, and burned their villages down to let the land lie fallow. Let it heal. Nothing is permanent. They walked on to build somewhere new. Only the onset of an ice age broke them apart, but they dissolved into other cultures, into the mass of humanity, and they spiral within us still.
We make a relay of remembering.
One day this week, my stitches healed, I felt strong enough to shovel the light white snow heaping around the parking spot. Then, Marc and May weren’t home yet, and so I went into the woods.
I realized it was the first time I'd been into these woods since the infection and the hospital, and I felt "you’re still here, thank gods!" Time and space opened around me and I eased into more awareness, more oxygen. Suddenly the cold eased too, and I could walk forever, but instead I just walked to the wetland. The huge boulders were tumbled here by the retreat of the last ice age, and in the snow the great rocks are covered, rolling white with the deep cracks between them disguised, more dangerous now in all its sweet blanketing purity.
So I'm alone in the snow covered woods looking out on the river valley. It’s still, and I’m full of awe. The bowl of evergreens, the golden grasses and overstuffed and bursting cattails all crystalline, the palette of glowing grey light.
Then, with a silent sigh, the clouds change from solid to open wisps and the moon appears, mid-afternoon. And I see the wind is coming towards me, touching the tree branches one by one along the edges of the river as it gets closer, and then when it’s near me, it lifts the snow off great pine branches and curls up a mist of snow in the air, once then twice, great laughing spinning arcs of snow. The wind is playing, dancing, right in front of me. I am laughing and in awe. I draw a spiral in the snow.
Later that evening, May (7) is drawing in an old calendar and telling us about an ornament she stitched in school, a star within a star, she holds up the calendar to show us, and it’s a row of cardinal points and the points between drawn on every day. I feel like time bends. I feel like we're at the heart of intersecting spirals. I feel so glad to be alive.
A few days later, she wants to teach me how to make a friendship bracelet and the pattern she makes is a twisting double helix. Marc and I look at each other over her head a little jaw-dropped and ask, did she make this in school? But no, she insists she just made it up, and what can you do but shrug and laugh and follow her instructions, twisting the brightly coloured string in endless spirals.
Sometimes Amy says, I feel for folks who aren't witches, who can't look at the wild spinning synchronicities all around them and at the very least imagine magic.
At the very least this week, let yourself imagine it.
The Prescription:
Walk a spiral in the snow, watch for spirals, draw them in the frosted glass, feel them in your cells dividing, your DNA singing.
Let the spiral be a teacher: how it reaches forward by circling back, how it repeats without repeating, how it reminds you that growth is never linear. Let yourself move slowly enough to notice where you are in your own coil of becoming. Tend your tiny ecosystem as though it were a living community. Bring warmth where there is brittleness, rest where there is churn, attention where there is quiet calling. If you need to pack up, burn it down, walk on; or just lie fallow for a little while, that's ok too.
Let the pattern guide your week: unfurl a little, return a little, breathe.
Invitations
Support Circle for Navigating Family Gatherings
Hosted by: Lise
Sunday, Dec 14 — 2:00–3:30 PM EST
A gentle gathering for those navigating overwhelming and/or dysfunctional family gatherings this season.
This circle offers space to focus on practices and strategies that help you meet the season with a bit more steadiness, ease, and self-support. We come together to support one another and to explore more sustainable ways of moving through it all.
Rooted in embodied principles of grounding, tuning in, and listening to the body’s needs, boundaries, and wisdom.
Official Event: COVEN YULETIDE PARTY!!
Wed, Dec 17 — 8:00–9:30 PM ET
IMAGINE: it's the last new moon of the year, it's cold and dark outside, snow blankets and quiets the world. But we are together, celebrating the shadow time. Suddenly, the power goes out. The lights go off. The music stops. We gather around the hearth, wrapped in blankets, cider still warm in our mugs. What story will you tell in this moment? What song will you sing?
Bring something that feels like Winter, Solstice, Yuletide. Reading, poem, song, recipe, story, myth, joke, blessing, divination, astrology — anything that fits the vibe.
Join the Coven
If you're reading this from outside the circle, come on in. We’d love to welcome you.
Meanwhile,
Go gently.
Twist by twist.
oxoBFB Risa + Amy T.
