In "The Prophecy" Taylor Swift sings, "And I look unstable/gathered with a coven 'round a sorceress' table" and... well, yes.*
To those who don't get it, I'm sure that it looks unstable... but what I'm realizing at this later part of my life is that nothing makes more sense than this, and that a lot of my sanity comes from such gatherings.
My entire adult life, gatherings of women have saved me. They saved me from giving up on my dreams in my 20s; they saved me from the isolation of new parenthood in my 30s; they saved me again in my 30s when I went through cancer; they saved me in my 40s when I went through divorce; and they save me now as the world seems more chaotic than I've ever experienced it before.
Gathered round dining room tables, we women have fed each other and our families nourishing food. We have tended to each others' wounds, and to each others' children. We found ways to make each other laugh and feel a little lighter when everything was heavy beyond bearing. We listened, we shared, and we cracked open and let the light in.
Lately, I've added to my gatherings by going to women's circles: rituals that involve poetry, sage or palo santo, meditation, breathwork, tarot or oracle, tea ceremony, reiki, sound bath and council (always poetry and meditation and council, the rest rotate) in the company of other women. At Solstice I even hosted my own at my house, serving a seasonal meal by candlelight and each of us sharing what we are leaving in the dark and what we are bringing into the light. I've become friends with several of the women who regularly attend these events through Sacred Woman or New Moon Mama or The Jade Dragon, and sometimes one or two or three of them will sit in my living room with me to do a spontaneous circle, sharing what is on our hearts and minds, asking for guidance from the Universe, practicing ritual to ground ourselves, setting intentions.
If this isn't a coven, I don't know what is.
Next weekend some of these friends will join me for Imbolc, to celebrate the early signs of spring's awakening. We'll bring seasonal readings, we'll pull tarot cards with the question "What is ready to awaken in me?" to pair with the shoots of green coming up through the earth. We will bring our grief, and our dreams, and we'll cry when tears are warranted and we'll definitely laugh, and we'll bring a fiercely protective energy for one another: we will keep each other safe, honor each others' dreams. When we blow out the candles at the end, we'll go for a walk through the neighborhood looking for snowdrops and crocuses and buds on the trees, and we'll stand at the edge of the Sound, breathing in salt and listening to the waves. The whole thing will feel holy and true, and I know this because I've done it enough now to not be surprised by the reverence I feel in the experience.
I believe that this is how we heal each other, and that if we heal each other, we can heal the world.
The world is aching. Covered in plastic, burning, at war. We turn away refugees, ostracize whom we do not understand, and keep running faster and faster on the treadmill of life that demands we buy more, more, more, and then we spend hours and days and weeks emptying our cupboards of all of the excess that we do not need, sending it to landfills, so that we have space to buy more.
Enough.
Enough! I cannot stand it for one more minute, and I know I'm not alone.
I have enough material things. I need more connection, love, hope, magic, mystery, insight, dreams. And in these circles of women, I reconnect with something ancient within me, magic and mystery and truth combined.
The rulers of my world have put women in a secondary place, but I'm starting to see that I have powers that they have forgotten, and that women are tapping into that more and more.
My intuition is - how do I describe it? Shocking. Accurate. Amazing. Wonderous. I have stories - so many stories, often with witnesses. The close people in my life have learned to trust me when I say I know something unknowable, because over and over that intuition has shown itself to be truth.
And when I'm in tune with myself, when I connect to that thing in myself that has no name... anything is possible. Anything at all!
It's the season of the witch, and not just when Lana del Rey sings it (but also then). Wicked resonates because we are tired of being told that there is something wrong with us, when we know somewhere, somehow, deep within, that the thing that they say is the worst is actually the best of us, and defying gravity doesn't seem so impossible anymore. We're willing to look unstable if that's how the world wants to see it... but we will gather with the coven round the sorceress' table... which is to say, MY table.
Women have deep wisdom about healing, diplomacy, and how to tend to the needs of the world. They call it "women's intuition" because we've got something that defies logic but is at least as true as science, maybe more. We have the power to create an entire human being within ourselves with just a speck of sperm too small for the eye to see, should we choose to. We can bring ecstasy and light, or we can bring a storm.
And we do it all the best, the most, when we are in tune with the moon and the sun and the stars; when we feel bare earth beneath our feet; when we breathe in the salt air and the damp forest. We do it best when we make things with our own hands - nourishing meals, or poetry, or blankets, or pottery, or stories, or soap and candles, or quilts, or clothing, or murals and portraits or anything else we care to bring into existence through the air, our minds, our hearts. We tend to forests and gardens, growing herbs or saving small worms and spiders, moving them out of harm's way. When we lead nations, children thrive, and the hungry are fed.
We are flawed, too. We can be jealous and angry, and we are just as capable as any other person of getting lost in our own lives, making it from one glass of wine to one take out coffee to one meeting to the television, without ever feeling or giving. We are broken, too.
But when women tap into their own power, the world changes.
My little coven is growing, and we are healing ourselves so that we can change the world. We are unraveling intergenerational trauma so that we will not pass ours to anyone else. We are working on our right livelihood. We are making soup, and giving hugs, and listening, and diving into the ocean on a 39 degree day (true story) to remember who we are and connect with the natural world and WAKE UP.
Sometimes, we're burning bay leaves, or carving "TRUTH" into a candle before we light it. That won't be enough unless we do the hard work, so we're also going to therapy and journaling and trying to do better; we're voting and rallying and gathering supplies for the displaced, hitting "donate" and going to the park to plant trees.
Is it any wonder that witchcraft is the fastest growing segment of religion in the US now?
I'm new at all of this, just a few years in the making, to the point where I'm finally comfortable saying "oh yes, I'm witchy!" (an adjective), and next I am working on, "I am a witch" (a noun). I'm working on getting over the belief or the fear that to say that I'm a witch will not only bring ridicule, but also invite persecution. Swift was right when she said, "I look unstable..." but looks can be deceiving. It's wisdom, not instability, but the world is judgey and scary and everyone knows what a witch hunt is.
As I meditate on my daily question and pull a card from my favorite tarot deck, eyes closed, heart opening, curious, I can't tell you how many times the card has reflected the exact language of a conversation I've just held with a witchy friend, almost verbatim the words that I had been pondering, reflected back at me. Kismet. Magic. Delight. Truth.
I shouldn't be surprised, because sometimes I just know things... I see clearly the path before someone. I can't explain it, but then, I can't explain how lots of true things work (ranging from how televisions work to how a crocus knows just the right time to come up in early spring). The world is full of miracles and magic, and my own life is testament to that fact. While not everyone will believe this, sometimes things are true, and this is one of them.
I keep thinking about the Wordsworth poem:
The World Is Too Much With Us
So here I am, trying not to lay waste my powers, to see Nature and myself as one, to become in tune in the sea and the moon, to let go of those things that don't serve me, to take enough but not too much.
I'd rather be a pagan...
I'm a witch. I'm listening, and I'm trying, and I'm out of the broom closet.
* I'm pretty sure that Swift is a witch, too. That song appears to have brought a new love to her life!
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