This episode went live on the podcast on Monday as usual, but I was in the hospital for a few days and couldn't manage to pull this post together, so here we are a few days late but full of love.
oxR
Friends, beloveds, Witches, the demure and the curious, the filthy and wild, welcome to a strange new season of the Missing Witches podcast. Usually here at the Fall Equinox we go looking for the witches we’ve been missing, but this summer I was diagnosed with stage 3 invasive breast cancer, and Amy had her land wash away in a flood leaving a crumbling wound, and we find ourselves on a precipice.
We’re here, and we come bearing stories, but we can’t guarantee what shapes they’ll take.
I’m starting us off with a miniature Cancer season, episodes drawn from elements.
I began last week with Water.
And, this is maybe an awkward detour but since posting my first in these Cancer stories last week, many folks have reached out to ask how you can support us, which is just incredibly kind. So, quickly in reply to that generous question, with the context that Amy and I aim to make our living and support our families from this Missing Witches work and we are currently (though definitely benefitting from unearned systemic privilege) earning below the poverty line, here is a mini rundown of things that are deeply supportive to us:
- On our website MissingWitches.com check out Join the Coven and become a supporting member.
- On our website check out Shop and buy some sweet merch.
- Order our books or deck from Bookshop or Amazon or your local witch shop or bookstore.
- Totally free things that actually really help too: review our book or podcast on Apple Podcasts or Amazon, amplify our posts on social media.
Ok, awkward material world detour over.
Though it’s there always isn’t it? The material, feeding these bodies, keeping the roof from coming down.
Today we continue with Earth.
The elements are a rosary of the present where all is possible.
Because after I’ve been running in rivers all over the place, melting, pouring, I need to figure out how to be solid again. These things weren’t linear, it wasn’t water season and then earth. One thing about cancer for us was the way it bent, fragmented, and twisted time. Things went fast and slow, timelines folded in on themselves. Noticing the way the moon moved through the sky was helpful, as was the feel of slowly changing seasons on our skin, but better was reaching for the basic elements of life, moment by moment, because they were there all the time, when time folded and trickled and stopped making sense I could come home to the way the water ran through my fingers, I could reach into the soil and notice the weight and millennia of stones, I could feel the wind and witness the spark, the ember, the way the smoke hovered when the fire went out and we all breathed it in.
The elements are a rosary of the present where all is possible. These stories don’t go in straight lines, these are songs from a time of grasping for the warp and the weft, threads of life in the dark.
This is an episode about holding onto the world, about grounding, digging into the soil, hitting the ground.
Trigger warning, this episode contains mentions of suicide.
This is an episode about Earth, and my priestess in this dark forest is ecologist Suzanne Simard.
We’ll get there.
In Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, Christopher Marmolejo wrote:
The Queen of Pentacles, and indeed all Queens under the Empress, can help restore lost connections to our motherlands. She helps us collectivize the body, extending personal identification not with a nation but with every bodily expression of the Earth. Her medicine for alienation and physical isolation is to invest in the body as a preserved wildland. As tarot works to summon what’s embedded deep within the psyche, it leads with the Queen of Pentacles to maintain psychic-social connections through history. These connections may be ruptured, butthey cannot be severed once and for all. The Queen of Pentacles calls upon mother-right traditions, matrilocality and matrilineality, which recognize all equally. The Queen of Pentacles has no bastard children, because all life born from her body is legitimized by her disregard of state-sanctioned relations. We are legitimate as long as we restore connection to the lands we are from.
Cancer is very lonely. No matter how encircled and supported you are, and I’ve been lucky, you’re all alone in the body, the lone reporter that everyone is looking to for reports, and you’re alienated from the body too because it is ranks of white coated unknown celebrants who interpret the sacred texts of your tests and tell you how in danger you are from what’s inside you. The body holds secret betrayal. You’re even more alone than you thought.
When I was facing and then finding my way back from a surgery that would cut dense bundles of nerves from my chest, myself from myself, I needed to hold onto the knowledge that “our connections may be ruptured but they cannot be severed once and for all”. We are legitimate as long as we restore connection to the lands we come from. I can become flaily and hand wringing at the thought that I’ve never really been to where i’m from, aside from a 24hr layover one time, I’ve never set foot on the lands most of my ancestors came from, England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, I’m rootless and severed. How much more nauseating, then, to be cut off from the body as well, sensory homeland, as Amy once put it, “my daughter’s first hometown.”
May, 5 and ¾ now, came to my bedside as I was writing this and wanted to add one sentence. She picked out the letters one by one then danced away when she was done:
Earth created us.
So. Not severed. I have a home and so do you.
To restore connection to the way Earth creates and how it holds us I had to feel both the sever and the suture.
I had to write while the stitches were still bloody, all along the underside of my breasts, and while my stupid toe was still stupidly broken and yellow and blue from losing my balance getting out of bed after my chest was cut and every startle felt like it ripped me up again.
I had to write while I was more concretely in my body than I had been since giving birth. Birth and death proximity slam us to the ground, let us touch the unnameable cavernous loop that only the lifeforce knows. No wonder caves are such holy places.
After the diagnosis I was suddenly tired like I had never been before in my life. I realized later it was shock, my body went into a protective shaky tender fugue state.
I wrote:
“I’m tired and the terror creeps in, it’s there all day, but it builds as a band around my heart. The more tired I am the more I feel the weight of the material body and the weight of what is happening so goddamn fast. My breast hurts and I have aches in my bones and every weird ache asks the question is that more cancer? Is it more places? cancer diagnosis stage three is standing at the precipitous edge of what gets called “uncurable stage 4” though for many people these days even metastasized stage 4 is treatable, long livable, the internet says the 5 year survival is under 30% but those stats change all the time now, pharmaceutical innovation is a high speed train, but not everybody gets to ride.
Some people say this is the worst part. The part between diagnosis and treatment, the valley of helplessness, the panic of being untethered with no strings you can pull to affect your own fate. Maybe I’m in the worst part, maybe other parts won’t be as bad as this part.
I feel like I can’t move my arms from tiredness, I feel like my skin has melted off and I am just bones in a barren place, but then my baby comes out onto the porch and asks me to pick her up, and I do.
I wasn’t strong and then I was.
And as I lay on the couch again after putting her to bed, writing this down, dictating actually, too tired to type, just as I spoke those words “i wasn’t strong and then i was” I promise you, I couldn’t make this up, Blue Heron flew across the sky, across the one small stretch of sky that I can see from where I spend my days melting, dissolving, losing form. I am called back into my solid state by the solid weight of love in kid form, and there is heron, flapping improbably, floating on the thick air.
We are blood and bones and shit and yet even weighty lumps of clay like us can get back up again.”
"The encounter was a bridge to when nature was family."
In “Something in the Woods Loves You” Jarod K Anderson’s memoir of mental health after a long season of deep depression and suicidal ideation, the poet writes of his own encounter with the heron:
It’s all still here, I thought.
The heron, The creek, The trees.
It’s not dead and gone.
It’s not locked away in the past.
It’s not a phantom of childhood or a metaphor of a bygone age.
It’s still here.
A hundred thousand little rivers.
A million secret sights beneath fallen logs and riverbank rocks. It was still here.
I had gone away, not nature.
But, of course, that’s not quite right either.
I hadn’t gone anywhere.
I had just stopped noticing.
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built out of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallowsto entrance the blue gills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it. The nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
I stood there, watching the heron, watching as she decided I was not a threat, as she turned and paced upstream, a poem of ancient slowness. I stood and silently cried, with the wind numbing my ears and my tears shining in the sunlight.
I was a grown man, alone in the woods, crying at a heron’s back, and even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time it was the most hopeful I’d felt in years.
There was the bird, but not just a bird.
The encounter was a bridge to when nature was family.
How has the earth reminded me that I am of them, that I am already home?
What do flight and fear of death have in common that they bring me back to the miracle of the material?
The day before my biopsy a wise covenmate and friend, Holly, told me that when she’d had a biopsy years before she had walked out of it feeling ok, and then 20 min later in a coffee shop the blood had rushed from her head, the pain and fear had hit and she had nearly fainted.
I got the good advice and still, still drove myself out of the mountains, 50 minutes to the Radiologix office to the biopsy.
I’m still high on the independence of being able to drive myself places alone. Driving was a terror for me for decades, I didn’t have my license so I was a perpetual passenger, out of control, constantly flinching in the car, imagining metal hot folding towards me, windows smashing in. But I got pregnant, and moved out to the lake and finally got my license, and after a year of driving May to and from garderie, in turns with Marc, an hour each day, my brain finally just stopped producing constant streams of molecules of glutamate (a neurotransmitter) screaming to the hypothalamus, triggering my nervous system, sending electrical shocks to the glands which produce adrenaline, releasing hot clenched terror into into my blood. (source) The constant fear triggered by being in the car stopped after enough exposure therapy and I could drive and feel my instincts cohere in my muscles and it felt so good to drive mountain roads and curve around their solidity and feel the palpable power my brian and bodied weilded in deft adjustments to the wheel and the pedals.
So, out of stubbornness, I drove myself to the biopsy. And so I had to drive back alone afterwards, but I had Holly’s warning in me, so after leaving the hospital before getting on the highway, just as the head rush hit, I pulled over. I went to a cafe and sat in an awkward rattan swing in the window as the post-biopsy terror slammed my body like a punching bag and the pain came in aftershocks from and earthquake.
This was one of those things that make you remember you are meat.
Theoretical physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad in interview talked about the cutting ways of knowing, the ways that knowing leaps through matter, and I read it differently when I was in the bloody ghostly land of cancer tests:
knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility. There is not this knowing from a distance. Instead of there being a separation of subject and object, there is an entanglement of subject and object, which is called the “phenomenon.” Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the entanglements of which we are a part.
The biopsy cuts do violence, and rework the conditions of possibility. Some cases of spontaneous remission have been attributed to violent accidents or hits to the body or even the biopsy itself - a stapler to the secret under the skin - triggering a fierce immune response in the body that attacks the cancer. For now, scientists can’t predict when this will happen and its incredibly rare but reading about it might make you imagine falling down stairs. What would you throw your body towards to escape a disease you can’t see killing you from the inside? But there’s no way of knowing when and whether this flesh sacrifice would work and I am responsible not just to the entanglements of cells that cohere my body, but to the entanglements of love, to the way fear moves through my body and into my daughters, the fear and labour all this wraps around Marc’s sinews, I have to do research, I have to advocate for myself and make good choices to ease our pathways and affect the probabilities of life and death.
I have to advocate for myself and make good choices to ease our pathways and affect the probabilities of life and death.
Having driven myself to the biopsy, I have to pull myself together and drive myself home.
The bone scan was done down in the basement in a section called Nuclear Medicine with nuclear waste hazard signs screaming yellow between friendly posters about online cancer support communities which - i discover - are unmoderated and so become a molten fear riot of people quitting chemo because they think their nurses poisonned them on purpose, quitting their hormone suppressors because the side effects make them sick, heavily interspersed with unhelpful (to me) messages about Jesus. Online gardens need gardeners, especially in places where fear is invasive. We need plans for the safe containment of our toxic shadowselves and hazardous secretions.
In nuclear medicine I receive an injection and come back 3hrs later when the isotopes are at their half-life to lie in a quiet machine that rotates its strong arms around me, never touching me, making no noise as it moves so that i nearly dose off and then open my eyes to find a massive extension of metal resting, silently breathing, centimeters from my face and i gasp and imagine being crushed by the weight of it before it silently spins inches away again. Alien choreography. Bone scans map fast moving cells in the body and are notoriously hard to read, says my doctor friend Merryl. It’s more an art than a science, they are like diviners. We wait for results in the box with Schrodinger’s cat.
On the way back from the nuclear test, in those days when the shock left my body a terrifying stranger and it felt like moving slowly through choking soil, and my muscles trembled like that time I’d hauled my body out of the grand canyon in an icestorm screaming with every step, we stopped for a sleepover at Jill and Joe’s cottage with their little twin girls Margo and Nelly, who May calls her sisters.
I mostly lay down inside and listened to the sounds of normal life through the window. The girls built a fort with downed branches in the woods. I mustered myself and went to sit out by the fire. We sat under a great white pine whose needles had all yellowed, and as the sun went down, for some reason the pine started to cry. I wrote about the white pine as kin last year, ever since these trees have felt more than ever like family. And here I was beneath a grandmother crying.
Needles fell, and fell, and fell like a soft rain, and there was no wind, and there was no animal shaking its branches, and we thought it was something in the chemistry of the evening, the chemistry of dying, and I tried not to imagine it was an omen.
As a blanket of needles gathered on our hair, the table, our knees, we talked about the origins of democracy in America the origins of American pragmatism rooted in the Haudenausaunee confederacy, when the leaders of the six nations agreed to a revolutionary peace and buried their weapons in the roots of the white pine tree and the authors of the declaration of independence referenced this great peace as their inspiration. Peace made more peace, theory made a multiplying imperfect union.
At some point, late on a panic night before surgery, I imagined that all the cruelties of the world, all its poison and injustice, were rooted in my left breast.
During a Missing Witches Coven circle I lay and listened to, I imagined holding the fears and brutalities that every member of my coven had been subjected to in their lives in my flesh and then letting them be cut away. It’s magical thinking and grossly grandiose but it helps pass through the feeling of choking helplessness. Put your sickness here in this flesh and I’ll get it surgically removed for us, I’m going anyway.
I still had choices to make about how much of my meat self, earth self, I would cut away.
My left breast had multiple cancerous lesions, but the right breast was a mystery box, they didn’t think there was cancer there - you are not more likely to have it in a second breast just because you have it in the first, but they kept asking for more tests. It turns out on a density scale I have the densest of breasts, two black holes within me, mammograms are unable to decipher their depths. According to the tech, not only were they black hole dense but "riddled with calcium deposits" making ultrasounds frustrating and useless, biopsies came back undetermined, and when they asked for yet another MRI, it tipped my internal Geiger counter over and I chose to remove that breast as well, rather than be forever haunted by it. Book the surgery, no more delays.
A college friend, writer Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of the forthcoming “BREASTS: A RELATIVELY BRIEF RELATIONSHIP” reached out when she saw I had cancer and became a lifeline to me, even though we hadn’t really spoken in almost 20 years. She wrote to me of her own choice to remove her unaffected breast, and to have a similar reconstruction to the one I’d chosen:
“definitely the right decision but also a decision that feels like a kind of self-harm. It took me a while to settle my brain around having done it. I had the expanders too, for six months. The pain does fade and in time I forgot they were there except when they made strange sharp corners in my swimsuit.”
A kind of self harm. I cried and wrapped my arms around my right side one night before the surgery, why had I chosen to hurt her when she didn’t do anything wrong? Part of being dense-breasted also meant that they were dense with nerves, the doctor who did my second round of biopsies explained that the two commonly go together and that might have been why I experienced so much pain during the first biopsy, he saw the pain I was in from the very start of the second one and added additional deep layers of numbing till the low down secret screaming finally stopped.
But before all this, being brightly wired with nerve endings had been a good thing, a deep and late-blooming pleasure. I had spent my 20s in a relationship that had numbed my body and after I got out of that, I swear I could have an orgasm sometimes just from a soft fabric moving against my skin. It was a kind of self-harm to cut that away.
I went through a dark valley of anger and weeping after the adrenaline of surviving the surgery itself wore off.
I had expanders placed in the hollow cavities of my chest in hopes of reducing the chance of capuscular collapse where the living shell your body makes around a foreign object sometimes turns hard and rejects the foreign body, especially after radiation, and you lose your best chance at having a shape that looks close to familiar again even if it doesn’t feel right.
It felt like the expanders were squares made of shap edged plastic, it felt like they were creeping through a thicket of angry nerves up my neck to strangle me. The expanders have metal plates in them to prevent the giant needle they use to fill them with saline solution from piecing through the plastic and I felt and saw the metal squares in my chest and was angry at the pressure of them.
Jean said get outside as soon as you can, sunlight, moving your body, these things will help. On the first day home I walked twenty steps down the tumbled river stone to the sand at the edge of the water. On the second day I made it through the arch of alder I have always thought of winkingly as Hekate’s bower. Michael Phelps says a positive affirmation every time he goes through a doorway, apparently, because our mind processes each transition as a new world, a portal of possibility. Hekate help stitch me back in.
On the third day I made a small loop around the half acre of our property and slowly this became a ritual, I realized I could walk the paths in such a way they made a lemniscate, an infinity loop. The leaves and the sunlight and the pines needles and the ferns and narrow woodchip paths and the tall thin mushrooms so perfectly camouflaged that when you see them its like a new dimension suddenly laughingly alive - it was all more vivid than before, hallucinatroy, dizzying. But if I’m honest I walked circuits of anger those days, I didn’t show it much but there was a quiet seething. I didn’t feel at home I felt enraged.
I’m writing to you from the chemo well now, even further afield. Chemo kills all the fast moving cells in your body - that’s why you lose your hair and your ovaries stop functioning - and it does feel as though all I’m left with is slow moving cells. Slow and fetid, everything tastes and smells bad.
Those weeks after surgery were like a premonition about chemo, everything was slow, nauseating, angry and uncanny and also I was always hungry but food was a stranger, unpredictable and weird. I had strange dreams and woke often in the night, starving.
Once I woke up from a dream about my sisters planning a makeover for an apartment I’d been staying in, though we didn’t have the owner’s permission.
Another time one of my oldest friends texted me:
My body was a house, borrowed and under reconstruction. I was being renovated against my will. My connection to the earth of myself was being rebuilt in my subconscious and in the dreamlands of my loved ones who held pieces of myself for safekeeping.
My strength slowly returned.
My dad and step-mom Kate come to visit and she and I walked farther than I’d been so far, off the property and halfway around the lake. The walk smelled of warm wet earth and Kate reminded me of Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree.
I had completely forgotten that her memoir of scientific discovery that showed us how trees pass on nutrients to their kin and community, how they nourish each other, warn each other, how they pour their lifeblood through mycelial underground webs to their children when they know they are about to die, that this story is a cancer story too.
Suzanne Simard writes:
The surgeon removed both my breasts, and I woke up to Mary and Jean, Barbara and Robyn hovering as I looked at my flattened chest and pressed the morphine pump. A few days later, I was in my apartment, eating kale and salmon, my scars red and my bruises as purple as eggplant. I walked a hundred meters, then another and another, ready to go home to Hannah and Nava for Christmas. We just needed the full biopsy results. “You might be done with treatments if your lymph nodes are clean,” Barbara told me.
On our way out of town, we learned that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes.
The two oncology doctors, Dr. Malpass in Nelson and Dr. Sun in Vancouver, said I would receive a new “dose dense” regime of eight chemotherapy infusions, one every two weeks over four months, the most effective option for my kind of cancer. They figured I was young and fit enough to handle it. The first half would be a combination of two older drugs, cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin—what Barbara called “the Red Devil”—and the second was paclitaxel, derived from the Pacific yew tree.
I was heading for the exact same regime when I found myself in the arms of The Mother Tree book again, and like Simard I’d been muttering this to myself too: the chemo was derived from the yew. And not just the yew but from a fungi relationship that happens under the bark. Deeply entangled relationships, hidden in plain sight. This helps a little but, I tell Kate, I can’t shake the fear and anger at myself at feeling the desire for these useless breasts so much that I chose to have plastic under my skin. I’m mad at the burning sharp pain of the plastic and metal, at my compromised cyborg desires, and bereft at the loss of feeling all across the front of me that used to face the world and reach out into it with fine invisible sensors.
Kate tells me that she’s proud of me for knowing what body shape I needed to be, for me, she had knee surgery 5 years ago and spent a long time angry at having this metal and plastic rod inside her body. She wouldn’t touch it, she felt her whole self pulling away from it, resenting it. She asks me, a little tentative, long pink and silver hair curling down her back, if I’ve talked to my body. If I’ve told it why the expanders and the metal plates are there, what they are keeping space for, why the flesh that once was there needed to go? She tells me that some of the nerves affected in her surgery and mine are myelinated nerves, they grow with use and the memory of use, they’re tied to mind.
The bundles of myelinated nerve cells that make up the white matter project into and connect various gray matter areas of the brain and are thus the site of signal transmission and passage of nerve impulses between neurons. (source)
I tell her about a practice I found online that suggested standing in a mirror naked and lightly tapping in widening circles around the numb flesh of your post-mastectomy breast, then doing it again with your eyes closed. Then do it again with a feather, then do it again with an ice cube. I thought since the nerves regrow at a speed of 1mm a day I wouldn’t bother starting till 6 months or a year, I could avoid the dull sad feeling of touching them for a while, but Kate said no, they grow with use, don’t wait like I did, start now.
You have to touch the numb and painful places.
Think of them like the mycelial web, let them send information about what happened to you so they can accept it and reach toward feeling again. You have to face it, even though it hurts, and, in a way, you have to forgive it so that you can heal around it. Start wrapping the nerves in you with your memories of how they once were and draw forward into new memories as soon as you can. You have to talk to your body to rebuilt your body. You have to touch the numb and painful places.
I walked my figure 8 around the property after my dad and Kate left, I passed Hekate’s bower and stopped just past the portal in the new world, the moment ticking new, stood in the little grove watching the sun dance on the water and I rested my hands then my forehead on the alders, the trees which foresters were clearcutting to give the pines more room to grow when Suzanne Simard showed that these fast little limbs of alder weren’t taking from the big trees. Instead they were fixing nitrogen and water in the soil.
In forests with a diverse understory left intact the pines were taller, stronger, better able to resist the pine beetle blight when in came and erased whole cash crop forests, needles falling in a dry grey rain for miles and miles. I rested my face on the young, wise, generous boughs and then, so carefully, so afraid of both the numbness and the pain and the weirdness, I held my burning chest. It felt like garbage bags beneath my skin and I could see a bit of plastic tangled by my feet in the roots a the shore and I felt a wave of panicked revulsion but I spoke awkwardly to my insides anyway. The garbage bags, these agglomerations of invention, capitalism and care, these strangers inhabiting us are holding space, I said. Holding space for a future post-chemo, post radiation where they will be replaced with shapes made of sand and cross-linking polymers. This isn’t what everyone wants or chooses and thats beautiful, this is what I chose.
A friend and theorist Jake Moore wrote to me:
I look forward to saying 'nice rack' at the beach sometime in the future and it will be funny not creepy because this will be the part you chose for all the reasons that move so far beyond the yet-to-be-known. yours is a truly theoretical response. for quote
"Theories are not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world from some presumed position of exteriority.
Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world."
She quoted Karen Barad, ‘breathing reconfigurings’, and I held onto that as I held my beautiful garbage bag rack in the woods, believing in the future, talking theory to my cells.
This metal and rubber and plastic is not the enemy. We made it, and we’re part of nature too, we make mistakes in what we make but our mistakes have the wisdom of Earth in them, and growing right next to them might be the antidote or symbiont or friend. I picked up the plastic off the beach and kept walking.
Suzanne Simard wrote:
After the last of the paclitaxel had been shot into my veins, I brought Hannah and Nava to this grove. The spring beauties and skunk cabbages were in bloom. “These are the yews that made my medicine,” I said, and we put our arms around their gnarly trunks. I asked them to look after my daughters, all of the daughters, as they did me. In return, I promised to protect them, ask questions of them, seek treasures still unknown. Unlike most conifers here, they formed relationships with arbuscular mycorrhizas, so did they connect with the cedars and maples? I bet that they kibitzed with the bigger trees and the tiny plants at their roots—the wild ginger and rosy twisted-stalk and false lilies of the valley. A thriving, webbed neighborhood might boost the yew in producing paclitaxel in greater abundance, stronger potency. (Simard 295)
I walked slow loops for days, I still do now as I claw myself step by step out of the poison path inertia of chemo. I imagine if I walk enough then whenever I do pass on, sometime a long long time from now, the particles here will still swirl and remember my heat and breath, these fabrics and this particular balance and weight passing through, and maybe whoever lives here then will catching a glimpse of me coming around the corner. Maybe it’ll be May and I will wave.
I walk through spider webs fine across my face all along the path, and try to pluck them from the air and reattach them safely.
Can I act, walk, speak, parent gently enough to restore connection to the lands we are from, leave enough behind to earn my place in the neighbourhood?
Weeks after surgery I get access to the full text of all my test results and pour over them like tea leaves. Why is this part of my insides slightly thick, slightly long, what does probably benign mean, what do you know about my body that I don’t? After the surgery I wanted to ask all the white masked faces who had been there, what did you see in there? What can you tell me about me? You, who have had your hands feeling along my wet muscles, following lymphnodes, carefully cutting away my rootwork of veins, do you know which parts of me are me, which parts are cancer, which parts are mother tree?
This is also how I learn that the right breast, which I had decided to remove prophylactically, did infact have lobular carcinoma in situ, stage 0, not cancer yet but a tipping-over state of pre-cancer that makes you 7 times more likely to develop cancer in that breast. It was not self harm, though it hurt like hell, it was self preservation.
One night, while wrapping her head around what she was learning about what would happen to me, that after surgery I would take a medicine so strong I would lose all my hair, May panicked before bed and in response I gave her a teacup full of stones. Earlier in the day she had picked up a geode which our friend Spencer had given her last year for Christmas and held it close to her heart saying she needed it down in her room, so when I took my grandmother’s china cup and filled it with small crystals and favourite rocks while she dried her tears and took gulping breaths, it wasn’t out of the blue. I said these come from deep in the earth, they have been made beautiful by heat and pressure, so they know about wisdom, patience, and strength. When you’re scared you can think of them, I said, and she held the cup to her heart and said “thanks so much mom that helps so much”.
In the end that’s all I have to offer you. Here is my cup full of stones.
“No energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed.” (source)
While I was recovering from surgery a wise and beloved covenmate who had joined our circle and made a huge impact and then gone quiet died by suicide.
She led grief circles that profoundly impacted all of us who got to be there with her.
She hosted from a park, because she was living in her car, because she was on the run from a bad man.
We loved her and were in awe of her and checked up on her and it wasn’t enough.
My belly is a cold cup of stones.
I found out about Terra’s death on my chemo eve, that night we talked about fear and grief and Genisis P-orridge’s invocation to Try To Altar Everything. How can we make altars to a universe that seems to act without sense or feeling for our gouging pain, our terror, or heartbreak?
The next morning I opened a package from a coven mate who goes by Granny Witch and unfolded a purple and gold quilted altar cloth, the design twisted and braided like my paths through the forest. May and I laid it across us as we watched First Aid Kit concert footage and Secret Sisters, the fat needles of chemo drugs coursed through my veins and my vision blurred and the world looked jeweled like it was made of tiny hard-edged stones all vibrating.
If we could follow an individual atom back through its history, it will have been incorporated many times into other animals and plants…
Bear in mind that you contain around 100,000 times more atoms than the number of humans that have ever existed. In fact, your atoms have been in pretty well every type of living thing, from trees to grass, insects to dogs.
We are cups full of stones, particles moving with coherence and momentum with our mythmaking for awhile, before moving on to another formation.
Physicist Aaron Freeman wrote in Eulogy from a Physicist:
all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you… scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time… your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.
For now I am here on this side of the veil and Terra is free, stones out of the cup, long hair in the leaves, her energy everywhere, particles still dancing from glancing off her face. I wish I could have known and flown to her and held her close, beautiful friend in the pixel box, shape made of light who reconfigured the world.
All I know is there are pieces of her over here, in me.
All I know is there are pieces of you over here, in me.
In all our forms, broken, sick, tired, we belong to Earth, to Terra, to every single loved one now less orderly and woven through us all atomically. No matter our parentage, we are chosen ones, perfectly designed and desired by the spiral fractal soup goddess of ferns and compost. You are exactly where you are supposed to be, I whisper through the portal, reaching with my nerves growing millimeters at a time towards the mother trees, shaking with fear and grief. I fill my pockets with stones when I go to chemo.
I tuck Terra in my heart and promise her sister I’ll keep the pieces of her she left with me safe and cherished the way she always should have been.
I’ll tuck you in my place of safe keeping too, and I know you’re out there holding me.
In Cat’s Cradle, a novel about string games and entanglement Kurt Vonnegut, who is one of our patron saints in the Missing Witches coven, wrote:
Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.
In Terra’s name, I invite you to notice with me. Reach your tender roots out to see who might need you, make it part of your craft: this weaving of care in action.
Coven, here in the dark we make between our ears, as we slip through the portal of this ending, let's whisper into possibility: ourselves as a Terra-web of Mother Trees.
So it goes.
And Blessed Fucking Be.
