MW Rx. We're Walking With Ghosts

This week we're walking with the ghosts of our former selves, our stressed-out selves, our loving ancestor selves. We're juggling all the selves and all the projects and we're preparing to take a breaaaaaak.

Amy is headed off to Scotland to sit in pubs with family and stand in circle with ancient stones. She prescribes the song Come Together by the Scottish band Primal Scream. This song has become the unofficial anthem of our annual Reparations Fundraiser, but this time it's offered as an invitation to find our balanced freedom, find ways to connect.

I'm Free
You're Free
I want you to touch me.

Risa is back from one folk festival (Mariposa) and heading off to the next (Hillside) to support her spouse's artisan dream world and to follow their 4-year-old as she absorbs and processes the beautiful community mayhem of Canadian Folk Festival living.

And maybe it's because her birthday is coming up, but at night in the tent at Mariposa, Risa was visited by a ghost of her former self as the song "Walking With a Ghost" floated over the lake from the main stage.

So this is the prescription — and you can take it in Tegan and Sara's original version or in the White Stripes cover — but it's to come into right relation with the ghosts we're walking with. We can push them out of mind, beg them not to insist, keep our sanity protected, but at some point, we also need to feed and forgive them.

Risa's second track for the prescription is I've Got Me by Joanna Sternberg. Joanna — multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, heart-wrenching crafter of song, non-binary, Jewish, New Yorker, person with autism — channels the exhilarating, torturous ambivalence of being with ourselves. I've Got Me is a song that is somehow both uplifting, anthemic, comforting, and also devastatingly honest about the torment of anxiety and self-doubt that comes with being alive and not a sociopath.

I've got me in the morning
I've got me in the evening
I'll let you be because
I've got me

And all my faults and flaws and lies
Are no one's fault but mine
Between self-hatred and self-awareness
Is a very small, thin line
I can't stop my worry, and my fury
Of all that I've done wrong
I waste so much time I mean it
So much time

I've got me in the morning
I've got me in the evening
I'll let you be because
I've got me

We hope whatever your faults and flaws and lies, you know that you got you. Be your own best friend right now. Be your own wise, wild-haired Witch auntie. We hope you are loving yourself through the highs and lows, and being tender with your shadows. We hope that every time a past version of yourself makes you wince, a future version of you is also there, delighting in your vibrant, glorious, utterly, unique mess. Offering you the patience of a hundred thousand parents up late with their summer-wild, over-tired kids. Reveling in your aliveness.

Speaking of summer wild and over tired! We'll be on a break for the next two weeks, and we'll be taking August at a relatively mellow rate (though we'll have special eps of the Rx.) as we gear up for the release of our second book.  But know that we'll be ghost-walking with you in the meantime, and we'll see you on the other side. 🌈❤️🔥