Risa here from Missing Witches, writing from the quiet heart of another shattering week. My filters have been gradually burned and cut away, and I find I have to write about all of it, so consider yourselves warned, and welcome aboard!
After my first week of chemotherapy I was starting to feel strong and good, the lake was cold but the air was hot and I was going for these big long swims, trying to tread water for longer and longer stretches inspired by Tig Notaro talking about her 45 minute sessions on our second favourite podcast, The Handsome Pod. And because Tig is a Swifty too I'll admit that I'd been bringing my little speaker down to the lakeside and swimming for the length of Midnights because it's not muscle tiredness that eventually kicks me out of the water, it's mind wandering, and singing "you're all alone kid, and you can face this" helps. So does "What if I'm a Mastermind?" But all this to say, I was feeling so good, I was drawing big strength into my body from the changing leaves, from the bowl of blue sky, from the hundred-foot-deep lake. I had developed this useful/delusional idea that chemo was going to be these successive journeys through the underworld of poisoned body and mind but that I was going to come back stronger each time. I called Amy and said: "never in my life have I explicitly aimed to get strong. What if instead of this breaking me, which has seemed like an option, what if I come out strong?"
And then I started to feel bad. And then I spent a night curled around myself, ice packs on my back, moaning. I went to the emergency room in the morning, after getting May to school, and found out I had appendicitis. One more surgery later and I'm back in the Witch room, the office, the recovery room where I healed from my mastectomy and sweated out round one of chemo.
I am back with you in the sick body, the "I had hope but now I feel like shit again" body. The "I briefly forgot how close we are to death at all times but now I remember" body. To drive the point home, my hair has begun to fall out in clumps. I am back in the ranks of those who live in these waves all the time. Thank you for the tenderness with which you welcome us back, every time we charm ourselves into believing we've escaped the long drawing tides of time. We are all disabled eventually. We build elaborate monuments to our invincibility and then the strongman gets sucker punched again, inevitably.
I am angry and sad and it's tempting to feel the world is cursed and my body in particular is cursed these days. I am feeling futile, stuck in bed and raging at the way greedy immoral power hunts us again: women's voices made illegal, women systematically disenfranchised, all these cruel snares. The growing darkness, the leaves dying all around me till it feels like an omen.
But I reject the idea of curses. I reject uses of magical tools and magical thinking that are bad for my mental health or that diminish my power. I remember our wise friend Julie from The Seasonal Body talking about how they use astrology cautiously, saying that when it begins to feel like they can't make choices about their life without consulting the stars, or when a reading adds fear or anxiety or compulsion to their life then that is NOT magical or useful for them and it needs to be put aside. This idea put a strong root in the center of my own ritual and thought:
These practices have the power I give them, and when I do give them power, they give me power in return. This craft is not religion, it is the resounding exercise of will.
So this is the prescription for me this week: use tarot, astrology, herbalism, free writing, chanting, runes, howling at the moon, whatever calls to you and feels rooted in your ancestors (familial or cultural) as long as it supports your mental health, and gives you strong branches to climb on. Leave aside what does not serve you.
Like Agatha Harkness in Agatha All Along (my TV Rx. for the week, though there are only two episodes so far they are swoon) we are clawing ourselves out of layers of delusion to remember who we really are, death and all. And when we remember, we will find each other, and we'll walk that long dark road together, and also all alone. We always have been, and we can face this.
Blessed Fucking Be.
The Season Begins
Sunday, Sept 22, on the Equinox, our annual Fall Season of our podcast begins with a special conversation between Missing Witches' Amy Torok and her guests Maria Minnis author of Tarot for the Hard Work, and Lane Smith author of 78 Acts of Liberation.
Together they complicate the cards and expand on the meaning of Tarot, they discuss Freeing Minds, Freeing Bodies, community, activism, the anxiety of 'getting it right', and the scared responsibility of being part of an interconnected web.
Monday, Sept 23, I begin a miniature Cancer season of the podcast, episodes that are part memoirs of these strange days, and part sharing the rituals, elements, and fellow cancer witches who have been with me all along. Part 1 starts with the Water, and follows Audre Lorde.
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Love you, thank you for being here.
BFB
Risa + Amy
PS. Any killer ideas for merch???
