DISPATCHES FROM A PRACTICING WITCH No. 1 - Unnoticed Things
Unnoticed Things
I have been a witch my entire life. I don't overtly identify this moniker, but I do think of myself this way.
Not in the way that gets performed for strangers. Not in the way that requires an audience or a costume or a carefully arranged altar photographed for approval. In the way that is simply — inconveniently, quietly, persistently — true.
I noticed it early. The particular weight of certain kitchens. The way some remedies know what they're doing before you do. The letter that arrives on the exact day it was needed, from someone who couldn't have known. These are observations that I wrote down.
I looked for this in religion, the way a person looks for water when they are thirsty. What I found was bureaucracy dressed in vestments. Rules protecting the institution from the very thing it claimed to offer. Magic, in every tradition I examined, had been carefully removed from the premises. What I found was the spiritual equivalent of a waiting room, and permission granted by those who claimed to know.
The world is boring and magical without imagination. That sentence arrived fully formed one morning and I have been turning it over ever since. Because it seems impossible — how does a world that contains rain, and creatures that heal without intervention, and the precise moment before sleep, and the exact smell of a particular herb dried over a particular window — how does that world become boring?
The idea all these things can be reduced to "science" is also boring. Science does not explain the mystery. Science does not explain beauty, human connection.
We have been trained to look past the mysteries. To categorize it, explain it, contain it in acceptable language, and move on. Magic is what happens when you refuse to move on. When you stand in the kitchen at seven in the morning with a cup of brew and a dash of hope.
I spent years believing that good work done honestly would find its way through. That if you made something real and put it into the world with care, the world would receive it with equivalent care. What I found instead was that the people in positions to move things along have, almost without exception, confused power with purpose. Goodness is not rewarded by systems. It is absorbed, thwarted and destroyed.
What I kept coming back to, through all of it, was smaller than any institution.
A letter. A recipe written in someone's particular handwriting. An herb identified and pressed and passed along with a note about what it knows. The things made by hand and sent by post. The transmissions between people who recognize each other without introduction.
This is where magic lives, I have decided. It is not a grand ceremony. Not in the approved and censored post. On a regular and normal morning. The correspondence that arrives one day to cheer me up or cause me to smile. When I'm feeling off, I ask myself "who can I send a note to?"
I have been practicing this way for a long time. Quietly, from what I call the Lost City — which is my home, and my kitchen, and the place where things are made before they go out into the world. This Lost City exists in a realm nestled next to the obvious, but hidden.
I am writing this because something is shifting. Because I MUST have a moment of hope. If I need this, I suppose you might too.
I am not ready to say what yet. But I have been making things by hand, as I always have, and some of those things are about to leave the Lost City in a new way.
If you have read this far, you probably already know why. You have been looking for the same thing I have, in the same wrong places, for approximately the same amount of time.
Stay close.
Something is on its way.
— Bee Head Soap Witch The Lost City