Forging Relationship-Becoming Lighting.
You will fall. It’s going to happen; I cannot make this comfortable for you. It will see you undone and messy, the world you hold as a solid concept will test you in ways that, from a distance, seem acceptable - nonetheless, remind you when in proximity that the human nature of connection will speak to the rising witch fire that stirs beneath. Like a caged wolf, that which you avoid will rise to hunt you.
And you will find a love that is so unshakable, so soul-singing, that no feeble ounce of pain will shake it from your being. So strong in fact, that it will follow you through lifetimes and incarnations, to serenade your souls again and again. It will whisper infallible truths, dare grander connections and feed the fonts of enamouring desire, to guide you. It will be so beautiful that even when you have forgotten your way, it will shake your fortress of normalcy and serve you to the maw of your greatest dreams.
Close your eyes, picture this - no, feel this:
The waves strike the stones beneath. The roar of the open ocean moves like a hungry beast snarling at the bottom of the cliff. It rushes the stoney shore, eating away at the slate painted black by the shimmering wet of salt and brine. Barnacles that latch on to the stones like razors, capture the moonlight and reflect it back as if to compete with the dark depths beneath. The great sea cloaks and stirs about you, two mighty jaws locked in a kiss. A sound astranged from the common expectation of the surrounding nature, is heard caught in the wind, notable only by the careful and curious. Easily missed except to those who are sensitive enough to the wyrd flutter of magick that dusts the landscape. The hum of a strange and wyrd melody dominates this open stadium of land to sea, kept by the spirits that watch on. The darkness, like a thick, clouded blanket that seems to fill every crevice of wind-swept coastal rosemary and warped banksia. As if a shawl on the peak where the witch is kneeling. The Witch is seen swaying in a way that tells a story of their many journeys to this place, their church of land, sky and sea.
Open your eyes, do you remember?
Often, when asked what it feels like to be a witch, I explain that my circumstances may not be considered common, even amongst witches. We can, however, be assured of similarities, as is our nature. We can also be assured that much like how an animal in its habitat varies on region, origin and therefore approach, the Witch is woven to the next by a hidden creed of legacy.
I am simultaneously woven into the world of flesh and bone and yet so completely alien to it. Even my physicality borders as a crossroads. Perhaps this is because I had to run a great distance to learn how to return home again, to turn around as all of myself. It feels as though I am an ocean, and I am working to fit it through a straw that fights to be animated. All of this is expressed in a world of warped contexts and constraints, not befitting of something so wild. Or perhaps as though the werewolf in a constant weave of fur and flesh, of something other breaking the bones of one to be remoulded into something in between. Something animal, spirit and human.
In this, I know that there is beauty and ecstasy in the relationships I am blessed with, and also, there is a stark contrast in the way in which those looking in may perceive. The outsider may see me as an abomination, something too strange to connect to, too old and ancient to understand. Then, for me, whether it's the wolf looking through my human face or the human through my wolf-eyes, I see only bridges. Some burning, some forming, as if new sinew bonds to suture the wound of confusion, whilst others are seared to stop the infection. The mirror is refracted like a kaleidoscope.
Its all alive, all of it. Every stone, every mountain. The world is never small, never subtle. I feel viscerally, relate deeply, and so I am affected more vividly by these ways of being. It can be overwhelming. Often, it is this aspect of seemingly contrasting realities, living as though woven into the same cloth of my being. It is these things I know are not so different from other witches, I have come to learn.
I note the friction in the stare or snark comment of the passerby, as it reflects the horrific abuse demonstrated by the ignorant, on a much larger scale. I see dual views of the greatest beauty, stirring underneath the stockpiled hideousness of the gnarled grin of fear, as yet again the fearful, despite the truth of love, continue to choose to absolve their basic humanity. All to survive against the latest lie. A lie bred by misinformation and arrogant indecency. A lie is born as a child of hypocrisy.
Wether its the witch that holds the tension of life and death and works the wyrd to re-assemble the balances, to live through or meet with grace, the terrible fate of death, to become the bridge of hope in the resurrection of romance, to bring peace between confused parties, or to be the midwife who offers herbs to the mother as she does the hardest job of all. The witch is born into this great tension, and so of it. Sometimes they are the centre of it, and so must learn fairly early on to establish a relationship to the often risky path of riding this current of existence—this uninformed and unstructured, hidden way of living. One minute we are learning to walk, only to crawl again.
Witches often exist at the apex of tension, and therefore on the outskirts of vision. We live in the face of assimilation, offering services to those with coin, and especially those without. So, with us, we carry a kind of energy, as if painted in watercolour, while those we encounter next to us are living monochromatic fantasies. An energy that can capture the eye of the fearful, simply by the uncomfortable nature of the fact we exist. It’s as if we are living threads of lightning, emitting charged currents of Godds, and so it is often that we become unsettling for some. We exist as an affirmation of the most strange, and so only in someone’s moment of great pain or desperation can we be approached. Sometimes, the seeker must be in a state of feeling so loudly that the contrast of our existence is less, so only then can they tell us their stories and feel the kind stare of the witch. We exist as affirmations of the strange, and we call those who dare wander too close to seek their own grand depths. The witch is an uncomfortable truth, never still. Even in the peaceful slumber or quiet meditation, the witch is in communion, a dance as a lifelong offering, constantly drawing with them a cacophony of histories, stories and people. We are living libraries of relationships. Those lips we kissed and that breath we shared are still alive with us now. A free pour of longing that drew us to make a haunting approach of courage and surrender atop stones as we reach out and hear the sweet nothings of the godds and the spirits in their consort. All this as we draw forces of power and weave them deeply into the fabric of life and death, that seeds of such acts become a forest to guide forth those who should dare such feats.
The witch is in constant relationship with all things, an adept one consciously so. We tenderly and wildly coil as the serpent in the sun and become as one with the shadows betwixt stone and bark. Relationship is the true forge fire of the spirit, and the witch cannot be whole and avoid such realities for long. Nonetheless, because we are uncomfortable truth’s, we are often the first witnesses to cruelty. We are initiated again and again by the very forces that storm the stars to being and undoing. We are conspirators of spirits, and so we are coloured by them. The other, the wyrd, the ineffable web that is in all things, also makes way for what is born out of the varied truths and their meeting, at the convergence of the seemingly at odds, so we become living houses for our spirits, places where these new potentials, these waking spirits can find home and kin. From these unions comes a new story and so on. The witch is completely enwreathed by these stories. So we become the altar on which they fuck and give birth. We stand as an assault on that which demands obedience and unquestioned subservience.
The witch is an altar, a temple and often the tree under which people will gather, seek wisdom, share secrets and reflect. And a witch as we reflect and weave such change, sink into a state of becoming. Witches are evidence of Gods becoming gods. We are a part in such legacies and stories. We exceed boundaries of flesh, and dangerously embrace them. Not because we simply will to but also because we must.
This is what it means to a witch to be constantly broken down, returned as atoms in a particle of dust, only to choose again and again a deeper truth.
Come now, go deeper! The truth is, we are a subtle defiance, not simply because we want to shake the cage that binds and set out to do so, but because we must. We are the trembling hand that accepts the fire of the Promethean prophecy, because we must. Gathering on mountain tops to meet with angels and consummate our irrefutable divine tension of love, because we must.
What is it to be in a storm of transmutation, to wilfully tend the blade of the spine on fire? To be as lightning, shattering stone and soil or singing open longing of the marriage of blood and stars?
Witches are not separate because we are unmade, we are separate because somehow, somewhere along the path we stopped being subject to effect and began to explore our agency in love, because we must. Somehow, we dared fate to test us. Somehow we chose the full heart of fate and said in union with the most sacred “I love you too”. We are fate choosing itself, we are fate weaving threads of Hir wisdom, through pain, through ecstasy, as though quill nibs of desire dipped in the ink of truth.
Close your eyes feel this:
…And as the witch’s song gathers in the nighttime spray, a nearby bird spies a crustacean on the shore below, A creek of straining wood and clattering branch of the banksia. The witch nods to the bird as though an old friend, as though something in the bird’s silent dance is a response to their call, as though it were finishing the song that had been shared.
The witch gathers their stang, a long, forked branch of driftwood. An old wine-soaked cloth lay before them as they begin to collect the strange book that lay open to a page nearby, and an odd rattle made of dried root and bones.
Open your eyes, do you remember?
- Photography by, Issac Struna
As a young kid, I would explore poetry. Not in any typical way, and certainly not in any academic farce. I explored it out of need. Words seemed problematic, overtly complicated often misunderstood. I’d live by the inner phrase of feelings are more important than words because they are true. I'd lose faith in my ability to say what I was feeling, seeing, misunderstanding, often. I found more freedom and fascination in the cicada singing the sun to sleep, in how they would shed their skin. I would marvel at the way they would feel like tiny humming words when they would rest in my palms, vibrating their songs of legacy. I was fascinated at the stories they must live, imagine they were living in great cities, worlds beyond my own, these possibilities were no stranger to my perception. I could look at the moon on a cold, cloudy night and see strange cities in the glow. I would scry the dark that hugged the pine trees that seemed to border this great tree in the front yard not far from the old living room window, spiders acting as ward, hiding in the hyacinths.
The shadows of my dreams played backdrop to a technicolour mass of forests that grew below and above as though the trees had no concern for rules or any gravity, as though the mountains that they anchored were as outside as they were in. I would fly through kaleidoscope caves and fall into the darkest waters with ease. In my waking moments, I would battle with spirits, fend off large anomalous creatures. My pain would be so loud that I would be cast into other worlds and sucked back into this betraying body again. Filled with fragility, fear, pain and a loss of control, I lost faith in my body, in my mind and in concepts of reality, because I had read between the pages and the song between the unsaid. But to me it was…normal.
It wasn’t all darkness. I’d also find awe in the way it rained in my birth town. Where the tall trees seemed to claw at the clouds, digging earnestly for more lightning, they would talk to the wind and whisper in relief as the cold rain would fall in pelting mists in answer to their plea. I knew secrets of the rain. I knew if I lay on the long grass and looked up, with breath I could feel - if I allowed myself, how the land breathed and raised me up to the sky. That strange sensation of falling and flying could be found again. I would chase these discoveries and seek to master the art of flight, learn how to activate it like a switch instead of the hunger, the desire and need through hope alone. I’d learn that a witch flight doesn’t need a Superman cape, it needs a kind of freedom. A freedom that the world is terrified of.
I would also lose moments of time and log others as though I were a sponge-like library, a mushroom drinking in the moss, the damp air. I was hungry to master a sense of control, to find my way through the complicated world around me. To ground my mind in some sense of reality. It was all haunted teddy bears, fear, pain and flying. I was a haunted child, and I was lost. All I wanted was to go to that forest in my dreams, where I was free, where everything felt safe. Where up was down and down was up.
In other words, I was fated to experience things differently; I was fated to meet the challenge of embodiment. I learned that life was fragile, and because I opened my emotional senses even wider to get some centring in nature, to allow a little more ocean through a little more straw, I became extremely sensitive. It was at the age of seventeen that I learned I would either be an unpaid musician or….
I’d become something other, I'd become something like lightning, a tear in the sky of not only my own world, but also those around me, a new sense of land and sky and sea. I’d become the cicada, shedding old skins to dry in the sun as I take flight in the summer night, and I'd share myself in song with the world. All in my palms, and either way, I'd have to learn to know the power of words that could not be spoken, to be okay with the ineffable.
So what does this mean for you? Hopefully, it’s a reminder of your choices, a refresher of your oaths, and hopefully, by feeling into these words, you may have uncovered the parts that reflect your own. Witchcraft isn’t just promises; it’s embodiment, and believe me when I say, I get it. I get that this is hard; it will be so because I’d hazard a guess that, like me, somewhere inside yourself is the sense of that ocean fitting into a straw. Somewhere in you is a storm that is brewing. Whether you are a Witch or someone who walks alongside us, what does the thunder inside you evoke, on the altar of yourself, what is it that enables you to choose it again and again? What is it that moves you into agency and surrender?
The reality is that unless we are willing to feel, speak, shake and break, we will always feel at a loss. The witch and the human are two sides of a divine coin. Ask yourself, where is the bridge that connects us?
It isn’t about control anymore, it is about Integrity. When your souls have dipped into the fires of integrity and annealed to its truth, what will be your legacy, your story?
Next instalment: Surrender and Stand - The Bridge on Fire.
”What will you take with you? For me, it was hidden. How we find it, is the dance of masks we often are too afraid to face. To choose this, we must be like the villager in need, and approach the witch in the cave of our heart and traverse the darkness of the woods, to face the uncomfortable truth.”