This Witch's Work

We learn to speak with knives, hidden on our tongues. Learn to spit poison between our teeth. Learn to like the taste of blood, rusty red running down our chins.  The world taught us there was only one way, one path, one voice. But witches are the ones who know how to walk many paths at once. We know there are paths upon paths. We contain multitudes. We know there are voices (named and unnamed) in the trees, on the breeze, in the ocean spray and deep waves, in the campfire and candle, in the hidden depths of the earth. We seek these voices and name the faces that we find around us. We are infinite in variety. Made of the same atoms, molecules, and chemicals as the stars. We are more similar than we are different. A few changes in combinations.  You could be the forest, or the fire. Change is constant, ever moving. But the cycle doesn’t. The wheel keeps turning. Birth, life, death. Maiden, mother, crone.

My mother is a great believer in the power of names.  She and my father, though devout Christians, are Hippies that never grew up.  A cousin told them that at a funeral, and they were delighted.  My family used the cloak of their youthful beliefs to filter through some fey practices and customs that Southern Oklahoma Christianity was unprepared to accept.  There was a tarot deck hidden in a desk drawer that I was never allowed to touch.  My father refuses to wear shirts of a certain color, green, because he has a bad feeling about them.  My grandmother, his mother, came from people who lived in camps, played the fiddle every night, and never stopped traveling.   My mother believes in the power of names for her children.  She had several books, from the popular culture of the late 1980s.  She named my brother for both of his grandfathers, a Manly Thresher.  For me, they decided they didn’t need to honor any ancestors.  Daughters aren’t important for carrying on family names after a