I attempt to do magic

Talking to birds and becoming a witch

Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to this BBC podcast series about witches. Maybe it’s because the existential dread my therapist warned me would come after a major therapeutic breakthrough (and which she strongly suggested I think about psychedelics to deal with, part of what I love about my therapist). Maybe it’s just the beginnings of fall and the long shadow cast by Halloween.

I don’t know the exact cause, but I do know that on a walk the other day, I found myself wondering if I couldn’t just, you know, do some magic. Maybe communicate with the blue jay in the tree beside me. Convince it to fly in a certain way. Or maybe touch a flower and make it bloom. I wondered if I couldn’t, at the very least, feel some sense of communion with all the plants around me, like all that’s ever kept me from having a conversation with them is a small language barrier that I could learn to cross. It would just take some time and effort.

These flowers look sort of witchy…what might they have to say?

I found myself wondering, in other words, if I couldn’t become a witch.

Later I thought what a thin and arbitrary line between those we deem mentally healthy and those we believe have passed over into dysfunction. I was, after all, walking around believing that maybe I could talk to birds.

On the other hand, is the idea that we could talk to birds really such an implausible idea? If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that our tiny backyard is constantly in danger of being enveloped by vines. Even as I sit here writing now, I can spot at least half a dozen tendrils, reaching across the neighbor’s fence, up toward the power line that leads into our house or toward the tomatillos I’m attempting to grow in our raised beds. If I stood still for too long in our yard, I feel certain the vines would slowly wrap their leafy fingers around me, until I disappeared under a suit of morning glory or English ivy, never to be found again,

Standing in the garden the other day, looking up at a vine that was slowly bending toward the power line, my partner said, “They’re thinking, aren’t they? The vines are thinking.”

It certainly seems that way, as you watch the vines slowly stretch across space, feeling their way toward something to grab onto. Or if you study the way they curl around and around the stem of other plants. I’m not a botanist, but there’s some mechanism that allows vines to shape themselves around a surface. There’s some intelligence there and even if it doesn’t function exactly the same way as my own intelligence, surely there’s a common ground. Surely there’s a conversation to be had.

What more is magic than that? What more than that is being a witch?

If there’s anything most of the wisdom about witches from around the world has in common, it’s the idea that they have a close relationship to nature. A relationship that allows them to manipulate the natural world. Witches are witches because they can communicate with plants and black cats and cows, though the cows often don’t fare well, usually being made by witches to die unexpectedly or birth calves with no eyes or too many legs or…you get the idea.

Photo by Charlie Harutaka on Unsplash

Witches are intimate with nature. They pay attention. They know things. Where certain plants grow. What you can use them for. They know how to navigate the woods. They know what’s happening in the night sky. They know the moment when dawn is coming. They know what the wind is saying. They know how to talk to cats.

I can talk to cats. One of them is even black, which has to count for something. I talk to my cat on a daily basis. I can get her to meow and, sometimes, if she’s in the mood, to come to me when I call. I am halfway to official witch status already.

Yes, maybe this is that existential crisis my therapist warned me about. But also it seems to me each day we discover more and more of the magic that already exists in the world. Trees talk to each other through networks of fungi. Plants can remember past experiences. For thousands and thousands of years and most of our history as humans, we believed the natural world was our kin. Brother fox and sister river. Of course they had intelligence and personality and motives and their own lives. Of course we could communicate with them if we worked at it hard enough. It’s only fairly recently in human history that we stopped believing that and some groups, like indigenous peoples, never got fooled into thinking otherwise.

And witches. Witches knew. Witches never forgot. Which was a good reason to kill as many witches as possible because the destruction of nature that is a necessary part of industrialization and capitalism and colonialism is very hard when you believe a mountain or stream are also your family.

When we’re young, it’s so easy to believe in magic. Our first assumptions as children are that of course we can talk to cats and dogs and ants and flowers. We are born into wonder. Then the world closes in and convinces us that a mouse is just a mouse and, not in fact, your dearest friend. But in the beginning, we sense there’s something more.

We all start out as witches. I intend to become one again.

If you’ve been around here for a while, you might know this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about becoming a witch. That’s okay. It’s a lifelong project.

Do you, like me, spend a lot of time figuring out what to read next? Do you ever love a book and think, yes, I want to read ten more books exactly like that, only the way in which one book is exactly like that is obscure and weird? Like, yes, I want to read more atmospheric thriller set in Ireland. Or, yes, I want to read more creepy British ghost stories. Or more books set in the 16^th century that do not involve the Tudors.

If you know what I’m talking about, Shepherd is for you. It’s a website with book lists and reviews written by actual authors, people who can be trusted to have done a lot of reading. And also to know some titles you might not have thought of.

I used Shepherd this week to find books in the face of the hold crisis happening in the Indiana state library system.¹ I’ve read two out of three of the books I got from Shepherd and they’ve both been great.

Check it out, including my own entry, the best five books by women who just won’t quit.

1. It’s a whole thing where the state switched the couriers who get the books from one library to another and the new couriers sucked. As in, the books just stopped moving. Now we’ve switched back, but in the meantime, no new holds and the existing holds are in limbo. This all presented me with the challenge of finding books to read that are actually physically in our local library. Shepherd came in handy for this.