Witchcraft

I started practicing witchcraft almost immediately after I left my husband. Daily and nightly tarot pulls, protective herbs, burning and spells. In these desperate attempts to create safety, I see myself refusing the illusion of my isolation. I see my desire to enter into relationship with the world around me, a growing awareness of the animism of it all, the mothering, present energy pressing close to my skin. As I felt into my discontent, my freedom, and the glaring rupture in my life, I opened myself to new intimacies.

The first night my girlfriend slept over she curled her body all the way around mine, hand at my heart, stomach to my back, leg thrown over my leg, like a pokeball protecting a soft, happy animal-creature. She’s an insomniac, but she stays in bed with me so our bodies can be tangled up together.

When one of us turns in the night, we find the other again, the mismatch of limbs and heartbeats and breath imperative to intertwine. This floating, liminal delight is a reminder of the ways I’m expanding my capacity to be loved, to be cherished, to sink into another’s softness. The shared womb space of our entwined bodies creates its own pulse: gentle energy floating along the skin, the feeling of holding and being held.

In this relatedness, I find the relationality of magic, how full it is of intimacy and surrender and co-existence. It is the process of acknowledging the web, where all things connect and entwine, a reminder that possible collaborators are trees, wind, spirit, the dead, our friends and lovers. The space where we curl our body around another and drift into and out of sleep. This is sacred work.

In the alienation of my life, it was this that was lost, the strains of connection that my practice of witchcraft brings into sharp focus. The fragile dependence of all life. This dance between us and our world is gentle and ferocious.

Witchcraft reminds me as I engage intimately with the energies around me, that we only emerge through inter-dependence. There is no “me” without a prior two in one, a shared body, the formation of matter in blood and water, a mystic non-definitional space.

It is this space I find in my practice of witchcraft, my meditation, my communion, my queerness. It is this space that gifts me my own becoming.