When I was 12 or 13, I walked up to my mom in our bright orangey-yellow kitchen and I said to her:

“Mama. I’m going to be a witch. It’s a real thing, it’s a religion, people actually do it, and I really hope you’ll support me.”

I was a bit terrified, honestly. I didn’t think she would take me seriously, and while we were not the most staunch of church going families, that doesn’t change that this was smack dab in the Buckle of the Bible Belt.

She responded in a way I could not have possibily imagined.

“Okay, bug. My books are over there.”

And she pointed to the shelf of books that sat in our kitchen, and when I went to look, interspersed between the cookbooks and magazines were my mothers books on Wicca, Herbalism, Folk Catholicism, and New Age Spirituality.

I felt angry at her. That she had deprived me of a childhood full of magick. But I began to realize she hadn’t; it was simply so interwoven that what I had thought was mundane was truly magick, once I had the correct perspective.

Realized the cards of hers that I loved to steal off her shelf and play with, looking at their gorgeous art, were in fact oracle and tarot cards; understood that her friend, a shopkeeper, whose store I was always keen to go to when we went into the city was, in fact, a metaphysical shop; wondered if, perhaps the almost annual girls trip she took to New Orleans was a bit more than just a “book club.”

She told me that she hadn’t brought up Wicca and Witchcraft as outright influences for the same reason we only went to church on Ash Wednesday instead of every Sunday: it was up to me to find my path, not her to place me on one.

This is not my first trial of creating magick for community.

In 2020, I stumbled into some friendships and community within the “witchstagram” sphere of the internet.

And for the first time in a long time, I actually felt connected to something I was meant to do.

As a teenage witch, I was always keen on teaching my friends about the Craft, creating little covens and doing spells for friendship and good grades, reading tarot about our relationships and watching The Craft and Practical Magic at sleepovers.

I loved to teach what I knew, and here I was presented with a community space and platform that is built on doing exactly that: talking loudly and proudly about witchcraft.

So I jumped in full force.

And I burnt myself out like a motherfucker.

I didn’t know how to be sustainable in what I was doing, I didn’t know the mundane things in my life that were about to take precedent over what my soul truly felt called to.

I no longer talk to my mother. She is not dead, but I mourn her. And I thank Persephone for her guidance in what it means to be both so close to and so separate from Mother.

I learned I have dynamic disabilities and chronic illnesses; I am still figuring out what this means, the extent of it, and how to best create sustainability for myself, but it explains a lot about the burn out I have faced in the past.

But after taking a hiatus, a katabasis, if you will, I finally felt ready to come back.

And so, I enter into anodos--Ascension from the Underworld