Witches Heal

WITCHES HEAL Curated by Jenna Lee Forde

Cover image by Lisa East

WITCHES HEAL This zine aims to document the more than human connections we have to plants and animals and our various relationship to chronic sickness, healing, disability, crip time, and surviving.

Curated by Jenna Lee Forde

WITCHES HEAL “Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright. “ - Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English We use ritual, ceremony, astrology, tattoos, art and herbs as apart of our witchy process to heal, transform and care for ourselves and the lives we choose to make together. These non-normative practices and rituals help us manifest not only our magic, but our chosen family, our covens and our queer-weirdos who help foster our commitment to the sensory capacities within ourselves. Moving towards magic means opening up these portals of presence in order to generate resources for creation and intention. As WITCHES WHO HEAL we gather a pathway to healing through change and renewal. Witchcraft weaves its way through our ordinary days, lighting our intentions for art, radical politics and community healing.

We are interested in breaking down the gender binary, smashing the patriarchy, dismantling white supremacy, and cripping ableism in order to bring power to WITCHES WHO HEAL. As WITCHES WHO HEAL we use spells to draws us to and from a place where we survive and manifest our own collaborations and healing practices. We centre our practices for healing, but we know healing is not a linear process. This is a call to all of us thinking about the concept of the witch, how we take up magic in our everyday and how we use concepts of witchy-ness to heal, survive and mark our movement through time. This zine is interested in the queer, qpoc, and feminist art that heals and soothes you. We think about magic as serendipitous, radical world-making and non-normative. This zine is about community creation, covens, intentions and spells, herbs, and non-normative ceremonies.These are our spells to bind against the rich, ableist, heterosexist, white supremacist patriarchy

Context and history are key: “What has not been recognized is that the witch-hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life. The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction.” - Silvia Federici, Caliban and The Witch “It is perhaps not surprising, then, that 19th- and 20th-century women’s liberation movements turned to the history of witch burnings to express the continuing plight of women living within the patriarchy. Witches were a symbol of the suppression of female power and the female body. The early suffragist Matilda Gage published Woman, Church, and State in 1893, tracing female persecution through the witchcraze. Later on in the 1960s, the American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) drew on wiccan practices for political stunts, dressing up as witches and hexing Wall Street. - Izabella Scott Revisionist feminist histories of witch burnings emerged across the 1970s, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s contentious theory that witches were in fact female healers eliminated by the medical establishment. More recently, the Italian feminist Silvia Federici has examined the connection between capitalism and the disciplining of the female body in her work Caliban and the Witch (2004).

"Witches Heal" is Inspired by a feminist herbalism book ( of the same name ) written by Billie Potts.

Edited by: Jenna Lee Forde

contents Jamie Ross

-1

Susan Clarahan

-5

Heidi Cho

-9

Kyla Jamieson

- 12

Clementine Morrigan

- 15

Jamie Ross

- 19

MONICA BODIRSKY

- 27

JESS MILLER

- 33

still f rom XII (2018), HD video photography by Kristen Brown

Jamie Ross

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WITCHES HEAL

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Susan Clarahan

SOLAR ECLIPSE

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This series of photographs builds a world in images that coalesces nature and bodies in a feminine exploration of sexuality, landscape, and ritual under f rozen tree-lines and shimmering sunlight.

Clad in sparkling, hand-stitched garments and furs, performers engage in intimacies and invocations as they connect bodily with the wild landscape and each other.

We are invited into moments unfolding off camera.

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Heidi Cho

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Kyla Jamieson

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MY LIFE IS AN INACCESSIBLE EVENT i tell myself about my days and dreams don’t rsvp to anything i could disappear or have already

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NOTE TO SELF I promise to care for you to support you to listen to you to respect you to prioritize you to love you to be gentle with you I promise

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Being good will never solve the p roblem because th e problem that I am b is not ad

Clementine Morrigan 15

Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad The house isn’t safe. The incest, subtle, implied, threatened and actual, is not safe.

The sexual abuse that I grew up with that turned my body into terror, is not safe.

The wilderness is safe, the trees upon trees, the endless forest, the animals that move through darkness. The night is safe.

Popular representations of witchcraft, possessions, and exorcisms are tied up with scripts of incest and sexual abuse. Feminine bodies are positioned as inherently sexual, dangerous and out of control. Literal conduits of evil. Have you ever wondered why the majority of exorcism movies are about young, teenage girls who are at the age of puberty? These are scripts about feminine sexuality as inherently disordered, as inherently ‘asking for it’. These are male fantasies, locating sexual violence in the victim’s bodies, locating the source of violence in the ‘devil’, the ‘witch’.

Stories about ‘evil witches’ which present feminine sexualities, feminine bodies, feminine aging, nature, wilderness and animals as the source and cause of evil, as the threat to the safety of the home, the family, turn reality on its head. I have wandered naked in the wilderness, under the moonlight, and I was absolutely safe there. Where it wasn’t safe to be naked, where it wasn’t safe at all, was the home.

My home, my family was the source of violence. Not my body, not my sexuality, not the forest, not the night.

WITCHES HEAL

Calling myself a witch is about more than naming my spirituality, my affinity with more-than-human worlds, my connection with the living universe, it is a political act, a political naming. Calling myself a witch is aligning myself with the forest, with the feminine, with my body, with the night. Calling myself a witch is declaring that I do not believe the misogynist propaganda about witches that has been used to justify violence for hundreds of years. Calling myself a witch is an act of resistance against sexual abuse and incest. It is survival.

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I lay in my bed, next to my partner, triggered beyond belief, pain ripping through my body. I feel utterly alone in the universe. My voice, the detached voice of dissociation, is caught up in compulsive telling. I am trying to tell my partner what it feels like to be an incest survivor, what it feels like to have lived a lifetime of sexual violence. The pain is crushing, overwhelming, the work of telling, futile, because I know it cannot be told.

I am staring out my bedroom window at the night sky and I see a quick flash of blackness. This movement stirs me and I look with curiosity, not knowing what I’ve seen. It happens again, and again, and I realize I am seeing a bat. When I recognize this bat, all the tension in my body suddenly melts away. I have never seen a bat out my bedroom window before, and tonight, as I struggle to tell the story of incest, to bear witness to the obliterating pain in my body, the bat appears. I know, as a witch, that this bat appeared for me. This bat came to me, as foxes and raccoons and loons have done, to show me that I am not alone. I am here, I am seen, I am known.

As a child I would leave the house of incest and go into the night and wrap my arms around the trunk of a tree. Nonhuman beings and I have always had a spiritual understanding, a strong solidarity. I know that I cannot protect the bat and the bat cannot protect me, but we see each other, we know each other, we are in this together. The bat is a being, a part of this connected, living universe, and the bat has come to me to show me that I am too. No matter what, regardless of the sickening violence, the violations, the narratives which cover over the truth, the fact that no one can see, the bat knows, and I know, and we are in this together.

With the bat, comes calm. Far from being evil, the bat, like my body, is good. I suddenly realize how deeply I have internalized the message that I am inherently bad, inherently disordered, inherently wrong. I suddenly see how I have lost touch with night, how I have ingested the lie which turns reality on its head. I have located the violence within me. I have worked hard and long to redeem myself, to exorcise myself, to become ‘good’. Suddenly the words form in my mind: Being good will never solve the problem because the problem is not that I am bad. The problem in not the bat, the witch, the wilderness, the night, the forest, the feminine, my body, my being.

The problem is incest, sexual violence, and a culture that sustains these things.

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Being a witch is my safety, my power, my refusal. Witchcraft is my communion with so many other beings, it is my relationship, my solidarity, my connection with a universe that loves me. The wilderness is safe, the trees upon trees, the endless forest, the animals that move through darkness. The night is safe.

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The Assless Chaplain : A Faerie Witch in Prison

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Jamie Ross

WITCHES HEAL

I invoke the following words of my queer faggot witch ancestors to help guide my actions and words in flaming right ways.

His words call me to action and keep me to my call, may they remind me how radically we can change this world. So mote it be!

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On an abandoned pier on the river of filth the dykalets and the faggatinas enact the saga of the faggot who was publicly tried, imprisoned and finally exiled for being too amusing. The players’ strut aristocratically delivering ironic, witty insults to the men as the crowd laughs and applauds. But the men are not amused. One of their empires is falling and they do not find it a time to laugh in public. So the men organize to destroy the faggot who dares to make fun of them. Just as they are about to banish the faggot from their land, the sirens of the men’s goons are heard. The crowd throws money to the players and runs like hell. The players catch the money and quickly take out beach towels and sun lotion becoming week-end tourists trying to find some sunlight coming through the dirty sky.

Larry Mitchell, Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977

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I remember hearing about Erik the Red in high school. You know, the Icelandic guy. Erik Thorvaldson! his wife took to the new religion, even commissioning Greenland’s first church, But Erik really disliked Christianity. He hated Jesus! He stuck to the old Norse gods. And because of that, his wife withheld sex from him.

It was in school that I first heard about the Vikings.

We were studying the Vikings and there was a poster of Erik with his big red beard. I remember hearing the names of Odin, Freya, Loki for the first time there. I remember it so crystal clear, hearing their names. It’s crazy but that day, my whole body was tingling I knew it was something to pay attention to. One of the few things to pay attention to in high school [laughs]

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You ever been to that mountain?

It’s totally different, bro. Kind of like the ​Mont-Royal I used to get up there hiking by myself.

There’s an energy - ​il y a une énergie là-bas - au sommet, là - qui donne l’impression que tu flottes sur la terre, suspendu.

Hard to describe.

She had ovarian cancer.

I took a photo of her onto the mountain. Like, my intution urging me to go somewhere.

I made my channel with this huge tree with a hollow in its trunk.

I put the photo into the hollow.

Un soir en automne je suis y allé – pleine lune.

Je prenais le char pour un drive de temps en temps juste pour respirer. À Montréal, juste avant que j’ai mis mes pieds dans le piège, j’étais tout magané.

Pis, je me retrouvais à la montagne. Le sommet est à une heure à pied.

Pis, là, un brouillard est déscendu, mais complètement. Je voyais pu rien.

Il y a eu un vent fou qui est descendu.

Par terre, toute les feuilles mortes, toutes mouillées, e’ dansaient. Je voyais pu rien.

J’étais complètement perdu, j’voyais pas le chemin. J’voyais même pas un mètre devant moi.

Mais, quand même, j’avais pas peur. Mon corps était on fire.

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But I knew I needed to get back down.

When I left that place I looked up and there were eagles flying above my head, man! Maybe 15 – 20. [astonished laughter] Fifteen eagles.

Two months later I saw her again at the restaurant she worked at. Her doctors had no idea how her tumors had disappeared.

I used to go there all the time, actually . . .

WITCHES HEAL

I stepped outside my choir practice to take a call one winter evening a few years ago - one that would end up subtly changing my life. On the phone, a friend of friends, a witch on the West Coast explained she was looking for a someone to take on something she had been tasked with - providing service to Pagans in prison in Quebec. She wanted to know how long I had been organizing in the Pagan community.

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To my surprise, she explained that she had been doing chaplaincy work, employed by the prisons to provide her religious care to people inside, for over 15 years. In the Pacific region, her circles were attended by hundreds of people and the prison administrations were often supportive of her spiritual care and support.

Yet no one had ever been able to visit witches in Quebec. I was to learn it was the last region in Canada still barring us from visiting our Pagan kin. Mine was the last provincial region where people inside were forced to practice all religions in a churches – some had life-sized sculptures of crucifixion scenes. Libraries were empty of literature on Earth-Based Traditions. People were not allowed to officially identify as Pagans unless the Christian priest decided they could prove they were Pagan enough. Individuals’ personal books were being stolen. Cookies were being given out as rewards for attending Christian rituals. Personal altars in cells were being destroyed. She warned me it would not be easy.

I accepted. What the Pagans in Quebec federal prisons needed was someone in my province patient enough with bureaucracy to begin visiting and to create a precedent. One of my main jobs was to approach the Christians in charge of chaplaincy to respect the human rights of Pagans inside. And so that’s how I ended up acting as the chaplain charged with supporting of the spiritual needs of incarcerated pagans in Quebec from Spring Equinox 2015 until Beltane 2018.

As a Radical Faerie, as a queer witch and whose practice is deeply informed by Reclaiming, above all the emphasis on social justice, it is important to situate myself in relation to prison abolition. As an abolitionist, it has been difficult to cooperate with the bureaucracy and leadership that manages the oppression of my incarcerated community members. I was as humbled to be one of the few people who is permitted by the Canadian state to access those “correctional” spaces to care for the person being held in solitary confinement as I was fascinated to witness the guards and administrators begin to understand their respon-

sibility to provide these people with the care of their religious advisor – a role so steeped in the nature and history of the prison itself.

The notion of state-sanctioned witchcraft-as-religion fascinates me, and the implications of witchcraft demanding space in institutions such as the justice industry and mainstream healthcare led me down a long self-directed study on the origins of the penitentiary in the British colonies of Turtle Island. The first modern prison was born out of the practice of keeping prisoners in dungeons where torture was the prime mode of justice. The penitentiary, it was thought, would induce the Christian value of penitence (feeling repentance, guilt, regret, shame, contrition or remorse for one’s crimes). The first penitentiaries in Canada built in the 1830s were places where people worked and then sat in silence for excruciatingly long periods of time each day1. The religious professional has always been primordial. There is no prison without the priest.

In Canada, prison policy has recognized minority religious rights to some extents for over a decade, however the political will to fund or implement this policy has been less than exemplary. In 2012, Correctional Service Canada during Stephen Harper’s mandate fired all non-Christian chaplains.

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To insert myself into the place of deep injustice is to walk into shadow and to hold the course.

After the first two years, I was deeply torn: I wanted to represent the needs and advocate for the rights of the people I was visiting. But on the other hand, the more effective I was at playing the institutional game and not rocking the boat, the more I was invited to visit, to listen to, to practice divination with and do energy work with people behind bars. I had reluctantly accepted that Christians didn’t want to let me lead big group rituals.

They brought me in to do individualized visits where chanting or ritual would disturb others in visitation. They would only allow certain books into the libraries and I was not paid for a single of the hundreds of hours of work that was needed of me. But eventually, I was asked to visit twice a month, regularly. This felt like a victory. I was volunteering significant amounts of time a month.

I had gotten my driver’s license to better carry this work out.

WITCHES HEAL

Then the depression started. My shielding had become weaker. I was porous and experienced self-doubt I had never felt before.

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I would wake up early and travel to the suburbs or a few hours outside the city. Visiting was most often an incredible experience, during which I would engage in some of the richest conversation in my life. I would frequently sit with things that were disclosed or prayers that we’d crafted, long after I’d been released from the prison at noon. And with watery coffee coursing through my blood, I would sit in cars and subways and buses, just sort of frozen. Coworkers and friends would sometimes ask me if I was OK, especially immediately after a visit. I would lie in bed, listlessly scrolling my finger over the screen of my phone. I began taking naps in the middle of the day.

Of course, I was reaching out my closest witches, my close practitioner siblings. Two of my community members officially supported my work from the beginning, to the administration, besides my cherished mentor who invited me to do that work from the beginning. I had become closer with prison activists who supported my work in very meaningful ways. I had run fundraisers and posted on social media. Two of the guys I had been visiting asked to be symbolically included in rituals of ours and the community gracefully accepted. I was trying to broaden the scope of this and to collectivize it. But I still felt incredibly alone in the work. I was stuck.

It had taken a year of bureaucracy to begin visiting and there was never the option of going inside with other witches. So much of this work had begun feeling antithetical to the deeply shared, collectivized, horizontal ways of practicing we are accustomed to as witches. I felt silenced and weakened by the way I wasoutnumberedandIfeltalone.A​ ssezc’estassez!

Then it occurred to me: separation is the heart of incarceration.

Isolation is their work. It was contagious and I had caught it. And so I returned to my gold standards: art and activism. If I couldn’t bring people in with me to support me, I proposed we make a film to bring the witches of the prison out. I wanted to share the stories that I had been given to hold – stories of life and mystery, no just of pain. The fundamental questions from which we departed were these: “What connects you to the mystery of life?

When have you felt an unforgettable connection with Spirit?”

We chose images and I transcribed pieces of narrative that emerged in our months-long development, guided by divination.

After nearly a year of planning, on May Day 2018, together with 13 talented Pagan artists and performers and supported by two daring arts organizations, we created a powerful psychic noise demonstration, reminiscent of the noise protests held on New Years that occur at the walls of prisons around the world with music and sound. A school bus drove supporters and practitioners from the city to the prison I had been visiting every two weeks. Fundamentally, the message was: we have travelled to you. You are remembered. You are important members of our community. We joined a group of men inside a prison near Montreal as they begun casting their Beltane circle, completing the circle at the agreed-upon hour from outside.

Our May Day procession carved a fierce line from prison down to the swift river, connecting with the sacred geography and the surging flow of Beltane melt with masks, torches, chant and wide intergenerational ritual.

In downtown Montreal, we opened an exhibition to launch the new film. I had received permission from the Pagans inside that I had been visiting most frequently to speak to the media about some of the things they had long been bringing me as problems with the provision of their religious human rights. We spoke to the media with allies and I cried hot tears of joy. Three articles were published. Hundreds of people sent me support. I was no longer alone. I had defied the prison’s isolation spell and I was unfrozen.

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This is writing about shadow work and about a wounded healer seeking to plant seeds of tenderness, touch and vulnerability in a place where hardness is often seen as the only recourse as a mode of self-defence; the short texts are hope spells that summon the radical new world in desperate times. I am endlessly grateful to the people who have shared with me their life stories.

From their vulnerability and wisdom, I have grown immensely.

The poetic testimonials published here, were rendered anonymous to protect their authors from increased scrutiny Correctional Service Canada applies to people inside who print, publish, agitate, exhibit and resist. These are spells crafted through the circles of care that defy the punishment of prison.

These are freedom spells. These are healing spells.

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The Spellcasters Art Monica Bodirsky

My spiritual and art practices are fully integrated in my life. All are mutually dependent. The process of making art is alchemical and a radical act. It can be spellcasting whose results transform all who see and experience it even if at times we can’t fully appreciate or comprehend the energy. When I focus my intent and will, my art becomes imbued with sacred energy, and as an animist, takes on a life of its own. I make oracle and tarot cards with enchanted ink, earth pigment watercolours, moon and sun water, and blessed paper. Each piece is created with energy so intense it will get passed along to those who use the cards even after printing.

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From inception to completion each moment of an oracle deck, even under the stress of deadlines, must remain sacred. I feel that this ritual of creation is an honoring and gratitude for all components that come together. This energy transference for me is a vital component for someone using the cards to seek advice.

So far, I have been fortunate. People have given me a great deal of positive feedback, not simply on my art, but on the energy they feel and the clarity of advice received. Some artists create using only intellectual or mechanical means, and I respect and honour all ways of making, adding ritual is simply my way of ensuring I infuse my art with my desired intent and outcome.

In the spirit of sharing, here is the spell from my personal Book of Shadows.

WITCHES HEAL

A SPELL TO CREATE AN ORACLE DECK All senses must be considered/physical/spiritual/emotion/ psychological All elements must be represented.

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Candle - fire - An orange or yellow pillar or votive, dressed with success, sun or creativity oil Incense – air - patchouli, sandalwood or chandan Moon and sun water – water - collected during the full moon and illuminated by both the full moon and sun and for one full moon phase in a mason jar Ink – water – with one drop of essential oil of peppermint Watercolours – earth - blessed earth pigments from Indigenous Manitoulin company Beam, or Daniel Smith, or your own recipe from collected pigments.

Paper - earth Music - air Crystals or river rocks – earth Ritual – air - cleansing and inviting good energy, ancestors and spirit guides to assist Intent Methodology Cleanse your space, it is sacred.

• Ask your spirit guides, deity or your ancestors on a trance journey for direction about the making of art to help others and watch and listen carefully for any signs, symbols, dreams you may have.

• Ensure you leave an offering • Gather your ingredients and begin your project on an auspicious day during a waxing moon, full moon on a Thursday, Jupiter’s Day. Jupiter hour on any day is also beneficial for ensuring success and expansion of ideas. Seasonally you may wish to begin reflection during the dark period of Fall and bring ideas to fruition for early February and continue until Summer into maturity and reap your fall harvest.

• Once you have chosen a time and place, season and mind set. Start your work by lighting an orange pillar or taper candle dressed with Sun oil or any oil you feel will bring you creative flow such as citrus for joy and creativity (see recipe for Sun oil). Clear

your mind and imagine yourself at ease and an open receiver of inspiration from within and outside of yourself.

• You can cast a circle if you wish; you can acknowledge the directions, ancestors, guides, the cosmos and self. Make this sacred in whatever way you prefer, but gratitude and acknowledging the gift of time and creating is important. BE grateful for all you have, your friends and loved ones past, present and future.

• Consecrate sketch book, pencil, ink, watercolours and all artmaking tools with focus of will, you may say something like“Tool of power, spiritual channel I honor and welcome you in this collaboration” You may also hold your tool over incense, dab a little sacred water, etc. or simply hold it and feel the energy transfer from your hand to the item • Sketch out your ideas, let them flow, doodle, don’t judge or edit, continue sketching. Background tones, music or nature sounds help create a mood for your work.

• Don’t let deadlines frighten you. Take note of due dates, clear your space and get to it. This is applied activity, not theory. To stay grounded and focused, ensure you are well rested, cleansed and have items such as rocks, crystals, plants, or anything that creates a sense of security. I use crystals extensively in my practice and use citrine (actual yellow citrine, not heattreated amethyst points) lava rocks, shungite, quartz, amethyst, picture jasper, to name a few.

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• At the end of each creative session, blow out the candle and say thank you.

Note some people find it insensitive or disrespectful to blow out a candle and prefer a candle snuffer or wet fingers. For my practice, breath is sacred, but use whichever method feels right to you.

• After sketching or after your ideation is complete, take your work to its final stage with your art board or paper of choice.

Consecrate your new tools and begin.

• Use moon water or sun water for your watercolours, and infuse ink with a drop of peppermint essential oil. Thank the trees for your paper and honour them in assisting with your creation.

If self-publishing WITCHES HEAL

• When completed, scan your art, create your layouts, get everything to the printer and stay calm and focused. Do not use your equipment when frustrated or upset as this can cause electrical issues. Walk away if you get frustrated and return with a cool head.

If published • The same applies, but send work to publisher not printer. When your work is printed and ready for sale, bless your cards and infuse them with love, send them out into the world to assist wherever they can. Hold a gratitude ceremony to ancestors, elements, spirit, and to self for collaborating and manifesting an outward expression of your inner self. Celebrate being brave enough to withstand judgment from others. Remember vulnerability is strength.

If you expect to make a lot of money, move along, this is something I do for love, and while you can keep picking up momentum from projects and build and grow your business, as I have, no single deck of cards or any single creation will bring you riches.

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My motivation is in creating affordable artwork that is also a tool for self-discovery, spirituality, feminism, change, self-sufficiency.

Remember, magic is energy and what is created on paper can come to life, so don’t be surprised if while working on the Tower card you experience an identity crisis. As much as I love the process of creating whimsical, spooky oracles, flexibility, resilience, and above all, persistence are the mundane ingredients necessary to complement any magical work.

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JESS MILLER Plant Allies for Winter The quiet and darkness of winter invites us to go within. If we have regular practices for grounding our energy, being in our bodies and digesting our everyday experiences, this container can be a welcome place for us. If not, we might tune into our inner landscape and find anger, grief, lack of motivation or frustration. Our bodies may be signalling to us with lethargy, restlessness and sluggish digestion.

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For those of us who live with trauma or seasonal depression, going within can ask for more of our energetic resources. I share the recipes for a tea blend to offer release and opening as well as a blend for creating an energy matrix that is loving and supportive.

When we undertake healing work, it can be so tempting to intellectualize it and try to think our way into a desired state of being (independent, energetic, passionate, boundaried) rather than facing and feeling the impact of what hurts.

Making room to let go can create a void that leaves us feeling unsupported, abandoned or lost. The Open Space blend offers us a loose boundary and gentle holding as we get curious about the room created by anything we felt courageous enough to leave behind.

WITCHES HEAL

Meeting the Void Blend Add a heaping teaspoon of each to a pot of boiling water: Dandelion Nettles Cleavers Lemon balm Dandelion helps to support the liver and release unprocessed anger. Nettle aids us in creating boundaries and rewiring our personal power grid. Cleavers tone and cleanse our lymphatic system, while lemon balm eases an upset stomach and calms the heart. This blend helps the kidneys, liver and urinary tract and is rich in Vitamin A, C, D, iron, magnesium and calcium.

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I use this blend when the seasons change or when I can sense an ending coming and it feels difficult to let go. Letting go can ask us to sit with what hurts, who hurt us, what we lost, any possible roads to recovery or reparations.

Letting go can punch holes in the structures of our minds and our lives and even when those structural changes support our empowerment, they can still feel gutting. This tea blend invites an emotional purging and a gentle acknowledgment of what we’ve outgrown.

Open Space Blend Add a heaping teaspoon of each to a pot of boiling water: Dandelion Nettles Cleavers Lemon balm Motherwort eases anxiety and brings openness and acceptance.

Tulsi promotes clear vision and the ability to open to change.

Oatstraw aids in lessening heart tension and offers us grace.

Burdock supports us in grounding and feeling that we belong on the earth plane. Hawthorn promotes cardiovascular health and the claiming of the body as a sacred space.

This is the blend I use after the letting go. When roots feel exposed, heart feels tender and possibilities loom large, making moving forward seem like a high stakes game.

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Call in just enough support that you remember you belong here, your roots are strong, your heart is brave and nothing is permanent. Invite curiosity and lower the stakes. Be present to breath and sensation. So much can be created in the empty cauldron.

WITCHES HEAL

Laila This is the season when my soul feels at peace.

Endless cups of Earl Grey.

Scent of bonfires in the air.

Leaves crunching underfoot.

Me and you a tangle of limbs and bedsheets. Everything sleeping or dying.

This is the return.

When darkness comes, welcome it.

And light the candles.

Light a fire in the cauldron.

Put the kettle on.

Surrender the past.

I trace protection sigils on your skin, treasure the heat and weight of you on me.

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Set an altar for my ancestors and the versions of me that served their purpose.

Sacred time.

Witches New Year.

Persephone rises up from the underworld, pomegranate in hand, wondering if you want to go with her.

Hands sinking contended into dough, kneading what will become bread.

Burnt offerings of cedar so our prayers reach Her ear.

Standing at the crossroads to catch a glimpse of Hecate. Black lace on my altar.

Black lace smoothed over the curves of me.

I am a prayer.

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WITCHES HEAL

JENNA LEE FORDE Jenna Lee Forde is an MA student in Critical Disability Studies at York University.

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Her research is invested in archives and the magic of queer ephemera in history. Jenna has co-curated Theory Boner zine, facilitated feminist film nights with Younger Than BeyoncĂŠ Gallery, and has curated workshops about lesbian history and bar culture.

Heidi Cho Heidi Cho is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto.

Using a range of mediums such as ceramics, illustration and storytelling, Cho explores narratives around family, chronic sickness, queerness and diasporic Korean identity. Her illustration work has appeared in C Magazine, GUTS Magazine, Shameless Magazine and Peak Magazine. Her visual work has been showcased in The Gardiner Museum, The Art Gallery of Ontario, XPACE Cultural Centre and Doris McCarthy Gallery UTSC. Navigating chronic illness and fatigue, I’ve had to fight internal and external narratives around “laziness, guilt and productivity,” particularly around the amount of rest I need to feel okay. I remember coming across a photograph of Frida Kahlo resting and smoking in her bed, with her bedroom walls covered in beautiful art, ornaments and sketches. Seeing this photograph, acted as a reminder that my bed is not a place of shame but a place of healing, rest and solace.

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Susan Clarahan Susan Clarahan seeks a wild and feminine understanding of sensuality, intimacy, landscape, community, and beauty. Clarahan creates a sense of wonder at the natural world, using both performance and landscape to engage the senses and connect with nature. She lives in the Rocky Mountains.

WITCHES HEAL

Clementine Morrigan Clementine Morrigan is a writer, artist, and working witch.

She writes the zine Fucking Magic. Their first book, Rupture, was published in 2012. Her second collection of poetry, The Size of a Bird, was published in 2017. She is a white settler of Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry living on unceded Kanien’keha:ka territory. They are a practitioner of trauma magic. Find out more at clementinemorrigan.com or follow her on instagram @clementinemorrigan.

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Monica Bodirsky As an artist, author, educator, seer and rootworking witch, her desire to create visibility and foster community inspired the creation of WITCHfest North Festival of Arts and Culture in Toronto. With programming for the full month of October, events include the Toronto Witches’ Ball, Wickedly Divine, art exhibitions, craft vending, community rituals, walks, workshops, and panel discussions. The festival’s vision is to unite witches, pagans, rootworkers, ATR practitioners, wiccans and earth based spiritualists of all ages, beliefs, gender identities, nations and individual points of view to come together as a community to share similarities and celebrate diversity.

Jamie Ross I am a visual artist, diviner, preschool teacher, Radical Faerie and pagan chaplain. I create and document queer community based on a sincere engagement with magic and intuitive therapeutic technologies. I graft myself onto the rich artistic traditions of my cultural and biological ancestors. I’m interested in the ways in which new religious movements demand acceptance of governments and in the ways minority religious expression has existed in the context of Canadian art history. My current research is focused on Radical Faerie and queer separatist back-to-the-land movements of the 1970s-80s in Canada. My video work has been screened and installed on four continents primarily as installations in exhibitions.

My next artistic activities will take place at the Connexions (Fredericton, NB), Strutts and Faucet (Sackville, NB), MAI (Montreal, QC), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce (Morelia, Mexico) and the Klondike Institute (Dawson City, YT). I am based on unceded Mohawk Territory (Montreal).

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Kyla Jamieson Kyla Jamieson’s work has appeared in Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, GUTS Canadian Feminist Magazine, Peach Mag, The Maynard, and Plenitude. She survived her MFA and a brain injury and her debut chapbook is forthcoming in Spring 2019. Find her on instagram as @airymeantime or on a rock next to a river.

WITCHES HEAL

Jessica Miller Jess is a queer Jewish high femme plant witch, Tarot reader and trauma survivor. She is a daughter of the moon and the waters. A writer, home organizer and intuitive energy worker, she makes magick and home in Toronto. She believes we reclaim our power by facing our rage, anger and shame and remembering that we came to the earth plane fully supported and deeply loved with important medicine to share. Tulsi, dandelion and burdock are her steadies.

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Lisa East is an artist, photographer and witch. A passion for equity has led her to engage with lens-based media as a tool for representation using both analog and digital processes. With a background in Gender & Equity Studies, her current focus as an MFA candidate in Documentary Media is on the representation of contemporary witch practitioners in the arts. She is a founding member of Toronto’s Dark Moon Coven (2010) whose mentor is artist, author and witch Monica Bodirsky.

Since 2017, she has been a key volunteer for WITCHfest North in Toronto and currently assists with festival documentation, administration, social media and is the C.A.T.S. (Coffee and Tarot Society) liaison.

Her photographs have been published by major news outlets and she has shown recent work in the exhibitions Transformations: Fluid Identities in Witchcraft (2019), Grimoires: Storytelling and Witchcraft (2018), Burgeon (2018) and 365 (2018).�

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WITCHES HEAL