Beaver dams and snow forts give way to notions of mortality and possibility.
www.missingwitches.com/rx-one-day-well-be-gone/
Amy: making humans is not an easy job.
Risa: Humanity, so weird. None of us know what we're doing, You wanna just use some of that?
Amy: I was going to cut in from none of us know what we're doing, for sure,
because I was thinking about this, that we were talking the other day about, If only people would listen to me, then, we could get this all figured out. Yeah. And I'm like, I wish people would stop thinking I know what I'm talking about. I wish people would stop coming to me for answers, because I don't have any.
Risa: Yeah. My delusion screams in the other direction. Like, why, we can all see that just peace and, sharing resources would fix it. What the fuck?
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. you'd think it would be easy, but it's
Risa: agony. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to the Rx.
Amy: The agony and the ecstasy. We
Risa: make no claims to knowing what the fuck is going on.
Just
Amy: songs of innocence and experience.
Risa: Yeah. we're witches in the sense of, artists and activists who are confused and believe in Magic of the natural world and hugging trees and the magic of reaching out for each other in the terrifying dark And this is our witch prescription to each other whatever that looks like on any given week that we managed to do it So thank you for being here along with all our caveats
Amy: and we can definitely like witchify by Thinking about changing something into something else, whether it's mood A into mood B, turning loneliness into exaltation or whatever, if we use vocabulary like alchemize.
there are many artists who talk about alchemizing pain into art, taking their pain and making it manifest and somehow working through it by making a physical object of it. I like to think about that a lot too. I think that most of the things that we do, especially if we identify as witches, can be thought of as, an alchemy of sorts.
Whether it's like being a kitchen witch and, making food from ingredients, or whether it's being an artist and making art from pain, or art from Excitement, manifesting imagination, all of these things to me are alchemy.
Risa: Yeah. And I, want to plant a seed for you that you somehow get a chance to alchemize your mountains of snow and the sort of, because we are in it, folks.
We are deep in it. All schools are closed in our area. We can't even get out of our road, down our road much today, and it's heavy and it's still falling. Alchemize that heaviness and all the labor that it is going to demand of us into something joyful. Probably a fort. I think my prescription for you, Amy, is a snow fort.
Amy: Yes, I, I haven't done one this winter, but last winter, I'm an adult, a childless adult, and I remember my mom would use me as an excuse to do the kiddie things she wanted to do, I don't need an excuse. I made a snowman. A snow friend, I think, actually. I don't think it was
Risa: a man, I think it was a man.
Amy: That's what we call them, too. Yeah. But, ended up looking like some kind of old babushka or something, and it was wonderful, As an adult with a home in the woods, snow is, more shit I gotta do. It's backbreaking, it's laborious, but I just took this one afternoon. And snow is, one of my favorite sculpting materials.
If you get that sort of, the snow that fell last night and today it's like, wet concrete. It's Amazing for sculpting. And I made this friend, and it was so joyful, and I would hug her sometimes, and then as the winter pressed on, she got more and more grotesque looking as like snow fell upon her.
Risa: Don't we all, lady?
Amy: Part of her face fell off, and it turned into this very excitingly creepy Ghost in the lawn.
to take that as a metaphor like the things that fall on us can be sculpted.
Risa: Yeah. My neighbors also make these beautiful ice lanterns. They use like Big buckets, like I'm sure Andy has a ton of them, big plastic buckets, and fill them with water and leave them outside when it's cold, and the way the ice forms, it forms from like the outside edge in, so it leaves a hollow in the middle where you can put a candle, and then they bring them inside for an hour, half an hour, until they can slide the ice out, and then you get like a, giant, Kind of candle holder all made of clear ice and then they place candles inside and they put them all around their property and leave them lit and then they also, there's They've been in this like ongoing relationship slash battle slash conversation with the beavers next to their house, they're right on the wetland, on the swamp, and these beavers moved in and started building the way all of their instincts and body tells them to do to make a safe space, a dam, but right where they were building it was going to flood.
Right up and on to their land and into their house and so every night the beavers would come and every morning David and Isabel would go and take down a few sticks and let the water pass so they're just like just hopefully doing enough to communicate go somewhere else but not to scare them and finally after two months of that the beavers moved down to the other end of the wetland and built it down there which meant they raised the water level a little bit you In an area where it wasn't going to damage anything.
And we discovered this winter after everything froze that they made a perfect little skating pond behind the house because they raised the water level enough that it lifts it over the reeds back there in the winter. So we've been shoveling and then hung lights, like solar powered lights in the back and a path of ice lanterns.
And I don't know, I hadn't thought to talk about that today, but it is one of these things where like, When I have had enough of sorrow, and enough of doing the actions that I can do from here in resistance to genocide, in resistance to what seems like a seemingless onslaught of war fueled by reactionary wealthy who use Race and otherness to divide us and to continue to gather their hordes that like I need to go and be with my neighbors and help shovel snow off the ice rink together and like spin on ice and remember that all of that division between us is fabricated.
By people who are trying to profit off of it, and I refuse to stay in their logic and in their world. I just refuse. And so that's the prescription to find moments of incredible beauty under the onslaughted weight of snow and of violence is one we're going to continue to insist upon here, even if sometimes it doesn't feel serious enough in the face of what we face.
Seconded. So here's my prescription, and this is not, it's not an uplifting one, but it's on a loop in my head. There's this song, If We Were Vampires. I don't, I didn't know the artists at all, which some Americans will probably laugh at me. Jason Isbell, I think he's won a bunch of country music awards.
I don't know anything. I did a Goog to make sure he wasn't like a racist piece of shit, and it turns out he's not. As of today's recording, he's he's like the country singer who was like, I don't want racists, or people are gonna sexual sexually assault my guests at my show so you can just fucking leave or he tweeted at the, douchebag who wrote the try that in a small town thing and was like, write your own songs, piece of shit.
Anyway, he seems like a little bit of an angry guy, which, I can relate to. But this song is it's on the loop in my head because the chorus is, it's knowing that this can't go on forever. Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone. Maybe we'll get 40 years together. Someday I'll be gone.
Someday you'll be gone. It's on a loop in my head just It's so painful to be reminded, but it's also, it's everything to be reminded, I fell down the stairs last week. My husband had a health scare the same day. We both, like, physically encountered our mortality on the same fucking day, And, I, after things with, May's allergies and health scares, like I feel like I go in these circles and Mark's mom getting cancer last year and I, go in these circles where like I have to cast a bubble of sparkly light around me and live in a ice candle and, make forts and delve deep into the beauty of it all to survive.
But I also have to have the song on repeat that reminds me that. Someday I'll be gone, and someday you'll be gone. And what we have is this flickering moment. And I'm so lucky to have it with you, Amesie, And I'm so lucky to have it with Mark and May. And with all you in the dark, in the coven we make between our ears, we are alive in this moment in the universe together.
And that's a spell I need to remember in the winter. It's part of what the winter calls on us to remember.
Amy: Yes, one of our coven mates, it was her husband's 40th birthday, and so they went to, the portrait studio. And they got these portraits done, and they look amazing, they're, like, all, dressed up.
But then they brought just, weird, ridiculous Or hops. And I was looking at these photos and they're like, just captured playfulness in this moment of time. Maybe that could be part of that prescription, like not necessarily taking photographs or posing within photographs, but. Remembering to capture these little moments, and appreciate them, and take them in, and not to rush through them, let's capture these moments like we can capture the light of a candle inside an ice structure, and see how it refracts as it burns.
we have to, All the time, we keep coming back to this notion of resistance and re enchantment, right? we can't forget what we're fighting for in the face of what we're fighting against. so capture a moment! Capture a moment in the snow. Capture a moment in, in your family or with your friends and hold on to it.
squeeze it so tight that it is absorbed into your skin through your hands, Is that possible? Can we do that? I think
Risa: so. I'm doing this, nature journaling class and in one class we did this, Like a blind contour drawing exercise, where you just look so hard at what you're looking at.
But you pretend that you're like an ant, going over the line by line, just exploring the line, exploring the, never lifting your pen, but exploring the line of what while you're, drawing, and not looking away from what you're looking at. And it made me think about, that line is the line of energy or something, like I've been imagining that line that the eye follows or the ant traces or the pen traces that is like the energy moving through that plant or that moment and that does stay when all the details are gone and all of the fuzz is gone and that moment moves past that somehow that line remains.
I had this dream the other morning that I was in Mark's mom's now empty house and her grandkids were around the coffee table. They always sat around on the floor and they were eating fruit and she was there on the love seat. But she wasn't, and, and the house was empty, everything had been moved out and the kids were just in this, glow of light and you could feel her just holding them there, and I felt like that was like that line through that house, through those people, through that moment remains, even though the house isn't theirs anymore and she's not there in that form anymore and they won't be in that circle again together.
It does. I think it does make a mark, especially if you take the time to burn it into you somehow. Yes.
Amy: I, I lost a mentor from afar, this week. Iossos died. And I may have talked about Iossos before. On the RX, because he was, I'm just gonna say is, I'm still getting used to the death. a pioneer of what we think of as New Age music, is just wonderful meditative synthesizers that are really transportive.
when you listen to Iosos music, it's I defy you to not be transported. And there's this amazing documentary, um, amazing, it's amazing to me, um, I also said his music and there's an interviewer who's asking him where, his music came from or where it comes from. And I also described that he would, hear it in his head like a radio station playing music.
And this went on for years. and he would try to, reconstruct what he was hearing in the material world with his synthesizers, with his instruments. And then at a certain point, he describes that he encountered, again, within his mind, an interdimensional being who had put this music into his head who had either created or, channeled and put this music into his head.
He describes this interdimensional being who gave him this music and then he starts laughing and he says to the interviewer. I want to quote this exactly. He says to the interviewer, I realize that this is hard for you to believe, but at least I'm telling you what I believe, and you're free to handle that reality any way you like.
And I've just been carrying that around for days, what we believe, the role of faith in our lives, but also the fact that, you're free to handle that reality any way you like. If someone doesn't believe what you're saying, then you can say to them, this is what I believe, and you're free to handle that reality any way you like.
And also, we are free to handle this reality. any way that we like. We are free to handle this reality any way we like. And so my prescription this week is to listen to some I Also's music, um, if you can, in, in a space that is just devoted to the listening. And, meditate on the idea that you are free to handle your reality or this reality in any way you like.
Don't nobody fucking tell me how to handle my own reality.
And the fact that I also was like self aware enough and had enough of a sense of humor to laugh through this storytelling of This is what happened to me. Ha I know it sounds crazy to you. Ha And that's okay. There was no part of him that was like, people are going to think this is crazy, so I'm not going to do this.
Instead, he was like, You're free to handle my reality however you like. without judgment, he wasn't saying you're not going to believe this because you're close minded. He was like, I recognize that this is difficult to believe, but this is my reality. And yeah, I'm just want to like bask in my awesomeness of just like having faith in our vision.
there's, there is an artist. I don't know if anybody who's listening watches Dragula. It's like a monster drag competition. And one of the contestants said, all I have is my vision. I don't have a home that's safe. I don't have Money, or clothes, or a proper job, all I have is my vision, and so I'm going to be devoted to that vision, that's what I'm going to do because it's all I have, and I was almost like, jealous, I was almost jealous that someone was like, so compelled to manifest their vision that nothing else mattered.
Nothing else mattered. And they were handling their reality how they liked. So that's my prescription to have a vision and to not worry if it makes sense to anybody else. That's my prescription this week.
Risa: May you, make a fort, whether it is literal or metaphorical. Shine your sparkly light.
Amy: or, dig a cloche in the snow for a candle.
Risa: Hold on to your vision. Hold on to your laughter about the weirdness of the world.
Amy: And you are free to deal with this reality however you like. Bless the fucking be