It's Imbolc weekend and we mark the inbetween, the blurred edges between dark and light. Not the Spring but the reminder that the Spring will come, eventually. This week maybe you need to just lie in the dark, no music, no sounds but the rushing of your own mind, the building breathing, the ground underneath and the roots whispering. This week, maybe be a seed. Amy asks: What kind of Groundhog are you this year? Did you see your shadow and retreat back underground for six more weeks? Or, like Quebec's (new) Fred la Marmotte, are you ready to Spring into action? If you're like Fred, this week's prescription is Revolution Get Down by The Bellrays. Get fired up for a total rebirth as singer Lisa Kekaula testifies: Don't you treat me like I was born for nothin'. If you're sticking under the snow, under the blankets, the prescription is to stay soothed and warm by the kiln fires of The Great (British) Pottery Throwdown, where well-intentioned kindness sculpts creative arts. A Canadian version is starting Feb 8th, to ease you softly through your next six weeks of Winter. We invite you to ask yourself, without judgment or expectation, "What kind of Groundhog am I this year?" https://www.missingwitches.com/dont-you-treat-me-like-i-was-born-for-nothin/
https://www.missingwitches.com/dont-you-treat-me-like-i-was-born-for-nothin/
Risa: Happy weekend of Imbolc! Happy Black History Month.
Amy: Yes, I think. Our panel will have come out by the time y'all hear this.
Obviously, we record in advance of the day that episodes come out. You will have already heard that panel of amazing, inspiring creators of the future of Black History. I hope that you got down with that. I, of course Super into Imbolc, because Imbolc for me is it's the real New Year, if that makes sense.
The example that I often use is at Imbolc, I know. If I have enough firewood to get to the end of winter. At the beginning of winter, it's like a speculative. Will we have enough wood? Will we have enough wood? Will we have enough wood? And now, I know. But it's also that in the metaphorical sense this is the moment, not January 1st for me.
And we've talked about this and talked January is a wash for me. Yeah. I just need to sleep, and sleep some more. And so then, for me, and especially the Groundhog Day aspect of it, it's such an amazing metaphor, because You stick your head out of your hole, and there's like an option, right?
Either you see your shadow or you don't. And both of those things are okay. If it's six more weeks of winter, and you crawl back into bed, it's okay. Make an assessment, and then do what you need to do. Or, Or, spring is coming, let's hit the road running let's, and also I love the term spring into action you can either go back and hibernate, or you can spring into action, and it all depends on your internal groundhog, shall we say I love Groundhog Day for that, and also I love the movie Groundhog Day that Harold Ramis made with Bill Murray, it's if you don't make those assessments, then you're doomed to relive the same day over and over again.
You can't look back at your past and recognize the mistakes that you made, and the victories too, like what you did right, what you did wrong, then you're just gonna live the same day over and over again, I'm a huge InBulk fan, it's one of my favorite sabbats, because it is like the promise of a new day, but also if you're not quite ready for that new day, it's cool you can sleep for six more weeks.
Risa: Yeah, I'm calling it, I'm not ready. I'm sleeping for six more weeks, or sleeping, I don't know, but I was thinking if I had a prescription this week, but I didn't really listen to music this week, I didn't. The one thing I did that felt like really restorative and magical and something was I just lay in the dark in my basement and I was really like you, the words I heard in my brain talking to myself were like, be a seed like you need to be a seed right now.
Just be a seed, don't try to be anything else, just be like a little wildflower seed under the snow, that's all you got, that's all you can do, just listen, just listen to the constant patter in my brain, listen to the house, listen to the creaking of the house in the cold, listen to what's coming through, maybe from the roots around from the earth, but I really, I hadn't done that in a really long time, but I just I was gifted with 24 hours alone and I spent like 18 of them lying in the dark.
Amy: That's an excellent prescription, y'all. If you have time, just lie in the dark for a bit. Mhmm.
Risa: Just be a little seed, that's all I got. Yeah,
Amy: and it's funny too because when the snow melts and I start clearing away like the leaves, I don't remove all the leaves, I like to pile them up on places where stuff's growing and around tree trunks and stuff, the snow has melted, imagine, it certainly has not melted, I'm freezing. But then when you clear away those sort of half rotten leaves from last year, Those shoots are shooting, they're popping, they're growing, we can't see them, they're under blankets, but they're still growing, and so I feel like that's like your seed mentality, it's like you can still bloom and grow under a blanket.
Risa: Yeah, and like the correlation for me is also like it's research time. It's and it's like playing with research time. It's not like I'm going to try to find out this one thing. This is like the curiosity part of research time. We Amy and I, part of the Missing Witches podcast, do a season dedicated to these meditations on our kinship with other species in the more than human world that starts in May.
Does it start in May, Amy?
Amy: March.
Risa: It starts in March. And So yeah, we're deep in the research now. The piece of research that's been like, especially correlative to being a seed right now is playing with ancestry. ca You can do two weeks for free or pay for a month and then cancel it after a month.
But just see what's in there. Click on the little leaf with the hints and see what the hints are and then go digging in the records. I found a fourth great grandmother of mine. In an industrial town in England that's described as being like this at the time when she's there like the 1850s is just being like a soup of gray.
Like it's the heart of industrial England. And on this document, I found she's listed as the head of a household. So she has six kids living with her, but the husband's name is not on the census. Her profession is listed as butcher, her son's profession is listed as butcher, and then living with her, she has like other kids and grandkids and daughter in law, and their professions are variously listed as scholars and painters.
So just I'm imagining, I don't know, it's so interesting to imagine these people, why did they come to Canada? What was that poverty that led them to be part of that land theft that was happening? What, what motivated her daughter to leave? And what was she studying? And I don't know, it's so interesting just to use those as points of research into where your people were part of maybe labor movements, I know I found a grandfather that died in a workhouse.
These are like poor people's, and after these laws came in the UK saying that people didn't have a right to food, it's like they were put in workhouses to work until they died. Those people are in us, and I don't really know what it means for what I'm researching right now, but that's part of being a seed for me right now, is just, I don't know, sending out strange roots, trying to understand where I am.
Amy: Yeah, and there's there have been so many times where I've been, like, researching something specifically, and then offhandedly encountered something else that just tied in so completely and accidentally to what I was doing, you don't know where the threads are gonna tie together necessarily, and I love that about learning.
I also want to say your ancestor who was the head of the household and listed as such. I love thinking about, the speculative fiction of life outside the patriarchal lens, or taking off those glasses of patriarchal lens and lenses and what? What can happen when we acknowledge that, the mother is the head of the household and is teaching her trade to her children, whether it's butchery or scholarship or whatever it is, like no wonder you have that like powerful womanness about you that's in your background.
Risa: I think it's in all of us, you go digging around enough and you find these clues like the other fun one I found is that my fourth great grandfather's brother was Samuel Bass, who is Samuel Bass, who is Samuel Bass. Brad Pitt's character in 12 Years a Slave. So basically, I'm related to Brad Pitt.
No, even better.
Yeah, just like a historic figure of emancipation, of standing up for somebody whose rights have been violated and helping them gain their freedom. And the tradition in my family is that the woman whose name we know, who was his mother, was Haudenosaunee, and it checks out for where they were, where their house was listed.
It's Haudenosaunee territory. It precedes the treaties, so they were definitely not on treated land. And so then I'm like in the speculative fiction of that imagining like this person who had the language to write these letters that helped get this man his freedom, who and who saw the necessity of it.
Maybe he learned about that from having a mom who was Haudenosaunee, like maybe he learned about race. Because there was this relationship and choice from her to teach him about that. I don't know. I like to imagine it.
Amy: Yeah. My number one example that I always go back to is Frankenstein, the novel, the Mary Shelley, and how her father, they lived at a time where you didn't educate your daughters, you educated your sons.
But her father was like, F that this is my child and they're going to have an education, and if he didn't make that choice the world would have lost out on one of the greatest horror, science fiction, whatever, novels of all time that has reverberated through all of our pop culture, abolitionists, and again Frederick Douglass, who was like a big feminist, obviously, race was his major thing, but he was the same thing no one is free unless we're all free, and so he was like, the only man, I think, at least the only man of color who spoke at a women's rally in the 1850s we have a choice to go against the grain And when we do look what can happen, like just when we make a choice to educate our children, when we make a choice to go against whatever the status quo is telling us that we know is not right, man, that's world changing shit.
Yeah, so I brought two prescriptions. One is something that I promised I would talk about, and the other is completely alive from off center. But the two prescriptions are like, which groundhog are you? Is it six more weeks of winter, or are you ready to spring into action? If you're a spring into action Groundhog, I brought The Bell Rays Revolution Get Down.
And I wanted to talk about this a little bit, because last week I was talking about Lisa Kekala, who was the singer for the Nowtime delegation that Handle Me With Care song. But she was also in a rock and roll band, is, I think the Bell Rays are still active. And it's just like kick ass rock and roll.
It's just kick ass rock and roll. Every time I saw the Bell Rays, I wept. Because Lisa is this high priestess. Like a high priestess of rock and roll, who Again, we're trying to get out of, the language of religiosity, but I don't know what else to say other than that she is delivering a sermon.
She is delivering, doing deliverance work for us every time she's on stage. Like I say I wept every time I saw the Bell Rays. I wept because of the sheer power of this person, Lisa Kekala, and this band is The Bell Rays. She also was like, when the MC5 reformed, she sang with the MC5. She's just one of the coolest people in the whole world.
And obviously, the name of this song is Revolution Get Down. So you know where she's going with this. But I want to just underscore this one line where she sings don't you treat me like I was born for nothing and like listeners coven like You were born for something and don't let nobody tell you were born for nothing.
Don't let Nobody treat you like you were born for nothing. Revolution, get down. If you're ready to spring into action put this song on, do the revolution, get down, and just understand that you were born for something and don't let anybody treat you otherwise, right? Now, if you're not there, if it's six more weeks of winter, I get that too, and so I brought actually a TV show, which I don't think I've ever done before.
And if you know me personally, maybe you've heard me talk about this before, but this is like my safe, quiet, beautiful landscape of television that I would love for y'all to get into. It's called the Great British Pottery Throwdown. And so it really is, it's like a reality competition show, like you imagine, but it's so sweet.
There's none of this let's create drama by putting the potters in the, in a room and have them fight. There's none of that. Super supportive. They're all helping each other. One of the judges is named Keith. And he's this big burly guy in his leather apron, and every time the potter, one of the potters does something he really loves, he cries.
He gets choked up. And I'm telling you all, if you just need to be under a metaphorical blanket of media, because obviously it's fucking fucked out there, everything is so fucking scary, the news is It's terrifying and paralyzing. So if you need six more weeks of winter, check out The Great Pottery Throwdown and just it really, and again, you know me, like I have an anxiety disorder and this show is like medication.
It's so well intentioned. It's so sweet, they really are so supportive of each other and then of course again there's Keith who's like weeping because someone made a really nice duck that's shaped like a teapot shaped like a duck or whatever and then I'm so excited about this and it's so ridiculous they're doing a Canadian version.
The CBC is doing a Canadian version that is starting on February 8th and one of the hosts is Seth Rogen. Now, I'm not like, I'd never even really thought about Seth Rogen, like I, whether he's a human that exists and some of his shit's funny and some of his shit's annoying, I never really thought about it.
I do want to say I have fallen in love with him over the years because one, he completely distanced himself vocally and publicly from James Franco when it came out that James Franco was like, trying to seduce teen girls and stuff. Seth Rogen was like, I don't care, fuck you Hollywood, this is bullshit, I'm not fucking with this guy anymore.
Publicly, which, and, oh Seth Rogen, he basically just quit Hollywood to like, stay in Vancouver and smoke weed and make pottery. And that's how he got this job, because he's no, not a, yes, oh yes.
Risa: I've seen him selling his pottery or like showing pictures on. social media or whatever, but I didn't know that was his life now.
I'm so happy for him!
Amy: And what a great inspiration, we're so greedy as a species, and we're so strivey as a species, and this guy was like, you know what? This million dollar Hollywood thing is not for me. I'm gonna go make pottery and smoke weed, and I'm sure so many of you who are listening are like me, and that's the dream.
I just wanna go and make little pots, and, listen to my Joni Mitchell records, and be very fucking Canadian with the whole thing, again, that starts on February 8th, I haven't seen it yet, I only saw the trailer, but if it's anything like the British version, which, again, please, even just watch a clip if you need something to lower your cortisol levels.
It's such a safe and happy piece of media that I would love for you all to check out. And then of course, on February 8th, we can all watch the Canadian version together. So again, just to recap, you're a Groundhog. you're seeing your shadow or you're not, you're six more weeks of winter or you're springing into action, so if you're springing into action, fucking bell raise, revolution get down, let's fucking go.
If you need six more weeks of winter, the pottery throw down, where people make little teapots shaped like ducks and then the burly man cries. This is what I need. Yeah. And
Risa: if, even if you're taking those time, that time to, be a seed for six more weeks. Just remember that, even when you're not really paying attention, your little tendrils are reaching out.
You're going down Wikipedia spirals, inspiring your creativity. Maybe you're getting your hands dirty with a pot. Maybe you're like, Just learning about your own relationship to other species and other people and Feeling your way into some more healthy kinds of relation, but all that stuff is revolutionary, too It's just the stuff that's happening quietly under the snow.
Amy: Yeah, and the message, don't you treat me like I was born for nothing. If you have left Hollywood to make pots, or if you have joined the revolution, you were born for something. And a blessing if
Risa: I can be to
Amy: that. If you
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