In this week's prescription we've got The Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, and Boygenius in our ears. The solar eclipse in Aries this past week called out to our warrior selves, and the call is still echoing. Take some time to listen to the warriors present in your own cells: the warriors of immunity and white blood cells and repair, the warrior who battles the cruel lies of the anxious mind, the warrior who gathers people on the street to look up at the sky in awe, the warrior who gets the fuck out and survives, the warrior who is a parent protecting their child and insisting upon their right to inherit a living world. The wounded healer who knows just how much it hurts to take those exhausting, repeated steps, pushing against the weight of entropy, and who does it anyway. www.missingwitches.com/rx-im-burning-so-i-will-bring-the-light
www.missingwitches.com/rx-im-burning-so-i-will-bring-the-light
Hi, Risa. Hi, Amy. Hi, Coven. Hi, Coven. Welcome to your weekly surviving whatever the fuck is going on prescription. Yeah, like. And you all know this, if you've been listening, if this is your first time listening, I'll just tell you, these are prescriptions that Risa and I give to ourselves and each other.
We are not gurus on a mountaintop, we are trying to take this advice as much as we're trying to give it to you. This is purely us talking back to the screaming voices in our brains, you know, trying to ritualize our own survival and inviting you to come along for the ride. Thank you for listening. And speaking of, um, I have not been doing well.
Um, you all heard last week that I busted my back and then I busted my ass just as my back was starting to feel better. And I've been in this like anxiety bubble. I do have a doctor's appointment coming up, which you'd think would be a relief, but it's not. The idea of it is making me so anxious because I feel like if I can't find the right vocabulary for what I'm feeling, like, if I can't figure out the magic words that I need to say to my doctor, then she's not going to help me, or she's not going to know how to help me, or I won't get any help, so.
Which is, I'm seeking magic words. One of our coven mates was talking about the diagnostic vortex, so as I go and spin into the diagnostic vortex, if you know the magic words to get help, please, please let me know. Gosh, I think so many people can relate to that. I know that feeling when I, I had a migraine for 10 years and I kept getting it.
going through these cycles of giving up on getting help because the emotional and physical toll of trying to get help was too much on top of surviving the pain itself. So trying to go and ask and say the magic words and deal with the doubt and deal with the sort of implications of teenage hysteria and whatever else is going on.
That was just already crushing on me. And it was, there was so much anxiety involved in a migraine. Of course, that to try to talk to somebody and find a way to explain to them and go through all my stuff of approval, anyway, I'm sorry. I'm just relating so hard. My love, it does feel like you're looking for the right words to put in the right order.
And, and so much of life is that. And I have to, like, get a medical degree before I go so that I'm, like, well researched and I have everything that, because, you know, I had to, when I got my hypothyroidism diagnosis, a couple different doctors told me, like, very dismissively that, you know, my symptoms were probably just stress and I literally had to go in with, like, a list of my symptoms and a list of the symptoms of hypothyroidism and, like, show them to the doctor to even get tested.
Which is like, I didn't go to school for fucking medicine. I don't know how I managed to diagnose myself, you know, but I did. Um, but I don't want to have to do that. This is what, this is what we have the medical professionals for, or so I thought. Yeah, it is such a pressure to put on an already Compacted and extracted from body.
I'm thinking in those terms because the episode of the kinship meditation this week is about granite and the shield and I've just been thinking so much about the way we are akin to this bedrock of stone that we have taken so much from and that has been https: otter. ai It has been created under pressure, under extreme pressure, you know, over millions of years.
Yeah. I feel kinship to that right now. Very much. So, um, I brought a couple things. I brought a song that is related to this and also to our conversation last week about, uh, doing whatever the fuck you want and making country music. Yeah. So, there is this band called the Meat Puppets, and they were contemporaries of and played with, you know, seminal punk bands like Black Flag and The Minute Men, but they're sort of that, like, what I conceive of as punker than punk, where you're so punk that you've gone completely outside the limits of what people tell you punk is, and they're almost like, like a freaky alt.
country band? Like, post punk Grateful Dead is sort of how I would describe this song at least. Um, this song is called Up on the Sun. Um, it's the Meat Puppets. Did I already say Meat Puppets? It's the Meat Puppets. And the lyrics go like this. A long time ago, I turned to myself and said, You are my daughter.
I saw that image, so you are my daughter. Well then maybe we've got something to talk about. Lay down. You're on the warmth that I'm weaving. And, you know, not everybody is lucky enough to have, like, great mothers who advocate for them at their doctor's appointments, you know, to hold their hand and take them.
But, like, we can be our own mothers, and we can advocate for ourselves. And, you know, the really mean voice that lives inside my head is like, not motherly. So I have to counterbalance it with like, how would, how would I talk to myself if, if I were my child, if I were my daughter, what, what would I say? And I think I might say, lay down, you're on the warmth that I'm weaving.
And a friend of mine knew that I wasn't doing great and sent me this poem by Richard K. Anderson, Richard, by Jared K. Henderson, the crypto naturalist. called Not a Mistake. It's not a mistake to need rest, or seek help, or make secret pacts with household spiders. Or find friendship in the dark beneath a log.
Or to think, hello, into the night sky and wait for a response. Or sink your fingers into the soil to see if they take root. Or, despite everything, to love this world. So those are my prescriptions this week. Check out the Meat Puppets, Punker Than Punk, Super Weird Alt Country. Um, lay down on a warmth that you are weaving for yourself and despite everything, Love this world.
Those are my prescriptions this week,
Jared K. Anderson, beautiful poet and super kind, lovely person. You can dig through our archives to hear my conversation with him late night talking about the woods and loons, but also, um, Jared has published books of poetry, but just published his first memoir. It is a heartbreaker for sure. What a wonderful thinker about mental health in these times and about crafting your own rituals to find your way through what can be a mental health nightmare in response to environmental collapse and late stage capitalism.
It's called Something in the Woods Loves You. Oh, and he's such a great role model for like, existing in nature as a human. Yeah. Bless you, Jared. We love you. We love ya. Yeah. I've been thinking about the eclipse, you know, in, in our coven circles, um, and in conversations with family and friends. So much of my thinking about the eclipse really was guided by this idea of an ego death, right?
Like of a, of the sun being fully covered, darkness during the day, of The fear that came, that could come from that, but also the release. But recently I've also been thinking about, at least for me, you know, moon is very much my Guiding planetary body very much my friend, but the moon is also really a symbol for me of mother relationships, um, and of re mothering, of re parenting, of going back to what can be a wounded place, um, but also of the mother image eclipsing the paternal, right?
And the paternalism, like, just for a moment during the day, that force that is. Whatever that counterbalance is to the, to the, the light and the flourishing and the strong and the warrior and all the things we sort of associate with something gendered male that was put out. And then moments later, the, the wounded healers sort of made their presence known.
And my family and my experience sitting on a hill with my husband and his family. On a bench dedicated to his mother who had passed last year. My mother was there. My mother had a terrible migraine. And her migraines increased her anxiety, and mine too, and we, she kind of out of fear snapped at Mae, and then I, out of fear protecting Mae, snapped at my mom like moments after the eclipse.
But all of our sharp edges came out, and we hurt each other, you know. Um, and we repaired. We're lucky that we have that pattern and help to repair. I'm lucky that I have, I have a therapist. Uh, I have a therapist who talks about like, you know, weaving a nest of golden light around my daughter from my heart and repeating words like a magic spell as I come out of anxiety.
You know, find yourself a therapist who understands the power of, you know, the magic spell. Imagined light and ritual phrases, for sure. I've imagined light and ritual phrases, for sure. But, that leads into, I guess, my sort of twinned thoughts with this prescription for myself this week. And both of them came directly from our coven, from our community.
We met to talk on the eve of the eclipse about our warrior selves. I think it's important when we're at these sort of dark moments, eclipsed moments, that we both like lie fallow and allow ourselves to leap and go into the earth, but also that we call out to the parts of ourselves and name and remember and list when we have been warrior, um, and all the ways.
And that was something that was really. astonishing and fulfilling. It sort of is like weaving a carpet to lie down on all of the ways that we have been warrior, you know. When we rested and tended to ourselves, our cells, our immune systems were warrior, you know. And when we found the words, To try again, and we got up the energy to try one more time to go back into medical systems, to go back into legal systems, to fight one more time against oppressive systems.
When we gathered our forces and we returned to the battle one more time, we gathered our hope. That was our warrior selves. When we were, you know, librarians in the street, inviting everyone to participate and share their glasses and look up at the sky, that was warrior self harmony. And, and, you know, when we acknowledged how much it hurts.
And we tended to our wounds and we gathered our people around us and we fed them and we helped them through the desert. That's what we write about in our chapter for the Aries new moon. Um, that's a warrior self too, you know, she isn't always at battle. Sometimes she's a leader for her people. Sometimes she's just a leader for herself, being kind to herself.
Sometimes she's fucking fighting back against an aggressor in her home. You know, sometimes she's leaving in the middle of the night. Sometimes she's the first person in her family to ask for help to break a cycle. Those are warrior selves, you know, all of those people. I just want us to see them. And I want to acknowledge to hope.
Um, that was a song that our coven mate Aaron brought, and I've been thinking about it a lot since. It's a Boy Genius song written by Lucy Dacus, and the lyric at the end is the one that says, That will chime through my own mind, especially the end of the verse, not everybody gets to gets a chance to live.
Not everybody gets the chance to live a life that isn't dangerous.
It hurts to hope it hurts to hope for more. You know that coming from a place where our life has been endangered. If you are in a place where you know what it is to live a life that is dangerous, you know the great privilege of not having that. You don't want to be fucking resilient one more time. You want to be on the other side of that privilege.
And to imagine that it could be different and to see that other people have it different can be so hurtful. That can hurt so much. That's the wounded healer too, you know, to be someone who imagines what it's like to not have chronic illness, to look around at other people just going about their day, not crippled by anxiety.
That hurts. It really hurts the injustice, you know. I wanna acknowledge that. I wanna let us all cry with that. You know, please know that we, we know that we hold that witchcraft isn't all sort of summoning in your next fucking double the size paycheck or manifesting a bigger house. Luck. No. So often it's just about acknowledging injustice and holding hands together, tally, to, to go through the.
The pain of hoping for something more to go through the pain of that birth. even if you're just doing it so your kid has a life a little bit less violent than the one you had, you know. There is tremendous power in that. So that's part one of my prescription. And part two, thank you to Satleen and others who brought up Bikini Kill and especially the song Rebel Girl, and especially the moment in this song where I hope you feel so seen, because there are moments when we can feel so.
Other We are so the weird one I know. I mean, our coven is 300 people strong. Now, I can safely say the part of what unites us is that we were weird when we were young. We were other to the people around us. There was something about us, especially if you were in a religiou. background or a culturally conservative background, and you wanted to dance to punk music and wear black and hug trees and imagine a world where you weren't shat on for being a woman, or that you weren't told to shut up when you were a little kid, that you were told you're maybe you could imagine your voice mattered.
I want you to imagine the other little girl who saw you and how to her. You were magic, and that's what I think this song is. There's this moment in this song, she says, when she walks, the revolution's coming. In her hips, there's revolution. When she talks, I hear the revolution. In her kiss, I taste the revolution.
Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world. I want to take you home. I want to try on your clothes. Just that adoration we have for each other. When we've. We find each other and the world seems like it could be what we imagine. We see it in her, in her wildness, in her bravery. I felt that when I met Amy, I was like, I am going over to that bitch's house anytime she lets me, because that's part of the world I want to live in.
And so I want the, the end of our, uh, prescription in our, in our new moon eclipse circle this week was an invitation to choose one of those two songs. Either the Boy Genius or the Bikini Kill. Have a pen and a paper, start the song, and write, and do not lift your pen until the end of the song. Let the words come, force the words to come, let them be messy, let them be sloppy, but imagine that you are writing.
A message from your rebel cells. The ancestors that are inside you, the ones you don't even know, who fucking fought to survive. What do they tell you right now? As this eclipse portal is closing, they have messages for you. Please, that is the prescription for myself. I want to hear them and hold them close to me as the last of the snow melts.
And despite everything, love this world. Blessed fucking be, y'all. Blessed fucking be, we love you.