When I was younger my grandmother told me that she comes from a long line of witches, and I always held that close to my heart in the ways I connected deeply with others and nature, but when I got older she told me she meant her mother and grandmother were witches as in a bitches- which first made me laugh, then made me sad and then made me mad, because maybe if I had held onto this truth I could be more self assured and strong like the trees I deeply connected with but instead I feel soft and squishy and I cry way too often and I dream more awake than when i’m asleep. I’m not criticizing my kindness and gentleness which I carefully sweetened to the perfect sap but my heart always feels so goddamn heavy like my flesh holds on tight to everything it comes in contact with.

When I was in the fourth grade the girl beside me had her chair leg on my foot and I didn’t want to tell her that she was hurting me so I left my little nine year old foot under her weight until she got up and when I went home that night I poked at my bruise and felt the remnants of the pain I withstood to not make someone else uncomfortable.

There are so many more of these markings that maybe didn’t leave a bruise but left deeper and unseen marks throughout my inner workings like scores in bark hidden behind rings of time and I don’t feel them until I am getting ready and feel immense sour shame rising up from my stomach or feel my back muscles spasming or feel my womb cramping or feel my ears thumping.

And writing things down has let me tap into these collected pains and pull them out of me and shelve them for me to yell at and cry at and laugh at.

It’s time to strengthen my roots for the long winter ahead with witchiness, bitchiness and vulnerability.

(2023)

every morning I go outside with bare feet and stand on the earth because I read once that most of the dirt you can see today is over 2 million years old and so maybe standing on it has been connecting my so(u)les with the pulse of millions of years of memories bc I may be shit at remembering to drink my coffee while it’s hot, but my bones feel like they hold the fears, hopes, dreams and tremblings of my ancestors and plugging into these waves has allowed me to hold my kin closer and makes the present more habitable; but in this same breath, memory is a link to freedom and this gift is being destroyed for many and so.. as I have been plugging into the earth these past weeks I’ve been trying to plug into my (un)belonging to this place I stand on, because belonging can be understood through examining relations of self and power <in place and space>; and I have been thinking a lot about Donna Haraway and her assertion of string figures - created through telling stories of kin <and odd kin> knottings and relations, and how getting on requires confronting the cluster of knots representing the reality of complex histories and knottings between life; because belonging is complicated, emotional, dynamic and complex and so I’m send love to my friends and family who are doing the hard work of bridging those memories and knottings to allow for more resistive politics of belonging with their kin