Hello friends!
It has been FAR too long. Our last post was on March 21, but it was scheduled a week prior, which means that immediately after said scheduling, the world fell spectacularly and completely apart.
Time has both flown and crawled by, and the weight of Not Posting got heavier and heavier, which on one hand is ridiculous and on the other, everyone who has ever had a blog or website knows the feeling.
Today, with Samhain coming up to mark the Witches’ New Year, I am diving in with an update on what I’ve been doing these last months, and what we are planning for the next Witch Year.
A Personal Update from your Head Witch In Charge:
My day job moved to work-from-home on March 18, and plans to continue at least through June 2021. I never thought I’d be able to work from home, being an extrovert who needs structure with a capital S, but it turns out I love it and I cherish a semi-secret hope that I can keep doing this.
In April I joined many of my bookish friends in writing for Book Riot, which has been a ton of fun and also predictably caused my TBR pile to explode.
June was a big month, both in the United States as a whole and in my own smaller sphere.
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My niephlets and their parents snookered me into a third cat: a grey tuxedo kitten named Wogglebug Strange Frances, aka Bug. (To be fair, it wasn’t hard…) He’s six months old now and simultaneously a complete love and a complete terror. My personal Instagram has been a lot of Bug a lot of the time, especially with the usual activities curtailed.
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My paternal grandmother passed away in mid-June, a week before her 94th birthday. We weren’t close, partly because I grew up several thousand miles away and also because we share a lot of the same stubbornness. Despite that, her death has asked me to walk a line between how I approach my practice as a witch and how I respect who my ancestors are. In this case, Alicia was a devout Catholic, and I still haven’t quite figured out how to honor her memory within the boundaries of witchcraft. Rest assured, I intend to explore that in future posts.
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The murder of George Floyd sparked protests across the country, and as someone who does all she can to lend her voice to the support of Black lives, especially here in Oakland, it felt strange to not join in due to COVID-19. I acknowledge that I could – perhaps should – have gone anyway, especially in hindsight. But recalling what we knew in early June vs. what we know now, I was afraid to attend; we didn’t know then that masks in outside spaces would greatly reduce the transmission rate. I will expand on this further in a dedicated post, but let me be very clear: Black lives matter. Black education matters. Black people matter.
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My Uncoven created an Unlearning Book Club, committed to learning about and finding concrete ways to combat the kyriarchy – particularly racism – on a daily basis. We are learning so much, and developing both habits of retrospection and action plans. It has been an eye-opening experience and we’re just getting started.
I voted with tears in my eyes for a daughter of Oakland as Vice President of the United States.
Between March and October, I wrote 620 letters to voters through Vote Forward. I spent 6 months testing different wicks for 14-day candles because the supply chain was broken by COVID, and have finally found one that works! Now I can pour my own, and just in time for my local witch store to have them in stock again, naturally.
I have fully committed to being a green witch and have filled any flat surface in the upper 1/3 of my apartment with plants. Anything below that 1/3 line has been claimed by the cats; several plants that have been left on the counter or in the kitchen sink have been feasted upon – thankfully to no ill effect in general, although the plants may feel otherwise.
One day about a month ago, I picked up some watercolors that had been laying around my desk for who knows how long, and I’m now fully on a path to becoming a watercolorist.
Which brings me to the second part of this post…
What’s to come at Decade of the Witch:
Firstly, on Samhain, I will spend the day pouring small spell candles, which will go up in the shop (the one I haven’t set up yet…). With the candles will come a hand-painted spell and herb dust from my garden, as well as other carefully curated sources. My Uncoven witches have all been diving into their own particular brands of magic and spellcasting too, so my fingers are crossed that they will be called to share their prodigious talents with all of us.
Secondly, I am committing to posting at least once per week here on Sundays. Several of my fellow witches also have ideas they’d like to explore, so it is my hope to ramp up eventually to multiple posts per week. We intend to discuss everything under the sun, moon, and stars as it relates to our personal practices and also our interaction with the wider world.
And that’s it! Like so many things in life, it turns out that just doing the thing is less work than worrying about doing said thing, so I’m going to hit that publish button now.