Missing Witches Risa Dickens + Amy Torok

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

Welcome back to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our Kinship Season, which is dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our more than human kin. In the fall we’ll do a season dedicated to people stories again - our classic Missing Witches stories - and throughout the summer we’ll have Witches Found Interviews and episodes of the Rx, our list of people and of songs and other media to learn from about craft and magic and resistance and re-enchantment is long. But in the spring we need to balance out against people-logic by digging into soil, learning about the plants and animals and rocks and winds and waters that are us too, as we wind our wild ways through the holobiont that we all are here on Earth. These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalist motivational meditations, and we hope you’ll take these offerings in that original sense: seed bombs hurled on the pristine dying lawns of Mondays. Blessed Fucking Be.

I have spent most of my life more like water than stone. Tears are always on the edges of my eyes, my thoughts are muddy or quick-flowing, it’s easy to splash me around and stir me up. 

But I am shield kin too....

A Black woman artist holds the top spots on country music charts and planetary bodies are coming into perfect alignment. Portals do open and things will change.
After a week in the car listening to Beyonce's requiem for America, it's the song Just for Fun which sits in Risa's heart this week and offers its medicine.
"'Cause time heals everything
I don't need anything
Hallelujah
I pray to her
I pray to her"
You know those times when you try to do something good — like ready your garden for Spring — or something just for fun — like make music in a new genre — and you are met with so much resistance it breaks your heart or lays your flat out on your back? This week we resist the urge to see it as a sign, and we lean into the thermodynamics of it all instead. Bodies at rest want to stay at rest, systems, genres, and gardens have inertia and push back hard against attempts at change. But time heals everything, and we don't need anything. Just rest, and then another step, and trust that momentum builds. Bodies in motion want to stay in motion. Our gathering magic is a fundamental property of matter and energy in this magical universe.
Amy injured herself while trying to build a garden to feed her family and her community, but bolstered by Cayelin and Zoe's Eclipse message that fear can be turned into strength, and Crosby, Stills Nash & Young's Carry On, Amy made a donation to World Central Kitchen and remains undaunted in the cultivation of hope.
"A new day, a new way, and new eyes to see the dawn. Carry on, love is coming. Love is coming to us all."
https://www.missingwitches.com/rx-carry-on-love-is-coming/

I am a creature of the night.  The bible says I’m unclean.  I’ve been painted as evil because I’m special in ways that people could not understand.  I fly in the dark, defying the laws of what men know. Mysterious, villainous, enigmatic, suspicious, monstrous, and full of secrets.
Misunderstood, yet integral to the workings of our world.
I am a witch and I am bat kin.
A group of bats is sometimes called a cauldron, so let’s gather in or around a cauldron and look for what we have in common, what we Witches can learn from bats.

www.missingwitches.com/we-are-bat-kin/

This week we are listening to plants and synthesizers. And we are calling back our power.

One self-prescription for this season is to luxuriate in fruit. Let yourself be seduced by colour, generous sweetness, and the way fruit makes itself desirable and delicious so that animals will seek it out and spread its seeds. Ease your beloved bones on a velvet chaise lounge (or similar) and feed yourself grapes, berries, persimmons... dare to eat a peach! Know that you are tending to your wisest future crone self, and thereby to a profound source of no-f***s given power in the universe.

Music from Mort Garson suggests that every cell has a soul. Can synthesizers connect us to our cellular spirituality? Do each of our senses have a seed where love has been planted? Can we see our world, our bodies, our gardens as a Cathedral of Pleasure? We think so!

https://www.missingwitches.com/rx-sing-the-body-electric/

We want to thank Tasha Lavdovsky for allowing us to share their music in this episode, the lichens of the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park are the source of the chemical dataset that has been translated into piano music for the project, "Music for Lichens", created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.