Missing Witches - Cancer Season - Water with Audre Lorde

00:00:00.000 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:06.600 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:10.900 Friends, witches, the demure and the curious, the filthy and wild, the sick and the, well, 0.99

00:00:19.620 welcome home to the coven we make here in the dark between our ears.

00:00:24.700 Welcome to a strange new season of the Missing Witches podcast.

00:00:28.160 Usually, here, starting at the autumn equinox, we begin a six-episode season telling stories

00:00:35.760 of real people who help us understand what we mean these days when we cackle and invoke

00:00:41.340 witchcraft, when we go looking for the witches we've been missing.

00:00:46.980 We typically spend the summer researching and writing these stories, but this summer

00:00:51.740 I was diagnosed with cancer, and Amy had her land wash away in a flood, leaving a crumbling

00:00:57.840 wound right at the edge of the home she and her husband had built with their bare hands.

00:01:02.940 And we find ourselves on a precipice. We're here. We want to be here with you. And we come

00:01:11.680 bearing stories, but we can't guarantee what shapes they'll take this year. They're still

00:01:17.900 metastasizing.

00:01:27.840 I'm going to begin with a miniature cancer season.

00:01:31.940 Episodes drawn from the elements, states of matter, the directions, the winds.

00:01:38.580 And while these episodes won't be solely devoted to telling true stories about missing witches,

00:01:43.540 there will be witches here, wise women who walked this cancer path before me.

00:01:49.440 I'm going to start with the water.

00:01:52.300 I'm going to follow Audre Lorde.

00:01:57.840 On June 3rd, 2024, I went with my husband Mark to get the results from a biopsy of my left breast

00:02:11.720 and a lymph node. The biopsy was way more painful than I'd been expecting and had left me with the

00:02:18.320 loud stapler sound of the ultrasound-guided biopsy machine ringing in my ear, and blood

00:02:24.360 spluttered all down my side, but still, I wasn't expecting cancer. I'd been losing weight for

00:02:32.000 almost two years. I was bone tired a lot of the time, but I always joked, I'm 43 with a five-year-old,

00:02:38.480 of course I'm tired. I danced, all knees and elbows, awkward white lady, in the tiny room

00:02:46.420 Mark and I waited in to meet the doctor, to shake off my nerves, and to make Mark laugh,

00:02:50.900 because he was way more scared than I was,

00:02:53.660 having lost his mother to cancer suddenly the year before.

00:02:57.660 And then she came in, the doctor, petite and sad-eyed,

00:03:01.300 and told me that the biopsy had come back positive,

00:03:04.060 and so I would have a meeting with the surgical team the following week.

00:03:09.120 She embraced me.

00:03:11.180 She told me,

00:03:12.280 Our goal is that you survive.

00:03:15.880 I can't tell the whole rest of the story now.

00:03:18.980 I can't manage it in any kind of order.

00:03:24.080 I'm writing you from one week post-surgery,

00:03:26.780 and I'll publish this in another week or five,

00:03:29.480 and life will keep crashing on us all like waves.

00:03:33.080 A part of coping with the identity headfuck of all this

00:03:36.520 is that it gets to a tipping point

00:03:39.380 where words are forcing themselves out of my ears and eyeballs.

00:03:43.060 everything is water-shaped and nothing here is linear

00:03:52.180 i am a cancer baby astrologically speaking my birthday is july 15 i celebrated 44 one week

00:04:11.060 before having my breasts cut empty.

00:04:14.460 Our element is water.

00:04:17.200 I wrote before about a kinship with undammed rivers.

00:04:20.240 I am a water person, always bursting my banks,

00:04:24.720 always weeping from joy, sorrow, rage, exhaustion, or nostalgia,

00:04:30.820 always game for swimming or dancing in the rain.

00:04:36.460 In the book, Amy and I co-wrote together about

00:04:39.320 anti-capitalist tools for resistance and re-enchantment

00:04:42.740 called New Moon Magic

00:04:44.000 in the chapter called The Body

00:04:46.420 in honor of the new moon in May

00:04:48.720 years ago I had written

00:04:51.060 For this May new moon we turn our attention to our bodies

00:04:56.880 how we move through the world

00:04:58.460 and also how the world moves through us

00:05:00.940 The nervous system is a vast web of sensors

00:05:05.340 the lymphatic system is a network of vessels that carry a clear fluid called lymph toward the heart

00:05:15.640 this fluid that moves through us takes its name from lympha the deities of fresh water

00:05:22.740 lympha bring inspiration even a creative frenzy one that can overturn all acceptable behavior

00:05:30.200 and social norms. We carry within us a vast network of sizzling vessels alchemizing what

00:05:37.180 comes into contact with our poorest selves. The lymph nodes are the underground rivers and wells

00:05:46.680 of these, our haunted temples, and mine were carrying cells that had lost the plot.

00:05:52.760 Mad with a growth mentality, so intent upon extraction and expansion, flipping tables,

00:05:59.040 overturning the acceptable behavior of cells

00:06:01.920 that they could wind up killing their host and themselves in the process.

00:06:08.760 I walked loops around the lake, waiting on test results,

00:06:12.700 until my fear brain was like a fever.

00:06:16.200 Back home and sweaty, I changed into my vintage brown bathing suit

00:06:20.400 with the purple and tomato red gardenias and walked quickly into the lake.

00:06:25.520 The water was high, the stone steps submerged,

00:06:29.040 The lake halfway up the beach.

00:06:31.780 The ancient horsetail, living fossils, had become bright green coral.

00:06:37.440 I swam hard to the middle, thinking about being strong.

00:06:41.460 Then froze, thinking maybe the movement sends cancer cells pumping through my lymphatic system faster.

00:06:48.540 I dove down and screamed with my eyes open and the murky depths shot through with light.

00:06:53.520 Please, Lake, please, please, please protect me for May.

00:07:01.940 And so maybe it's not such a surprise that later that day, when May took to the water, she suddenly felt held.

00:07:11.420 She floated on her back for the first time this season.

00:07:23.520 resting in the bowl like.

00:07:33.360 Shortly after this, I got the results from the nuclear bone scan and the MRI and the CT scan

00:07:39.540 and learned that it hadn't metastasized into my bones, liver, or lungs.

00:07:45.280 I would need a mastectomy and lymph node dissection and chemotherapy and radiation,

00:07:51.040 but after that my five-year survival odds were over 70 percent my friend Emily drove up with

00:07:59.540 her daughter Ivy for a sleepover and after Ivy asked us to come out and play for the 20th time

00:08:04.760 because she said the wind was making her spooked and there was a wildness to it the way the wind

00:08:10.320 can be so bodied in full summer the trees thick with blowing leaves I said would you like to do

00:08:17.580 a ritual with me? And her eyes lit up, as kids always do, and she said, yes. Suddenly, Emily was

00:08:24.780 out of her phone, too. We went outside, and I had May show them the heart-shaped clover that tastes

00:08:31.200 like sweet men, and how to recognize heal all, and where to find lavender and wild strawberries.

00:08:39.360 And we poured water into a beautiful stone bowl Mark had brought back from Japan, and set it in

00:08:46.020 front of the stone circle where we make our fires. Then we went down to the lake together and washed

00:08:51.400 our hands and faces, laughing at how warm the water felt in the cold wind. Then I let the girls

00:08:58.500 pull treasures out of my black velvet jinx monsoon bag, a pink rose quartz ball which Ivy clutched

00:09:06.020 to her chest, a felted ball made with layer after layer of color and cut open to reveal the secret

00:09:12.960 labors underneath that May had made at her hippie school before summer vacation, which she claimed

00:09:18.740 like a talisman from a long, long time ago. A heart which I had made with gentle witch artist

00:09:26.080 Lorraine in a five-hour ritual workshop where we took broken things, symbols of loss and betrayal

00:09:32.960 or whatever needed tending, and wrapped and stitched and wrapped and twisted and stitched

00:09:38.940 with beloved scraps of fabric,

00:09:41.180 a shape like a helical heart,

00:09:43.980 which Emily chose.

00:09:46.720 And finally, a brooch of jewel red roses

00:09:49.300 sent to me by my friend Kenneth,

00:09:51.500 who travels the world

00:09:52.560 with the most famous drag artists there are, 1.00

00:09:55.760 who is the reason I have a black velvet bag

00:09:58.200 from Jinx Monsoon,

00:10:00.700 and who practices a deep and quiet backstage magic

00:10:03.720 that lets him see right into the hearts of people like me

00:10:06.600 and hand them a perfect treasure.

00:10:08.940 that talisman was mine

00:10:12.020 it was with me at my wedding

00:10:13.380 I didn't wear it

00:10:15.060 but I keep it in my pocket

00:10:17.060 so I can grip its metal edges

00:10:18.800 when I'm afraid

00:10:19.640 we held these treasures

00:10:23.160 and pulled out the white sage

00:10:26.080 braided sweet grass

00:10:27.480 and eagle feather

00:10:28.260 which my brother-in-law's friend Isaiah

00:10:30.540 a gentle Mi'kmaq gardener

00:10:33.860 had sent me upon hearing

00:10:35.620 about my cancer

00:10:36.640 and i told this tiny coven so fleetingly assembled though the little girls had known

00:10:43.840 each other since before they were born their cells in each other's orbits since their mothers

00:10:48.780 were teenagers watching kids in the hall on repeat and laughing till we cried stinging rems

00:10:54.900 night swimming in a way that suggested one day we would know what it meant i told them that isaiah

00:11:01.480 had said, not to worry about doing it wrong. Anything done with love, our ancestors would

00:11:07.640 receive with love. And I told them I didn't know what to sing, but singing was important,

00:11:15.900 so I sang a song I'd learned in school, maybe, or at church camp. It was an appropriation,

00:11:21.980 certainly, but at its heart, true. And I felt Isaiah had known about this moment exactly.

00:11:28.780 and I remembered Amy shrugging and laughing

00:11:31.900 when we improvised the ingredients for our first spells

00:11:35.700 and saying, well, the goddess forgives.

00:11:39.140 And we kept singing till the little girls got it

00:11:41.720 and we were all singing together.

00:11:43.680 We lit the white sage for cleansing, 1.00

00:11:46.480 which I don't use unless an indigenous person like Isaiah 1.00

00:11:49.820 has given it to me with permission. 1.00

00:11:52.620 And when I do, my eyes fill with tears

00:11:54.920 of being treated so kindly

00:11:56.520 after so many generations of theft.

00:12:01.140 We lit it with a Bic lighter 0.82

00:12:02.740 and May waved the feather around us and washed us.

00:12:05.540 We put the sweet plants into the water with all our hopes.

00:12:09.640 And then Emily lit the braid of sweet grass

00:12:11.820 and we didn't know which end was right to light

00:12:14.680 and we felt all wrong again, but the goddess forgives.

00:12:17.860 And the kids don't have shame all baked in everywhere yet.

00:12:21.400 And we washed the smoke over each other

00:12:23.460 and told them it filled up every clean place with sweetness.

00:12:28.400 And Emily and I, our eyes shone with tears.

00:12:33.040 But then Ivy took a fistful of clover out of the bowl 1.00

00:12:35.720 and shoved it in her mouth,

00:12:37.060 and we all laughed and passed the bowl between us,

00:12:39.660 sipping it and feeling light and green.

00:12:43.240 And then Mark called us in for breakfast.

00:12:47.640 I asked the girls to give the water back to the lake,

00:12:50.340 but they forgot,

00:12:50.980 and it sat out all night beneath the first quarter moon.

00:12:55.900 In the morning I found it covered in dew on the picnic table

00:12:58.980 and I brought it in and poured it through a metal sieve into a mason jar.

00:13:03.920 I imagined it blessed by the growing moon and the growing kids,

00:13:08.580 the fat summer, and I felt like it was calling out to my courage.

00:13:14.260 I took the wet, sweet-smelling leaves and muddled berries from the sieve

00:13:19.140 outside and walked through the high wild flowers and grasses

00:13:23.320 calling hey snake

00:13:24.900 hey snake

00:13:27.200 so they'd get out of my way

00:13:29.480 till I found the altar stone where I'd buried my placenta all those years ago

00:13:34.220 and I wiped the lavender and heal all

00:13:37.760 and St. John's wort and clover on her like a paste

00:13:41.060 here love

00:13:43.800 we are still connected through this altar stone

00:13:47.100 and down into the soil

00:13:49.200 where our cells seep into the earth

00:13:51.120 beneath the stone

00:13:52.060 into the foundations of my home

00:13:53.940 all these years later

00:13:55.080 here, you take this too

00:13:57.840 draw it into our foundations

00:14:00.940 let it stain and sustain us

00:14:05.200 back inside I ran the shower

00:14:10.280 and cleaned myself

00:14:11.360 I always felt the strangeness

00:14:13.260 in my left breast in the shower

00:14:15.840 My hands strayed towards it hundreds of times a day.

00:14:20.240 Right before I got out, I poured the cold moon water on my breasts,

00:14:24.560 then baptized my head.

00:14:27.160 I didn't believe this would take cancer from me,

00:14:30.960 but I asked it to hold me anyway.

00:14:35.180 I don't know exactly how to explain, except it's beautiful.

00:14:39.080 It's better than the terror stance, the fugue state,

00:14:42.240 The TV coma, the crying, the other ways I passed that time.

00:14:51.560 After surgery, my friend Ina came to visit with her daughter Yasmin and her partner Sam,

00:14:57.420 and the dads and the kids swam while we sat together on the porch.

00:15:01.980 I sat in a recliner and Ina balanced on a tiny hard stool rather than sit on the couch

00:15:07.080 so she could be right by me and hold my hand.

00:15:09.620 she brought me a tisane to help me sleep

00:15:13.020 and told me she'd asked her friend

00:15:14.660 who was a doctor if there was a tisane

00:15:16.420 to help with my pain and nausea

00:15:18.360 after surgery and general anesthetic

00:15:20.400 and the doctor had said

00:15:22.040 no, Ina, there's no tea for that

00:15:24.480 and we laughed

00:15:26.000 she brought me a copy of

00:15:28.400 Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

00:15:30.080 her stories and hymns from Sumer

00:15:32.120 a story about descending into the land of the dead

00:15:34.760 losing everything

00:15:36.420 and coming back

00:15:38.420 and she brought me a mason jar of water which she had charged with friends under the solstice

00:15:44.320 strawberry moon after a day of labor together laughing and stuffing my leaves

00:15:48.840 she said i asked them to send their strength to my intention

00:15:53.260 i held you in my heart then and i have been all days since

00:15:58.360 then she looked at me a little skeptically and said look it sat out in the yard all night

00:16:04.640 under the moon, and then it sat on my shelf for a while,

00:16:08.700 so maybe don't put it near your stitches or anything.

00:16:11.940 I laughed again and promised not to.

00:16:16.240 A few days later, I got my drains out.

00:16:20.300 The plastic tubes that came from deep inside me

00:16:23.260 and drew red-yellow liquid into little bulbs

00:16:25.820 I had worn in an apron around my waist for two weeks.

00:16:30.320 A week after that, I was allowed to shower for the first time.

00:16:34.640 Mark had taken May on a two-night canoe trip, intent on making this cancer summer one of magic for her.

00:16:41.980 My mom and sister stayed to care for me.

00:16:45.340 My sister swam across the lake by herself for the first time.

00:16:49.600 We gathered our strength.

00:16:52.060 On shower day, they hovered and wanted to help, but I gently closed the door, and they understood.

00:16:57.620 I could lift my arms enough now to get out of my clothes, to pull the last bandages off,

00:17:02.460 to stand naked in the mirror with my strange but familiar self.

00:17:07.860 In the shower, I washed my own hair for the first time in weeks.

00:17:12.080 I tended to my skin with gentle soaps,

00:17:15.540 in awe of this moment of being alive.

00:17:18.720 I opened the jar from Ina and called out to Ina,

00:17:21.980 Venus, Brigid, Melusine, the moon, all my coven,

00:17:26.440 all the people who had offered prayers

00:17:28.340 and the languages and frameworks that made sense to them.

00:17:31.200 I felt them run through

00:17:34.240 I felt all of them in the water

00:17:36.900 rushing over me

00:17:38.580 and I thanked them and told them

00:17:41.900 Kimo is coming

00:17:43.980 please continue to carry me

00:17:47.000 please let the road rise up to meet me

00:17:50.200 as I continue my descent

00:17:51.880 please help me find my way home

00:17:54.860 and I poured Ina's moon water on my feet

00:17:58.780 sometimes my improvised rituals are funny and fun sometimes they are a kind of performance or

00:18:11.140 experiment i do them laughing wondering playing full of awe

00:18:18.300 in all ways they've settled in and just become part of my sense making in a nonsense world

00:18:27.340 I see them rising up before me, a possibility.

00:18:32.480 I make sure I'm safe and then go to where I'm asked to be.

00:18:36.420 I've just accepted it, and I won't keep re-litigating it for the judgmental chorus in my head.

00:18:42.540 This is how I've made up my dance with the world, or this is how it dances with me.

00:18:48.780 I was tempted to say the spirit world, but that's not quite right.

00:18:52.940 I don't feel like there's a secret hidden dimension of spirit that I can unlock or enter with the right gestures, or not exactly.

00:19:02.720 It feels more like seeing the world as it really is.

00:19:08.040 The all world.

00:19:11.080 It's right here.

00:19:14.820 The possibility of leaning into the wind and saying hello.

00:19:20.020 Or anointing rocks in the garden.

00:19:22.940 or laughing and drinking leafy water with little kids is all as likely as anything else.

00:19:30.360 As I wrote that sentence, a small, sturdy body, five and a half, in all confidence, 1.00

00:19:35.200 went running past in her underwear with a pile of different swimsuits thrown over her shoulder like a purse, yelling, 1.00

00:19:41.360 Good morning!

00:19:44.360 And that was a spell, too.

00:19:48.180 I found out my little sister was pregnant the day after I learned I had cancer.

00:19:52.940 And she came up to visit for a week before my surgery.

00:19:56.480 And we spent that week gently paddling around and floating in time together,

00:20:01.300 while inside of us, cells rapidly multiplied.

00:20:06.800 At night, of course, sometimes the panic took me like drowning.

00:20:12.040 And I held on to Mark like a life raft, whispering,

00:20:16.040 Get it out of me. Get it out of me. Get it out of me.

00:20:22.940 On July 24th, I had a bilateral mastectomy.

00:20:31.320 That's both sides.

00:20:33.540 One side was cancer-ridden, and the scalpels cut deep.

00:20:37.980 I also had a series of lymph nodes removed from my left side.

00:20:42.300 I had tissue expanders, thick, awkward, empty plastic bags placed under my skin,

00:20:48.200 which would be slowly inflated with salt water over weeks,

00:20:51.740 until after the cancer is fully and finally cut and gouged and poisoned and burnt out of me

00:20:58.580 some months in the future from now. I will return for another surgery, and the expanders will be

00:21:04.800 replaced with gummy bear implants, silicone formed with crossed polymers, so that if burst

00:21:11.920 or cut, all the silicone stays in place, like a gummy bear. I wrote about this choice on social

00:21:19.340 media, saying, if you had asked me before when it was theoretical, I wouldn't have guessed I'd

00:21:25.380 have chosen implant. But when it came time, I knew for sure I wanted to come through the other side

00:21:30.080 of this with these parts of me. Suddenly, the fight for gender-affirming surgery became very

00:21:35.880 real for me in my body. I wanted to hold the weight of my breasts in my hands again after

00:21:45.700 cancer. I wanted my symmetry. I just knew in my body that if I came out the other side without

00:21:52.040 my breasts, it would leave a pit of grief. It would eat away at my mental health. I would take 0.97

00:21:57.800 them even if they were fake, even if it hurt. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but if

00:22:04.120 you've ever had to listen to a voice inside your body yelling that it knew who it was,

00:22:08.740 then I know you understand.

00:22:13.640 The weeks after surgery were like being held underwater,

00:22:17.940 sometimes surfacing,

00:22:19.700 time passing in the fast, slow way of pain.

00:22:24.820 Plastic drains buried deep within my chest dripped all day,

00:22:28.260 and Mark and May took a kind of pleasure

00:22:30.720 in being the ones to lovingly check,

00:22:32.920 marking their contents in clarity every day,

00:22:36.460 celebrating the tide receding.

00:22:38.740 My mom didn't want to look at the drains, but May is not afraid.

00:22:46.500 She taught herself to swim during our cancer season.

00:22:50.260 One day she was in the water telling us,

00:22:52.420 Look, look, I'm doing it, but she wasn't.

00:22:54.920 And I said something like,

00:22:56.480 You're jumping up and down and kicking like a champ, but you're staying in one place.

00:23:01.320 You won't be swimming until you can move across the water.

00:23:03.720 you'll be swimming when all your muscles figure out how to keep moving together to stay afloat

00:23:09.640 but honestly it doesn't matter what we think whether we believe you're swimming or not

00:23:14.820 what matters is that you will know and you're doing your best

00:23:19.900 and a minute later she swam and then she turned into a fish

00:23:25.700 on the monday after surgery i surfaced for my first follow-up visit with the plastics team

00:23:34.720 they asked how i was feeling and i told them that aside from the pain in a tight line across

00:23:41.320 the chest where i had been cut open aside from the feeling of ache and collapse and dysmorphia

00:23:47.800 in my deflated chest and the ache in my back from constantly curling around my chest to protect my

00:23:54.060 loss, my bloody emptiness. Apart from the surreal agony of feeling stiff plastic under my skin with

00:24:01.640 my fingers, the pain of an underground open wound though the skin itself was numb and might always

00:24:08.280 be. Aside from that, the worst part was just feeling just sick. Time had slurred and stretched

00:24:18.740 in waves of heat, heart palpitations, panic, weepy, a feeling of being ill at ease, my family trying

00:24:26.600 to keep me comfortable with a routine of ice packs and British crime dramas. For that whole first

00:24:32.320 week, I just felt sick. The plastics team was a disconcerting gaggle of young hot men, but they 1.00

00:24:41.780 looked at me with deep and gentle compassion. They held my hands, and they said, yes, I'm so sorry. 0.56

00:24:49.800 This is so normal, and that doesn't make it better, and I'm so sorry. What I was feeling, they said,

00:24:56.060 was mostly anesthesia sick and opioid sick, aside from the fundamental identity pain.

00:25:04.080 They said, drink all the water you can to get the drugs out of you. Try as soon as you can to stop

00:25:10.220 take in the Oxycontin and you will feel better. Then they said, we're going to do the first

00:25:18.980 filling of the expanders today. Not for any cosmetic reason, but to help with your healing.

00:25:24.920 To take up some of the space in there so there's less room for fluid to accumulate and become

00:25:29.840 infected. It was about a balance of waters. I closed my eyes and they injected a needle into

00:25:37.880 my dumb flesh and slowly saltwater rushed into these new caves I carry, subterranean 0.97

00:25:44.160 temples honoring the death that could not take me this time but will eventually. No 0.99

00:25:50.380 less sacred for being hidden in plain sight. On the right side, injection point, I felt

00:25:57.560 nothing. On the left side, where the surgeon had removed more tissue to dig out the tiny

00:26:03.700 roots of cancer taking hold, and where they had reached up into my armpit to cut out the

00:26:08.540 cancerous lymph nodes and also those a row beyond, I felt a screaming shot of lightning.

00:26:14.980 I yelled, and they held my hands harder, and they kept going, and it felt like time collapsing

00:26:20.760 and a black hole opening directly through me.

00:26:26.720 It was only a minute, but I came out of it in a cold sweat, filled with deep regret.

00:26:33.700 Why did I choose this disastrous and painful illusion when microplastics are increasingly

00:26:42.420 associated with cancers? Why did I put this hard metal plastic into the bloody open wound above my

00:26:48.220 heart? Am I, as Audre Lorde put it in the introduction to her own cancer journals,

00:26:54.400 with a forgiveness that almost makes it harder to bear? Am I a woman who has chosen the path

00:27:00.900 of prosthesis, of silence and invisibility? Should I have worn my empty spaces like a 0.94

00:27:07.800 refusal to be normal, obedient, woman-shaped? Should I have been more brave and let my 0.96

00:27:13.600 refigured body help me scream my rage at the polluting systems that are accomplices to

00:27:18.800 this ancient disease? I'm still carrying all these doubts, all these new opportunities

00:27:26.340 for shame. The surgery is not the only reason I moved like a caved-in person for all those early

00:27:33.740 days. The night before the first time the expanders were filled, I had a panic attack and felt the

00:27:41.920 screaming, aching weirdness of hard plastic curling up below my collarbones, saw it in me

00:27:48.180 reaching for my throat, and Mark held me again while I sobbed my new litany, not just about the

00:27:54.420 cancer this time. Get it out of me. Get it out of me. Get it out of me.

00:28:07.320 The next day, as we walked away from the hospital, maybe 20 minutes after getting the

00:28:15.120 saline pushed into the empty spaces of my chest wall for that first time, Mark made me laugh.

00:28:21.740 He's good at that.

00:28:22.840 And as we hustled across a busy intersection to get to our parked car,

00:28:27.180 he looked at me funny and said,

00:28:28.980 You're night and day right now.

00:28:31.160 You look like you feel better.

00:28:34.080 And I stood still.

00:28:36.180 I felt my feet steady beneath me as the rivers of cars and people eddied past.

00:28:42.180 And I realized some core aspect of my balance had been returned.

00:28:48.880 I stood taller.

00:28:51.560 The hollowed-out caves of my chest were filled with just a little water, and it had uncurled me, opened me, lifted me a few millimeters towards a remembered body harmony, and Lord forgive me, it was a gift.

00:29:10.040 in the following days before i was allowed to shower the climate tipped past record heat

00:29:18.840 day after day and the west blazed and ancient rivers ran dry

00:29:23.160 jasper alberta which had seemed like one of those old colonial gems wounds in the chest of native

00:29:31.100 lands treasures to generations of settlers the kind of place that people in power would always

00:29:37.420 managed to save. Burned to the ground. Conservative Minister Danielle Smith, who had gutted the fire

00:29:46.900 department, wept at the press conference for the lost tourism dollars. And then she went on to gut

00:29:53.400 the province's health care system. And I sat at the water's edge by a small ancient lake in the east,

00:30:00.720 watching the reddening sky, while first my brother-in-law's girlfriend Sarah, and then my

00:30:06.260 neighbor Isabel and her daughter Juliet and then a few days later my mother Cheryl washed and braided

00:30:13.120 my hair. I wasn't allowed to get my bandages wet. I wasn't able to lift my arms. I couldn't find any

00:30:22.740 kind of words for what it meant to me except it gave me back everything I believed to be hopeful

00:30:28.840 and good in the whole world.

00:30:32.380 Pouring jug after jug of cold water

00:30:35.460 over my burning, itching scalp

00:30:37.940 that crawled with heatwaves sweat

00:30:39.960 and with my night terrors also.

00:30:42.680 The water ran under my bare feet

00:30:45.020 and back down into the lake.

00:30:48.900 Audre Lorde wrote,

00:30:50.740 That two-week period of time seems like an age to me now

00:30:54.480 because so many different changes passed through me.

00:30:57.180 actually the course of my psychic and physical convalescence moved quite quickly

00:31:03.060 i do not know why i do know that there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing

00:31:10.240 into me from the women around me and it felt like being bathed in a continuous tide of positive

00:31:16.100 energies even when sometimes i wanted a bit of negative silence to complement the pain inside of

00:31:22.600 me. But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image meanings for

00:31:30.020 me now, one of which is floating upon a sea, within a ring of women, like warm bubbles

00:31:37.480 keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water 0.95

00:31:45.000 just beneath their eyes and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and

00:31:51.680 laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away

00:31:58.300 from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these

00:32:07.120 women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself. There is so much false spirituality

00:32:15.740 around us these days, calling itself goddess worship or the way. It is false because too

00:32:23.740 cheaply bought and little understood, but most of all because it does not lend but rather

00:32:30.240 saps that energy we need to do our work. So when an example of the real power of healing love

00:32:38.180 comes along, such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it.

00:32:45.740 I see a ring of women, like warm bubbles, keeping me afloat. 0.60

00:32:55.800 When I start to feel like I am drowning, I feel their hands in my hair.

00:33:02.420 I feel the weight of water sitting above my heart.

00:33:06.800 How it came washing over me, and flooding into me, and I uncurled a little, stood taller,

00:33:13.720 and my parts remembered something about myself

00:33:18.040 alive in the burning world.

00:33:22.720 It's difficult to talk about it

00:33:24.740 but what matters is that you know

00:33:26.580 I whisper to May and to myself.

00:33:32.100 The days will continue to crash on us relentlessly like waves

00:33:35.720 and we'll make choices and mistakes

00:33:38.280 and do our best.

00:33:40.900 And one day

00:33:42.040 your body parts will figure out

00:33:45.960 how to all move together again

00:33:48.360 and on that day

00:33:50.800 you'll fly across the water

00:33:52.600 and one day our parts will figure out

00:33:58.140 how to all move together again

00:33:59.960 and on that day

00:34:02.780 we'll fly across the water 0.98

00:34:04.620 blessed fucking be 1.00

00:34:12.040 You must be a witch. 1.00

Missing Witches - September 23, 2024

Cancer Season - Water with Audre Lorde

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