Missing Witches - I Am Spider Plant Kin – Everywhere and Unkillable

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our kinship season, which is

00:00:06.120 dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our more

00:00:12.460 than human kin. In the fall, we'll do a season dedicated to people's stories again, our classic

00:00:19.080 Missing Witches stories, and throughout the summer, we'll have witches found, interviews,

00:00:22.940 our list of people to learn from about craft and magic and resistance and re-enchantment is

00:00:28.480 long and fertile. But in the spring, we need to balance out against people logic by digging into

00:00:35.580 soil, learning about the plants and animals and rocks and winds and waters that are us too,

00:00:42.380 as we wind our wild ways through the hollow biont that we all are here on earth.

00:00:47.740 These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek, anti-capitalist,

00:00:52.640 motivational meditations, and we hope you'll take these offerings in that original sense.

00:00:58.060 Seed bombs hurled on the pristine, dying lawns of Mondays. 0.99

00:01:03.100 Bless it fucking be. 0.99

00:01:18.860 I was not successfully a houseplant person on my own. 0.98

00:01:24.140 In my 20s, I lived with my friend Emily in an apartment that looked out over Mount Royal.

00:01:29.040 With these old wood-framed French doors and a wrought iron railing,

00:01:33.420 not a balcony, just a 10-foot window with a balustrade.

00:01:37.360 Four floors up in the air that made you want to lean out into the wind and sing.

00:01:42.380 Sometimes our neighbor would lean out of his French doors next door and drunkenly play the trumpet.

00:01:47.040 It was that kind of thing.

00:01:49.300 A wild and flourishing thing.

00:01:52.620 For a while.

00:01:53.360 A fast road wound immediately below like a river,

00:02:05.760 and we could see a convent with its dwindling numbers of cloistered nuns

00:02:09.220 silently keeping their secrets,

00:02:11.480 pacing their fourth-floor balcony on the next block behind the consulate.

00:02:15.940 And beyond that was all the fierce movement of wind in trees up the hill

00:02:20.400 made into a park by the urban planner who had also made Central Park,

00:02:24.800 a lung maker in cities, Mount Royal.

00:02:29.520 Emily kept a little tree alive in that apartment, but barely,

00:02:32.420 and it died when she left for that room on Vancouver's east side

00:02:35.900 with the shared bathroom down the hall.

00:02:38.460 For love, for music, for love.

00:02:42.480 I had one spider plant, which became, like, seven in the way of spider plants.

00:02:47.940 Maybe our 20s are spider plant years.

00:02:50.400 At first, I was very pleased with that plant and with myself, an offshoot of one my mother

00:02:58.120 kept alive.

00:03:00.080 I was delighted with the way it shot out long stems and grew roots in the air like white

00:03:05.100 fingers finger-walking, looking for better soil, proud of my little babies.

00:03:14.180 But after cutting and transplanting a few into more poor soil, I have to admit, I came

00:03:20.380 to hate them. They were everywhere failing. Pale yellow leaves, white knobby little obscene root

00:03:28.940 fingers on every end, creeping dry and ugly across the rain-damaged wood floors.

00:03:36.860 They never quite died, but they weren't happy either.

00:03:42.220 But those little fingers were reservoirs. Even when the leaves failed, the plant was storing life

00:03:48.380 for later. The houseplant, we call the spider plant, chlorophytum comosum, is native to tropical

00:03:57.960 and southern Africa. It evolved in wet, shady river valleys, forest edges where light flutters

00:04:05.080 down through trees and waters stored in thick roots that help it make the relay through drought season.

00:04:18.380 When we import it into our kitchens and living rooms, its biology still remembers.

00:04:33.340 Long, arcing leaves above, cascading through canopies, underground resonating thick and wet.

00:04:40.920 what we call a houseplant is a migrant although that's not the most accurate metaphor is it

00:04:49.780 from human experience for someone who is taken from africa without their permission

00:04:54.940 and forced to adapt to small containers icy winters food that makes you sick

00:05:00.020 body subjected to the concept of property and being property

00:05:04.580 Did I remember to say that these kinship meditations are

00:05:31.120 and have always been anti-imperialist seed bombs?

00:05:34.580 thrown onto parched lawns, that we are here in the coven we create between our ears.

00:05:41.040 To dream, to wonder in widening circles about how to resist the death cults that have evolved

00:05:46.780 and expanded their logic, reaching from early to late-stage capitalist expansion, slavery,

00:05:52.400 monocropping, and international trade in living beings.

00:05:56.960 Systems that evolve and shape the Kyriarchy, keeping resources flowing up to high, narrow

00:06:01.340 peaks increasingly detached from the web and susceptible to collapse. And did I say

00:06:06.280 that we will write from here a kind of threnody to all the beings and ideas and relations

00:06:14.520 and witches we are missing to try and together re-enchant the world, that it will be imperfect

00:06:22.940 and we will do it anyway. And we will just try not to fuck it up too much. 0.59

00:06:31.340 I was miserable, as were my spider plants. 0.99

00:06:48.040 But we were tough and knobby and difficult to kill.

00:06:53.260 I didn't want to understand what they were saying about me and the situation we were in.

00:06:57.260 I had a migraine for 10 years, but I looked away from the information that the spider plants were

00:07:02.360 scratching in the air and the edges of that apartment. They were living what I was too.

00:07:09.600 A not thriving. A longing to walk away on ghostly new appendages. A memory of a life that was more

00:07:18.120 alive. Because by then Emily had moved out and my boyfriend had moved in and he smoked weed all day

00:07:25.060 long and built a supercomputer with 12 Linux machines running time trials humming like an

00:07:29.580 airport all night long. We had fun too and we made wild art events together but we couldn't figure

00:07:37.480 out how to make it sustainable. The love for the business and the plants got sicker and sicker

00:07:44.140 and the pipes never worked well and then the bathtub coughed up black gunk and we got behind

00:07:49.040 on our rent and hid from the handyman because we owed him money and because I was scared of him

00:07:53.860 The way he'd cornered me in the bathroom once, and I felt the air full of threat.

00:07:59.260 And the stench of rot in the black bath, and the way he'd bang on the doors in the night,

00:08:03.980 and we'd pretend not to be home.

00:08:06.060 Only ghosts here, creaking.

00:08:09.360 We made it out. It wasn't pretty, but we did it.

00:08:12.440 We had that white, middle-class, settler-colonizer privilege of second chances. 0.78

00:08:17.880 A friend who was moving signed over his lease to us, a cheaper, smaller apartment, no plants. 0.75

00:08:23.860 Eventually, I left the relationship, too.

00:08:27.860 To do it, I had to leave everything and walk out the door one day into the snow

00:08:32.860 and then start calling people to see where I could sleep that night.

00:08:36.860 I took a series of crummy jobs until I got one that offered me a balance of corporate safety

00:08:41.860 and some space for my community-building magic and some time and resources to breathe a little bit.

00:08:48.860 I had to find in my body a version of myself that I could recognize.

00:08:56.360 In the following years, I threw my body, sometimes recklessly,

00:09:01.240 out of the mile end in Montreal and into the world.

00:09:04.720 I went to South Africa and sat on Table Mountain in the fog with my little sister 0.99

00:09:09.560 as she slowly acclimated her body to the grief of leaving the pregnant mothers

00:09:14.420 she had dedicated the last year of her life to in Uganda behind.

00:09:18.860 I didn't know it, but the spider plants were there.

00:09:27.420 I went to Vietnam and walked for hours to sit in dark caves where the Buddha had come

00:09:31.580 to worship a presence in the earth that people had come to to pray for their children for

00:09:36.820 thousands of years before he joined them.

00:09:41.760 I went to Miami and Shanghai and Nashville, lots of places, sometimes for work, always

00:09:47.680 to meet hologram versions of me and see what they knew.

00:09:52.660 It was a total privilege and also a kind of compulsion.

00:09:58.400 Sometimes I watched myself from the outside shaking my head.

00:10:01.700 Sometimes I put myself in bad places.

00:10:05.240 It was related to the drinking and the weed and the cigarettes.

00:10:10.100 It was a purer form of whatever that harmonic was I was always chasing.

00:10:17.680 Thank you.

00:10:47.680 The spider plant's most famous habit is reproduction by wandering.

00:11:14.460 Instead of relying mainly on seeds, spider plants grow long, flowering stems that produce tiny plantlets, miniature clones, at their tips.

00:11:24.760 These dangle in the air until gravity, or an animal like a human being, brings them into contact with soil, where they grow roots and begin again.

00:11:34.940 Botanists describe these stems as inflorescences carrying vegetative offsets.

00:11:40.040 The strategy is one of dispersal without forgetting.

00:11:43.320 Each new plant is genetically the same individual,

00:11:46.000 extending itself outward, a living network of selves,

00:11:49.060 an everywhere self, everywhere seeking.

00:11:52.740 Not children, exactly.

00:11:54.680 More like fingertips of the same body,

00:11:57.720 reaching for another surface.

00:12:12.380 When a spider plant sends out its long, arching stems

00:12:19.200 and forms little plantlets at the tips,

00:12:21.940 those plantlets are produced through vegetative reproduction.

00:12:25.300 No pollen, no mixing of genes, no second parent.

00:12:29.940 Each plantlet grows directly from the tissues of the parent plant

00:12:33.060 and carries the same DNA.

00:12:35.960 Botanically, they're clones,

00:12:38.240 genetically identical extensions of the same organism.

00:12:42.380 This means the hanging chains of spiderettes are not a family tree, but a body spreading outward.

00:12:51.020 Many plants use similar strategies.

00:12:53.700 Strawberries send runners.

00:12:55.380 Aspens share underground roots.

00:12:57.700 But the spider plant does it midair,

00:13:00.100 suspending its future selves like a mobile of green comets waiting to land.

00:13:12.380 Because the houseplants are almost always propagated this way,

00:13:21.380 millions of spider plants across the world

00:13:24.020 belong to just a handful of ancient genetic individuals.

00:13:29.220 The most common variegated forms,

00:13:32.800 cultivars like vitatum or variegatum,

00:13:36.460 have been reproduced almost entirely by cloning since the 19th century,

00:13:40.340 when they were first circulated through European botanical gardens and horticultural trade.

00:13:46.780 Every time someone hands a friend a spider plant baby,

00:13:50.380 the same organism stretches a little farther through the human world.

00:13:55.960 Its body exists as a scattered archipelago, everywhere seeking.

00:14:03.140 I'm Spider Plant Kin, everywhere seeking.

00:14:10.340 Spider plants remind me

00:14:32.500 of another distributed body.

00:14:35.440 In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, 0.99

00:14:37.760 A mother of five children was bleeding, and she went to Johns Hopkins, one of the only hospitals that would treat a black woman with cancer, in their colored people's ward.

00:14:48.700 When treating her cervical cancer by stitching radium inside her cervix, the best treatment at the time, doctors took cells from a tumor in her cervix without her knowledge.

00:15:00.960 They were taking cells from every patient, black and white,

00:15:04.400 in keeping with protocols that were considered acceptable at the time.

00:15:07.860 That doesn't make it right, does it?

00:15:10.340 To take from us without asking us,

00:15:12.500 especially cancer patients from whom everything is being taken.

00:15:16.460 Time with our kids, especially black cancer patients 0.99

00:15:20.180 from whom everything is being taken.

00:15:22.580 Dignity, comfort.

00:15:24.920 She should have gotten to know before she died at 31.

00:15:28.260 her children should have gotten to know 1.00

00:15:30.680 that Henrietta's cancer cells, 1.00

00:15:33.960 HALA cells, didn't die.

00:15:36.680 They kept dividing. 1.00

00:15:45.800 Her cancer cells taught cancer researchers

00:15:48.600 the difference between carcinoma in situ

00:15:51.140 and invasive cancers like mine.

00:15:55.380 Oncologists used HALA cells

00:15:57.680 to test the toxicity of chemotherapy

00:15:59.840 without having to test it on patients.

00:16:04.120 Henrietta Lacks saved my life.

00:16:07.460 And millions of others. 0.82

00:16:09.360 Her cells helped develop polio and COVID-19 vaccines.

00:16:14.580 Cancer treatments, gene mapping, IVF,

00:16:17.320 decades of biomedical research.

00:16:19.480 They've grown in labs across the planet,

00:16:21.840 frozen and thawed and shipped through the mail,

00:16:24.820 been sent into orbit.

00:16:25.940 it. And the woman they came from was a black tobacco farmer whose family remained poor

00:16:34.140 for decades, while the global biomedical industry benefited from her body. Johns Hopkins never 0.68

00:16:42.660 sold or profited directly from the discovery or distribution of halos cells. They offered

00:16:48.320 them freely and widely for scientific research. And they also acknowledged that from the

00:16:53.180 beginning, things could have been and should have been different for Henrietta. And though

00:16:59.160 Johns Hopkins didn't sell the cells, the cells multiplied into a health care system in the

00:17:07.440 United States that is designed to profit. Even in Canada, where my millions of dollars of

00:17:14.920 life-saving treatment have cost me a total of $100 a month in the equivalent of a pharmaceutical

00:17:20.560 co-pay, one-sixth of people with my cancer will go bankrupt within a few years of diagnosis.

00:17:27.620 And in the States, nearly half of patients report catastrophic financial burden, starting

00:17:33.600 with $40,000 a year in debt from the day of diagnosis. They're skipping pills because they

00:17:40.040 can't afford them. Our systems are full of this story, knowledge and wealth for the few built

00:17:46.300 from bodies that weren't asked, that didn't consent, that haven't been paid, that suffer

00:17:51.020 still from the diseases you robbed them to cure. Black women suffer exponentially from 1.00

00:17:57.680 breast cancers and cervical cancers. To think of the tropical plant trade in relation to 0.95

00:18:04.040 slavery or for-profit health care is maybe fucked up, or maybe the way neo-feudalist 0.95

00:18:11.540 capitalism extracts and trades living and life-giving beings for profit without care 0.95

00:18:17.040 for the environments they disrupt on either end is slavery logistics and technology expanded.

00:18:24.120 It moves through our bodies and systems at every level. We eat it and it's covered in microplastics.

00:18:31.040 Chemo poisoned me and saved me and shortened my lifespan and gave me my daughter's childhood.

00:18:41.540 And I want to say all this not to make us more sick with the knowing,

00:18:47.220 but because I need to love the real, bizarre, broken truth of it all

00:18:51.480 to make good on what I've been given in being here right now in your ears. 0.97

00:18:56.740 To love this fucked up moment for what it is 0.98

00:19:00.100 and not keep running or masking or escaping, 0.99

00:19:04.040 throwing myself off Table Mountain

00:19:06.240 or into the arms of strangers in cities I don't even like.

00:19:12.640 I need to transmute the fear and horror into a high

00:19:16.060 that goes all the way through and down and between.

00:19:21.180 Roots me in to deep reservoirs and requires open eyes,

00:19:28.560 missing fingers, the magic of actually being here and alive together.

00:19:36.240 lucille clifton wrote we take what we want with invisible fingers and her fingers were poetry and

00:19:52.040 spirit talking and the sheer power of rising generations demanding justice and they were

00:19:58.420 also real fingers she had an extra finger removed when she was a child and this ghost appendage ran

00:20:06.020 and her family and I think of her now

00:20:08.220 when I think of spider plants on the run

00:20:10.340 inside me

00:20:11.360 inside all of us

00:20:13.360 where are we nourished

00:20:15.820 and where are we starving

00:20:17.620 witches

00:20:18.160 and with what behaviors and thoughts 0.93

00:20:21.640 and emotions are we flailing

00:20:24.000 our ghost appendages

00:20:25.460 hoping to hit a patch

00:20:27.820 of better soil

00:20:36.020 Spider plants are living organisms with their own evolutionary histories,

00:20:49.240 their own strategies, their own stories,

00:20:53.160 their own insistence on continuing right through it all.

00:20:58.060 Spider plants belong to the asparagus family,

00:21:01.280 which links them to agaves and other ancient monocots

00:21:04.420 whose evolutionary lineage stretches back tens of millions of years.

00:21:10.240 I have white asparagus here in the forest that are called living fossils.

00:21:16.780 Some chlorophytum are used as vegetables or medicinal plants in parts of Africa.

00:21:21.700 Even the common spider plant's leaves and roots contain minerals like potassium, calcium, and magnesium,

00:21:28.320 and have been eaten in small quantities as a pot herb.

00:21:31.600 For more than a century, it's been propagated almost entirely by cloning, like immortal cells, endlessly dividing.

00:21:40.800 The plant's life unfolds in forests and kitchens, classrooms and dormitories.

00:21:47.060 Neglect gives it brown tips, and affection multiplies it endlessly.

00:21:52.920 And all that time they were quietly, holding water, cleaning the air.

00:22:01.600 The spider plant is a species that has learned, like us, to travel by relationship.

00:22:15.780 Even when the relationships were toxic, we were throwing our bodies into the bright unknown together.

00:22:31.600 Imagine, which is a spider plant way of knowing,

00:22:53.040 of responding to violation and extraction.

00:22:56.360 The spider plant multiplies, a distributed organism,

00:23:00.660 a quiet diaspora of the same green body moving in green time, breathing always in binary balance

00:23:09.180 with the colonizers, keeping lifeblood underground, forking, finger-walking, making possibilities,

00:23:18.500 improving the odds.

00:23:30.660 This February, I had my ovaries removed.

00:23:50.760 They test everything I do for cancer now, and I just found out.

00:23:54.920 The pathology report from the ovaries came back negative,

00:23:58.700 And relief is rain

00:24:01.420 And hope stores up in reserves for the next time

00:24:05.020 I'm not the same body I was before

00:24:08.280 But I'm not new material either

00:24:10.680 I'm a body revised, pruned, regrown

00:24:14.720 I carry the sacred Hela cells and stardust

00:24:20.000 There is today an asteroid belt named for Henrietta Lacks

00:24:24.740 One in space, like the one here on Earth

00:24:28.600 an archipelago of impact of living stories made one by gravity orbiting through space and time

00:24:37.160 as above so below my body is here in quebec but other versions of me exist in the places i've

00:24:44.720 been and breathed and left skin cells and memories with the fog ghosts on table mountain

00:24:51.760 Sweating in the caves in Vietnam

00:24:54.740 Waves and microphones through speakers scattering on

00:24:59.960 Not one thing, but a pattern spreading

00:25:03.860 Roots appearing wherever the conditions allow life to continue 1.00

00:25:08.760 We live with old travelers 0.99

00:25:21.760 We live with vast ancient organisms whose bodies are one body. 0.93

00:25:34.220 A few giants spanning continents quietly extending through human homes creeping along

00:25:41.160 until machines, which seemed inescapable, inevitably clank and clatter into rust.

00:25:49.400 We are spider plant kin

00:25:52.760 Reaching for each other across time and space and bias and brutality

00:25:58.220 Witches and gardeners and caretakers who kept seeds and stories

00:26:04.600 The spelling and the grammar

00:26:06.400 Spells and grimoires of how to be in patterns with each other

00:26:11.380 That are not based on violation and extraction

00:26:14.440 but on that weird spurting wild madness of life the living world the magic of becoming

00:26:44.440 We are spider plant kin.

00:26:49.760 Scientists and poets smuggling truths

00:26:52.180 past the brutality of delusional fascism. 0.74

00:26:56.280 Queer people who learn to root in the cracks and expand. 0.99

00:27:00.580 Troublemakers and healers. 0.99

00:27:03.140 Women and trans people who knew they were not object, 1.00

00:27:06.880 not lesser, not weaker than,

00:27:09.680 but simply gloriously alive

00:27:12.220 and glowing in the right to be happy and seek happiness in this body this skin all beings who

00:27:22.300 remember in their cells that the world is made of relations not resources

00:27:42.220 We are crafting our spider plant kinship,

00:27:59.680 building our minds and systems and logic back into one body.

00:28:05.760 The body we are that we've forgotten in our trauma states.

00:28:10.480 A living root work spreading quietly through kitchens, forests, classrooms, covens, laboratories, and city blocks.

00:28:40.480 We are a body that refuses extinction.

00:28:52.060 We are a body that refuses obedience.

00:29:02.300 We are a body that keeps sending out runners.

00:29:05.380 we are spider plant kin 0.99

00:29:11.380 blessed fucking be 0.99

00:29:35.380 Thank you. 0.99

00:30:05.380 Hi, this is Amy.

00:30:26.660 And Risa from the Missing Witches podcast and Coven.

00:30:30.300 Each May, we donate 100% of our coven membership earnings to the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal.

00:30:36.320 And we rally our community to raise money for Indigenous-led support organizations.

00:30:42.620 By contributing incredible prizes for our draw, donating, and signal boosting, we all make a hopeful wave of repair together.

00:30:51.680 We make reparations to re-enchant the world.

00:30:54.520 This year, we're weaving the biggest web yet.

00:30:57.400 And we'd love for you to join us.

00:30:59.620 Donate, share, or become part of the coven.

00:31:03.180 We believe community is something we build together.

00:31:05.500 We built Missing Witches because we were missing you.

00:31:09.680 So check out missingwitches.com slash reparations.

Missing Witches - April 09, 2026

I Am Spider Plant Kin – Everywhere and Unkillable

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