Missing Witches - July 22, 2024


MW Rx. 59 - Garden Party AKA This Is A Lot

MW Rx. 58 - I Rock, I Roll, I Bloom, I Grow, I Glow MW Rx. 60 - It's Gonna Be Alright, Baby

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

117.73

Word count

2,040

Sentence count

128

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.840 The Missing Witches podcast follows the wheel of the year, with true histories of real witches in the autumn, and meditations on kinship with the more-than-human world in the spring.
00:00:12.320 Stay with us in the off-season for the Missing Witches prescription, plus interviews and Sabbath specials all year round.
00:00:19.900 Join us as we change with the seasons, but always return to our roots.
00:00:25.000 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, join the Coven!
00:00:30.000 Find out all about it at missingwitches.com.
00:00:51.260 Hi, Coven.
00:00:53.280 Welcome to another installment of The Missing Witches Prescription,
00:00:56.780 where we try to come up with ideas to help us all get through it's just me this week
00:01:03.760 so to borrow a phrase from delta work i am going to look gorgeous and speak extemporaneously
00:01:14.440 it's not something i've done before so i'm glad you're with me i'm alone in my house but i'm not
00:01:22.460 alone because I'm with you. I want to start by reading an Instagram post from the unbelievable
00:01:30.800 Austin Channing. It starts, this is a lot. Quote, you're not imagining it. You're not overreacting.
00:01:44.280 You're not being melodramatic. Your body isn't lying to you about how heavy it all feels.
00:01:51.720 It can be helpful to see how systems of violence are all connected, but it can also be overwhelming.
00:01:59.100 It can feel like you exist under a weighted blanket.
00:02:02.000 It's hard to move, hard to breathe.
00:02:05.160 I wish I could offer you relief and organize it all into nice, neat boxes, roughly the size of an Instagram post,
00:02:14.460 and issue some orders that would have us solve all of this.
00:02:19.120 But I cannot.
00:02:20.860 We need a revolution. And then another one. And then another one. And then another one.
00:02:29.360 Because the backlash to our revolutions is real. We are living through one right now.
00:02:36.000 And your survival, and your art, and your voice, and your writing, and your passion, and your joy.
00:02:44.900 And all your beauty, all matter, for getting to the other side.
00:02:50.160 so you can enjoy and experience the next revolution.
00:02:54.480 Remember the goodness that you want in the world.
00:02:58.480 Remember the human dignity you want for Black people,
00:03:01.580 Palestinian people, queer people, disabled people,
00:03:04.820 poor people, women people, children people, 1.00
00:03:07.380 houseless people, incarcerated people, 0.77
00:03:10.100 marginalized people, and all the intersections thereof.
00:03:14.380 Remember the goodness you're working toward.
00:03:16.500 Because the backlash of hate is impossible to carry if you do not remember what it is to love.
00:03:25.180 And as silly as it feels, we must remember love.
00:03:31.740 End quote.
00:03:34.060 I think Austin put that better than I ever possibly could, so I wanted to use it as a jumping off point.
00:03:41.960 Thank you, Austin Channing.
00:03:43.200 It makes me think of the Angela Davis quote, freedom is a constant struggle. And that's something that we've seen in our lives. We've seen gay marriage legalized. And then we've seen drag bands.
00:04:01.280 we've seen the pendulum swinging and i know it's hard and i know it's exhausting but it makes me
00:04:11.800 think about this song it was the canadian equivalent of we are the world you know if you
00:04:20.180 remember the 80s usa for africa and their song we are the world canadians formed a super group
00:04:28.880 called Northern Lights that included such people as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bruce Coburn,
00:04:38.340 Burton Cummings, some of my favorite singers. And the song was called Tears Are Not Enough.
00:04:45.720 And I want us to remember that, that as compelling as it might be to doom scroll
00:04:52.500 and who weep because we are empathetic and sympathetic people.
00:05:00.420 But tears are not enough.
00:05:03.180 they sing if we can pull together we could change the world forever heaven knows that tears
00:05:26.320 are not enough. And that, in some way, brings me to my garden. This was the first year that I
00:05:39.620 started attempting to grow vegetables. To make a real attempt, I have planted plum trees. It'll
00:05:50.080 be years before they bear fruit. And we can take that as a metaphor too, that it might take years
00:05:56.800 for the seeds or the twigs and the saplings that we plant to bear fruit. But I want to talk about
00:06:05.520 my cucumber plants because up until this point, I've always gotten my cucumbers from the grocery
00:06:13.420 store, maybe a farmer's market. And they are all the same. They're the same size, the same thickness,
00:06:25.320 the same color. But that's not how nature operates. In my garden, what I've discovered
00:06:34.060 is that cucumbers are all growing on their own timeline. Some grow really fast,
00:06:42.300 and some grow slowly. But that benefits me because I have a perfectly ready and ripe cucumber
00:06:51.060 at multiple different times throughout the summer that I can harvest and eat.
00:06:59.660 But my cucumbers are all different. They're different shapes. They're different sizes.
00:07:08.560 Some of them are straight. Some of them are curved. Some of them are big on the bottom and small on the top and small on the bottom and big on the top.
00:07:20.280 And some are bulbous and some are fat and some are skinny and some are round and some are kind of square and some are kind of triangular.
00:07:31.460 because this is how nature works and this is how humanity works too at the grocery stores and in
00:07:41.840 our human lives we've been conditioned into this false sense of uniformity that everything
00:07:49.460 and everyone should be or has to be the same but that's not how nature works and that's not how
00:08:00.080 humans work. It takes all different varieties. And nature makes all different varieties. And
00:08:10.380 I'll tell you this. The curved ones taste the same as the straight ones. The flat ones
00:08:20.500 have the same nutrients as the round ones.
00:08:25.360 They're all giving me what I need,
00:08:30.020 even though they take on different shapes
00:08:32.320 and different timelines.
00:08:35.960 And I keep going back to this scene in Harold and Maud,
00:08:40.560 which you've probably heard me talk about before.
00:08:42.880 It's one of my favorite love stories of all time.
00:08:45.180 It's about Harold, a young man obsessed with death.
00:08:50.500 who meets an old woman, Maude, obsessed with life.
00:08:56.020 And there is a scene where they are walking past a giant field of wild daisies. 0.51
00:09:04.180 I should like to change into a sunflower, most of all.
00:09:08.480 They're so tall and simple.
00:09:11.820 What flower would you like to be?
00:09:15.060 I don't know.
00:09:17.900 One of these, maybe?
00:09:19.460 Why do you say that?
00:09:20.500 Because they're all alike.
00:09:24.720 Oh, but they're not.
00:09:26.940 Look, see, some are smaller, some are fatter.
00:09:32.140 Some grow to the left, some to the right.
00:09:35.060 Some even have lost some petals.
00:09:37.300 All kinds of observable differences.
00:09:39.960 You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world's sorrow 0.92
00:09:46.100 comes from people who are this.
00:09:50.500 get allow themselves to be treated as that so what does any of this have to do with the revolution
00:10:00.360 well i'll tell you because like cucumbers this is how activism works too
00:10:07.500 there's not just one way to change the world one of my favorite youtube cultural analysts
00:10:17.340 is Matt Baum. And he made a video called The Rowdy Queer Rebels Who Turned Television Gay
00:10:25.760 about gay rights activists who were tired of seeing homosexuality portrayed as evil
00:10:34.380 on television and decided to do something about it. And what they found was it takes 0.98
00:10:42.380 different kinds of activism to reach a common goal. Here's how Matt put it.
00:10:52.600 Getting TV to this point took a lot of trial and error by a lot of different people.
00:10:57.620 And when you look back over what those people wrote about their experiences and what they'd
00:11:01.400 learned, something that stands out is that change happened fastest when there were three groups in
00:11:06.460 place. Group one, the rebels. People willing to make noise, get attention, be impossible to ignore,
00:11:13.500 like Mark Siegel and Arthur Bell. Once the rebels got attention, it was time for group two,
00:11:18.680 the negotiators. People who could present clear demands, find agreement with people in position
00:11:23.080 of power, like Gene O'Leary. And third, to turn those demands into action, they needed group three,
00:11:29.080 the insiders. People working inside the industry with the power to make changes. Sometimes those
00:11:34.520 insiders were already on board for change, like the anonymous leakers. Sometimes they needed a
00:11:39.660 little push from the rebels and negotiators to do the right thing, like with Dick Cavett or
00:11:43.760 Herminio Trevisis. Rebels, negotiators, and insiders. Each group had a role to play, and each one made
00:11:50.800 it possible for the other two to succeed. And in the span of just a few years, television was totally
00:11:55.940 transformed by a handful of dedicated, hardworking activists whose work lives on today.
00:12:00.920 And I want to tell you, too, about my potatoes.
00:12:06.400 I had some leftover potting mix from when I was planting the vegetables that I intended to plant.
00:12:15.880 And I found in my pantry a half-empty bag of old, new potatoes that had dried up a little.
00:12:27.340 They were starting to sprout.
00:12:28.420 and normally i would throw them in the garbage i would throw them in the compost
00:12:34.480 but instead because i had this extra potting mix i looked up how to plant them i cut them in half
00:12:42.860 i followed the directions and now those potato plants those green stalks are about three feet
00:12:54.160 tall. And so I want you to know that if you feel like a rotten potato, that maybe you feel like
00:13:03.020 you could just be tossed out to the garbage. I want you to consider Amy's potatoes. And I want
00:13:11.580 you to consider that maybe you just need planted. You just need to move to a different kind of soil,
00:13:20.220 a different environment, a different way of thinking.
00:13:25.220 And then you too can grow your leaves three feet tall
00:13:31.860 and make roots that might feed someone's family like me.
00:13:40.020 I want you to know that we're all different.
00:13:44.200 And that's for a reason.
00:13:46.540 That's how nature intended us to be.
00:13:50.220 so i want to leave you with one more song now maybe you've heard of ricky nelson he was kind
00:13:58.960 of a child star in the aussie and harriet and he put out pop hits and as he grew older he found
00:14:07.860 that people weren't super interested in who he had become they were only interested in
00:14:13.460 the ricky nelson that they knew and he played a concert where he was playing some new material
00:14:22.800 mature songs that he had written from a mature point of view
00:14:27.400 and the crowd wasn't having it he got booed people weren't interested so inspired by that
00:14:39.260 event he wrote a song called garden party and it's the title track from the album garden party
00:14:47.940 at this time he had changed his name to rick nelson just to put a fine point on his maturity
00:14:53.740 but the lyrics go like this and i hope that they'll echo in your head
00:14:57.940 well it's all right now i've learned my lesson well see you can't please everyone
00:15:06.340 So you've got to please yourself.
00:15:20.460 I want you to understand that there are a million, billion, eight billion different ways to be in this world.
00:15:31.800 And that's the same for activism.
00:15:33.180 that Doreen Valiente offered to wash the dishes,
00:15:38.380 that there are a million different things that you can do
00:15:41.960 from the place you're at with your specific skill set,
00:15:47.140 from your specific perspective of care.
00:15:52.540 You can't please everyone, but I want you to try to please yourself.
00:15:58.760 Because tears are not enough.
00:16:00.640 But when you decide or try to figure out what am I going to do, just know that you're the only one who is you, who is capable of going into the world as you.
00:16:17.860 Thanks for hanging out with me today. 0.94
00:16:20.800 And blessed fucking be. 0.98
00:16:30.640 the missing witches podcast follows the wheel of the year with true histories of real witches in 0.98
00:16:53.560 the autumn and meditations on kinship with the more than human world in the spring stay with us
00:16:59.440 in the off season for the missing witches prescription plus interviews and sabbat specials
00:17:04.840 all year round join us as we change with the seasons but always return to our roots if you
00:17:12.240 want to support the missing witches project join the coven find out all about it at missingwitches.com