Missing Witches - MW Terry Tempest Williams - A Pencil Is A Wand And A Weapon

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00:00:17.320 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:20.420 Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:25.320 Language and landscape are my inspiration 0.88

00:00:30.400 So said Terry Tempest Williams in her personal topography of America's National Parks, The Hour of Land

00:00:38.760 And I think this rings true for most witches

00:00:41.700 We do our workings and find our magic in these spaces between creator and creation

00:00:47.300 Writing tiny wish poems on bay leaves to burn

00:00:50.660 Transforming our wishes to words

00:00:52.900 Our words to action

00:00:54.560 action to environment. We are all a part of nature but we might be the only creatures who

00:01:01.920 paint landscapes with pigments and poems. We are language and landscape. My friend Kenneth whom

00:01:11.020 y'all met in the Yuletide episode introduced me to the work of this author, activist, seeker of

00:01:16.720 social and environmental justice, this bird lover of the Utah desert. Side note, he himself was

00:01:24.040 introduced to terry's work by none other than pam grossman the web expands right away i knew

00:01:30.920 that i needed to add terry tempest williams to our covens pantheon of missing witches but i wanted

00:01:36.040 to thank kenneth from the jump because if you decide to dive into the rocks and sand the

00:01:44.140 beautiful and terrifying landscape of terry's work i don't suggest you go alone terry tempest

00:01:50.340 Williams is honest about desolation, silence, rage, cancer, confusion, fear, and loss. She asks,

00:01:59.260 how do we find the strength not to look away from all that is breaking our hearts?

00:02:05.380 And we sense in her question a million tiny heartbreaks, personal, political, spiritual,

00:02:11.100 finding beauty in a broken world. So if you're anything like me, trying your best not to look

00:02:17.680 away, you'll need a therapist, a priest, or a mystic. Your coven, as in my case, a trusted and

00:02:24.120 sympathetic friend. Or, at very least, an empty journal. A blank page. Something or someone willing

00:02:32.700 to be a sounding board to the discomfort that Terry, unearthing her own truths, inevitably

00:02:38.100 digs up in you. I got to page two of Terry's book, When Women Were Birds, and had to put it down for

00:02:46.180 a couple days. So if in the future you read Terry, read her slowly and read her with a friend. For

00:02:54.100 now, let me be that friend to guide you through the tempest and back home, safe and sound. I don't

00:03:01.420 want to start you off thinking that Terry is some nihilistic, hopeless Debbie Downer. She's not.

00:03:06.800 She wrote, we need not lose hope, only locate where it dwells. For Terry, hope, like most things,

00:03:14.980 is tangible, actionable. She doesn't wait for hope to come to her. She goes out and finds it,

00:03:22.540 taking us with her along the rugged, stumbling path of its discovery.

00:03:27.240 Let me give you some context. As a child, Terry was raised under that thinly-veiled racism and

00:03:32.660 sexism sometimes found in the Mormon church. As a child, Terry saw a mushroom cloud explode.

00:03:38.760 Nine women in her family have had mastectomies. Seven have died of cancer, her mother included.

00:03:45.980 Doctors say it's a matter of when, not if. She will be stricken with cancer.

00:03:51.720 Spoiler alert, Terry is alive and well. You can follow her on Twitter, and I suggest you do.

00:03:57.680 Terry and her family are called Downwinders, people the U.S. government knowingly exposed

00:04:03.200 to radiation during nuclear testing in Nevada in the 1950s and 60s. 0.94

00:04:07.580 For Terry, the connection between environment and self, the joy and pain that that entails, is very fucking real.

00:04:16.060 But equally important in her work and life is this commonly mislabeled unreal. 0.63

00:04:22.200 The intangible, the unseen, and unseeable.

00:04:25.440 The spirit beneath and behind the science.

00:04:29.040 Like Majin Gonzalez-Whipler, Whitefeather Hunter, and other glorious science witches of the Earth,

00:04:34.260 for Terry, the universe is magic.

00:04:37.580 Terry is the kind of witch whose message resonates most deeply with me.

00:04:41.880 She doesn't seek out the supernatural, but sees mysticism every day in the air quotes real world.

00:04:49.400 She graduated from the University of Utah in 1978 with a degree in English and a minor in biology,

00:04:56.020 and this is so witchy to me.

00:04:59.040 Balancing one's education between poetry and petri dishes, music and molecules.

00:05:05.460 seeking a holistic understanding of life itself and humanity's place in that life.

00:05:11.280 The non-witch sees a line of delineation between the real and the unreal,

00:05:16.920 the real and the surreal, the seen and unseen.

00:05:21.400 For the witch, no such lines exist.

00:05:25.060 In one of my favorite passages from When Women Were Birds,

00:05:28.940 Terry wrote about a childhood moment when her education met up with her enlightenment. 0.95

00:05:33.160 Four gases create air. Nitrogen, 78.084%. Oxygen, 20.9476%. Argon, 0.934%. Carbon dioxide, 0.0314%.

00:05:51.780 This gave me confidence. The unseen world was real.

00:05:56.740 so learning the invisible dance of molecules did not diminish but rather gave credence to the magic

00:06:05.460 that terry felt vibrating in the very air she breathed and in that air birds of infinite

00:06:11.520 variety sweep in loops or dive in predatorial thrust terry whose grandmother could identify

00:06:18.580 a host of feathered friends by sight and song writes a lot about birds the swallows returning

00:06:25.320 to Capistrano, the corpse of a swan that she washed and cradled, laying herself down next

00:06:31.220 to it on a beach. An albino robin she named the Holy Ghost. Owls asking, who? Her book

00:06:39.660 chapters are titled with bird names, and I get it. I've often said when I'm at my lowest,

00:06:45.280 I fill my bird feeders and sit and watch the birds. It doesn't solve my problems, of course,

00:06:51.320 but I do, for a moment, get to feel like a part of their chirping lightness.

00:06:56.780 Inquisitive head tilts, their fluttering of wings and the pecking of teeny tiny beaks,

00:07:03.520 crows and hawks circling to the beat of a woodpecker drum. I am part of the song and

00:07:09.340 dance, or at least close enough to hear the whoosh whoosh of wings. It helps. Once I saw an

00:07:16.320 enormous great blue heron plunk itself down regally but comedically like a Jim Henson muppet

00:07:22.920 into a creek. In a moment, it spread its wings and, as birds do, flew away, leaving me with

00:07:29.100 only the gift of having seen it. That helps, too. When I lived in the city, there was this one bush

00:07:36.200 on this one corner that was inexplicably filled with dozens of little brown birds a few weeks of

00:07:42.640 every year. That definitely helped. Despite what you may have heard on the internet, birds are

00:07:49.920 definitely real. Literal. But they are also metaphors that aid Terry and us in discovery.

00:07:58.720 The answers to existential questions can often be found in feathers, rocks, grains of sand,

00:08:05.240 and leaves of grass. In her book Refuge, Terry wrote, when Emily Dickinson writes,

00:08:10.440 hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, she reminds us, as birds do,

00:08:15.780 of the liberation and pragmatism of belief. Pragmatism of belief.

00:08:24.760 Pragmatism, with its focus on practical application, is not a word most people would

00:08:29.620 use to describe a bird-fostered belief system, but for Terry, bird magic has real-world benefits.

00:08:35.460 She wrote,

00:08:37.360 Beautiful, right?

00:08:58.720 The idea that joy is world healing.

00:09:00.840 because if we think of joy as healing, we can see play as important work

00:09:05.680 and gleeful birdwatching as a productive earner, an investment in the future.

00:09:11.360 When joy is acknowledged to be healing,

00:09:14.780 all acts of love and pleasure, to borrow a phrase from Doreen Valiente,

00:09:18.800 can be viewed as a damn good use of time.

00:09:21.320 Sorry, grinding, striving, patriarchal, capitalist meat wheel. 0.85

00:09:26.620 Compared to that, your system just don't measure up.

00:09:28.900 In a panel discussion called Nature, Justice, and the Sacred, Bioneers, whose motto is it's

00:09:36.140 all alive, it's all connected, it's all intelligent, it's all relatives, co-founder Nina Simons

00:09:43.180 said of Terry before I'd ever met Terry, and from reading her writing, she taught me that

00:09:48.280 I could create a life that integrated every aspect of myself and didn't have to cut off

00:09:53.780 any part of my expansive curiosity to fit any pre-existing shape or formula or design.

00:10:01.260 Reading her books has led me to explore more deeply how relationship to land and wilderness

00:10:06.640 is woven with health, and how spirituality is related to art and culture, and how gender and

00:10:13.800 expression are connected and how art can become social and community healing. Our friendship in

00:10:19.460 the years since then, says Nina, always expands my understanding of marrying apparent contradictions

00:10:25.420 and rewilds my interior world, weaving connections between inner and outer realities.

00:10:33.140 And that, my coven, is the ideal calling card of the witch, one who makes you see the connections

00:10:40.600 among contradictions, makes you feel wild, yet woven into a grander force of personal

00:10:47.500 and communal healing. Indoor religion bored me, said Terry, and when women were birds, 1.00

00:10:53.860 outdoor religion did not. And as witches, I think we all feel this way a little.

00:10:59.460 Even if you live in a concrete jungle, once outside, all it takes is a tilt of the head

00:11:03.780 upward to see the sky, clouds, the sun, the moon. Perhaps some of you city dwellers have escaped the

00:11:11.340 rat race momentarily and headed off to Nature Bay in a national park. There are 423 national

00:11:18.360 park sites in the United States, 48 national parks in Canada, and these lands are the focus of much

00:11:25.040 of Terry's work. In her aforementioned book, The Hour of Lands, Terry guides us through 12 parks,

00:11:31.260 from Yellowstone in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas. But Terry has taught us not to

00:11:38.580 look away from that which breaks our hearts. She does not shy away in her love letter to

00:11:43.380 the parks she visits from reminding readers of the bloody history that allowed these parks

00:11:48.240 to exist. National parks were conceived above all as a tourist attraction. One issue that

00:11:55.020 arose was how to create a space in which no humans dwell when there are humans dwelling

00:12:00.920 everywhere. Yellowstone, for example, was chosen for its undeniably spectacular landscape.

00:12:06.960 Terry wrote,

00:12:36.960 it was a superstitious ground. Indians kept their distance. Like any good story, with the muscle of

00:12:43.420 privilege behind it, it seemed believable, and I never asked the question, who benefits from the

00:12:49.460 telling of this particular story? The truth is, the federal government did not want visitors to

00:12:54.560 Yellowstone to encounter Indians, full stop, and so they either banned tribes from the new preserve

00:13:00.720 or relegated them to the margins, where they could continue to hunt game unseen. This was the era of 1.00

00:13:08.040 Indian removal and westward expansion. Reservations were being established at the same time as 0.97

00:13:14.620 national parks. But it wasn't just our national parks that were displacing tribes. American

00:13:20.340 progress was on the move in every state and every territory, rolling over whoever and whatever got

00:13:26.080 in the way. Nor was it just Indians who complicated a mythical landscape. Elk and deer were lovely to 0.80

00:13:33.120 look at, an enhancement of a pastoral vision, but wolves and grizzly bears were another matter.

00:13:39.240 There was no place in this pretty picture for predators, and in Yellowstone they were hunted,

00:13:45.540 trapped, and killed. A fuller and more honest narrative has emerged over time,

00:13:51.280 Mostly from tribal historians who want to right a historical wrong.

00:13:56.320 Knowledge matters.

00:13:58.100 Justice matters.

00:14:00.340 Hindsight shows us our blind spots and biases.

00:14:04.420 We can recognize ourselves as human beings caught in the cultural mores of a specific time.

00:14:09.140 This is not to excuse the brutal and tenebrific acts of the past,

00:14:13.140 but to consider them in the light of what we know now.

00:14:16.920 Restoration is what's required today.

00:14:18.840 Can we engage in the restoration of a different kind of storytelling, not just the stuff of myths, self-serving and corrupted, but stories that foster integrity with a fragmented nation?

00:14:30.140 Can we change America's narrative of independence to one of interdependence, an interdependence beautifully rendered in the natural histories found in our public lands?

00:14:40.740 These are parables of change and transition that might offer us maps

00:14:45.640 to help us navigate our future in the era of a warming planet. 0.99

00:14:52.880 I must mention that in Canada, the government forced the Stoney Tribes people from their land 0.94

00:14:58.160 for the creation of Banff National Park. 0.99

00:15:01.240 As the National Post reports, when the Stonies were invited back in,

00:15:05.260 it was for the annual Banff Indian Days,

00:15:07.600 an event that ran into the 1970s.

00:15:11.100 Tourists were entertained by dancing, drumming, war whoops,

00:15:15.700 and archery performed by chiefs and braves and squaws in full regalia,

00:15:22.700 as a 1929 advertisement put it.

00:15:25.580 Terry adds details like this to the introduction of her book

00:15:29.320 so that you can't go forth on her journey through the parks without knowing,

00:15:33.800 without carrying that knowledge in your backpack.

00:15:36.520 The indoor religion Terry writes about is Mormonism, and she still considers herself to be a Mormon,

00:15:41.460 though certainly not one that conforms to all the rules.

00:15:45.720 On seeing the Matt Stone, Trey Parker, send-up musical The Book of Mormon, Terry wrote,

00:15:50.780 I was proud of my cultural heritage, embarrassed by it, heartbroken, and inspired by our hunger to not only be told a story, but be transformed by it.

00:16:02.360 This is where I place my faith.

00:16:05.000 The power of a story well told lies in empathy.

00:16:09.420 We are not alone.

00:16:11.380 Great art is transformative because it inspires us to be our highest and deepest selves.

00:16:17.840 It reminds us what it means to be human.

00:16:20.720 We are both shadow and light.

00:16:22.820 Great art becomes spiritual when it reminds us what binds us together, rather than what separates us.

00:16:31.140 I think one of the places a witch can often be found

00:16:33.540 is at the intersection of ecology and reproductive justice.

00:16:37.120 And you can find Terry here, too,

00:16:38.740 in a space we sometimes call ecofeminism.

00:16:41.300 In 2011, she published an essay called

00:16:43.320 The Moment I Became a Feminist.

00:16:45.260 Here's a bunch of it.

00:16:46.580 Last week, I was a guest at a meeting of abortion providers

00:16:50.660 in the Intermountain West,

00:16:52.440 where the first rule of business on the agenda

00:16:54.940 was the rule of no disclosure.

00:16:57.280 Absolutely no identification of those who were in attendance.

00:17:00.340 The level of concern for both their safety and their capacity to continue their vital

00:17:05.120 work as healthcare providers for women, be it as a doctor, a nurse, or a volunteer, was

00:17:10.240 stirring.

00:17:11.320 As a writer, out of respect, I put away my pencil, a notebook, and listened.

00:17:17.000 As a human being, I was grateful for their courage and commitment to do what fewer and

00:17:21.660 fewer individuals want to do.

00:17:24.340 Honour a woman's right to choose, whether or not she will give birth to a child.

00:17:29.320 As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex.

00:17:33.840 We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and violence and harm committed to those who tell the truth of their lives.

00:17:39.980 Marriages are shattered.

00:17:41.420 Families are broken.

00:17:43.180 Judgments are rendered.

00:17:45.520 The woman stands alone.

00:17:47.920 Our stories live underground.

00:17:49.960 I think of the poet Muriel Ruckheiser, who asked this question. 0.98

00:17:55.280 What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? 0.95

00:17:59.560 The world would split open. 1.00

00:18:02.180 The world is splitting open.

00:18:05.340 Our voices arise from the blood truth of the moon where we are reminded of the cyclic nature of life. 0.97

00:18:10.720 I would like to ask these abortion colonialists, these zygote zealots, what are they afraid of? 0.93

00:18:17.260 Shortly after the publication of my book Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 1.00

00:18:22.260 I was called into the office of one of the general authorities of the Mormon Church

00:18:26.180 in Salt Lake City. I was young and unsure of what he wanted to discuss. I feared I might be

00:18:31.620 excommunicated for what I had written, which ran contrary to Mormon doctrine. But what troubled

00:18:36.920 this church leader was not that I had mentioned a mother in heaven alongside a heavenly father,

00:18:41.520 or asked the question, if there is a godhead, where is the mother body? Or that my mother and

00:18:46.900 I had given each other blessings without holding the priesthood reserved for only men? What disturbed

00:18:52.020 him most was that my husband and I had chosen not to have children. This was the threat

00:18:58.100 I posed. I had a voice. He asked me if I realized that by not becoming a mother, I too would

00:19:05.400 become an endangered species, leading future generations of spirit children down the path

00:19:10.460 of extinction, just like the wild birds I so loved and championed. The phrase that my

00:19:16.740 religious leader uttered that I have never been able to forget was this.

00:19:20.380 Just as a mother bird has no choice whether or not she will lay her eggs, she must.

00:19:26.600 God insists.

00:19:28.760 So the eggs you possess over which your husband presides must also come forth. 0.94

00:19:33.980 Will you choose to become a mother of Zion, or will you allow your womb to become empty and barren, 0.69

00:19:39.780 defying the faith of the women who came before you? 0.63

00:19:43.140 In that moment, I became a feminist. 1.00

00:19:45.380 In that moment, I realized that to control a woman's body and deny her the choice over her own reproductive health 1.00

00:19:52.140 is to silence her individual voice and rob her of her innate power, 0.95

00:19:56.920 which is the power to choose her own life's path. 1.00

00:20:00.580 To control women is another way of controlling nature. 1.00

00:20:04.760 May we stand up and speak. 1.00

00:20:07.020 May we stand up and cry foul.

00:20:09.740 May we stand up and support planned parenthood,

00:20:12.580 and may we show our power through our individual and collective voices by not remaining silent.

00:20:19.160 It's worth noting that Terry sneaks another bird metaphor into this essay too,

00:20:23.120 refusing to allow women to be thought of as egg-laying hens. 0.73

00:20:29.580 Witches, we're back to talk about Foxgloaf Farm.

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00:21:41.780 In Mother Jones, A Fierce Responsibility by Stephanie Menzheimer,

00:21:46.360 Terry delivers a quote that rings more true in 2021 than possibly ever before in our lifetime, saying,

00:21:52.220 Sometimes the most radical act is to stay home.

00:21:55.820 There, issues are not abstractions. They are our lives.

00:22:00.780 That creates action, impassioned action, born out of love and urgency.

00:22:06.580 These days, staying home certainly has a different connotation,

00:22:10.180 evokes a different notion of responsibility than Terry intended,

00:22:13.720 and so too with issues or not abstractions.

00:22:17.000 Because of the events of the past couple years,

00:22:19.400 we can no longer view issues of politics or power as theoretical, if we ever could.

00:22:24.820 It's not personal, it's just business no longer flies. 0.95

00:22:28.320 It might be just business, but if you can't afford your rent or to feed your family, that's very fucking personal. 0.79

00:22:35.200 Terry believes that legislators think, quote, 0.89

00:22:37.440 in terms of economics, but what about the spiritual resources?

00:22:41.860 We don't have the language in this nation to speak of these things.

00:22:46.300 So, dear Coven, it is up to us to create that language and speak it into existence.

00:22:52.760 Vote with your money.

00:22:54.460 Vote with your attention.

00:22:56.320 Yes, think of your attention as currency and spend it with as much integrity as you can.

00:23:01.420 They say lands are property, ideas are investment ventures, hobbies must be monetized, and a recess at play is reserved for children.

00:23:10.580 But life, your life, is not a commodity.

00:23:15.960 It has, however, been commodified.

00:23:18.660 Space and time.

00:23:21.020 Bought and sold. 1.00

00:23:22.640 As we unsettle and decolonize, let us also decommodify our fucking souls. 0.99

00:23:31.300 I see your value and worth, and it is so much more than petty finance. 0.93

00:23:39.100 I want you to see your value, and not the price tag the world has stuck you with.

00:23:44.420 In 2016, Terry and her husband Brooke attended a federal oil and gas lease sale in Salt Lake City

00:23:50.260 to bear witness to the destructive practices of resource extraction on public lands.

00:23:56.600 They decided to purchase the leasing rights to 1,120 acres for just $2,500

00:24:03.200 and created Tempest Exploration LLC,

00:24:08.720 the first energy company with the goal of conservation instead of extraction.

00:24:12.320 The Bureau of Land Management initially rejected Williams' claim to the land

00:24:17.220 because they did not plan to extract resources.

00:24:23.100 Terry voted with her wallet in a way that most of us can't afford,

00:24:26.700 but it's still ghastly to see how cheaply these rights to exploitation go. 0.91

00:24:32.260 Two bucks an acre to rent the earth for destruction.

00:24:36.820 In Ontario, water-taking permit holders pay between $300 and $500 per million litres.

00:24:44.600 We can't look away from that which is breaking our hearts.

00:24:49.780 So let's look again to Terry to inspire us to keep digging and scratching past the public relations

00:24:55.160 that we are spoon-fed by marketers and the spin-doctoring we do for ourselves in our own lives,

00:25:01.400 crafting shiny personae for the internet age.

00:25:04.960 Let's drill down past performative perfection to a paradoxical place where chipping away a rock unearths a crystal.

00:25:11.820 As Bruce Coburn sang, you gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

00:25:17.780 Similarly, in her book Erosion, another warning, the chapter in Erosion called The Questions

00:25:23.020 Held by Owls is not about owls, but about the experience of putting her ancient beloved

00:25:29.060 dog to sleep.

00:25:30.720 Not cool, Terry.

00:25:33.400 The paradox found in the peace and restlessness of these desert lands, where rock slides,

00:25:39.860 flash floods, and drought are commonplace, allows us to embrace the hardscrabble truths

00:25:44.860 of change. In the process of being broken open, worn down, and reshaped, an uncommon

00:25:51.520 tranquility can follow. Our undoing is also our becoming. I have come to believe this

00:25:58.160 is a good thing.

00:26:00.300 Our undoing is also our becoming. Like the Tower of the Tarot, sometimes our destruction

00:26:06.840 is our revelation. Sometimes a good cry makes you feel better. Side rant, crying is your body's

00:26:14.600 natural way of releasing stress hormones. When you stop yourself from crying, you are literally

00:26:18.780 and scientifically keeping that stress inside your body. Patriarchal brainwashing is fucking 1.00

00:26:26.120 bizarre. So let's bathe in our bummers for a little while longer until we can transform them 1.00

00:26:31.980 into hope or the impetus for change. Build sandcastles on the shores of our rivers of tears.

00:26:38.880 Weep with me, just a little, for these first two pages of When Women Were Birds. As I said,

00:26:45.680 these couple hundred words wrecked me and sent me into the spiraling rabbit hole multitude of

00:26:51.300 feelings that comes from having a mother and living in the world. I am fifty-four years old,

00:26:58.760 the age my mother was when she died.

00:27:02.400 This is what I remember.

00:27:04.000 We were lying on her bed with a mohair blanket covering us.

00:27:07.840 I was rubbing her back, feeling each vertebra with my fingers as a rung on a ladder.

00:27:13.340 It was January, and the ruthless clamp of cold bore down on us outside.

00:27:18.200 Yet inside, Mother's tenderness and clarity of mind carried its own warmth.

00:27:22.720 She was dying in the same way she was living, consciously.

00:27:27.480 I am leaving you all my journals, she said,

00:27:29.780 facing the shuttered window as I continued rubbing her back.

00:27:32.400 But you must promise to me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.

00:27:36.840 I gave her my word, and then she told me where they were.

00:27:40.280 I didn't know my mother kept journals.

00:27:42.360 A week later, she died.

00:27:44.520 That night, there was a full moon encircled by ice crystals.

00:27:48.820 On the next full moon, I found myself alone in the family home.

00:27:53.140 I kept expecting Mother to appear.

00:27:54.860 Her absence became her presence.

00:27:58.020 It was the right time to read her journals.

00:28:00.620 They were exactly where she said they would be.

00:28:02.920 Three shelves of beautiful, cloth-bound books.

00:28:09.020 Some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors.

00:28:14.800 The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves.

00:28:19.200 I opened the first journal. It was empty.

00:28:21.320 I opened the second journal. It was empty.

00:28:24.860 I opened to the third. It, too, was empty. As was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth. Shelf, after shelf, after shelf. All of my mother's journals were blank.

00:28:39.260 In the book, these words are followed by 12 blank pages that the reader is forced to flip through,

00:28:48.580 the silence resonating and multiplying inside the emptiness.

00:28:54.340 It is one of the loudest silences I have ever experienced.

00:28:59.000 All my mother's journals were blank.

00:29:09.260 Those of you who are long-time listeners know that I've also been left with blank pages.

00:29:16.680 My father had Alzheimer's and my mother has MS-related neurological impairment.

00:29:20.500 She doesn't remember.

00:29:22.120 When I have questions, there's no one out there with the answers.

00:29:26.760 Do y'all feel like some general or metaphorical version of this these days?

00:29:30.860 Like we were all tricked into buying or looking to our society's journals for the answers, only to find them blank?

00:29:36.940 Like our parents and teachers and government curriculum creators didn't teach us anything we could actually use?

00:29:42.980 Just a pack of lies about pilgrims and progress and the pristine nature of national parks?

00:29:48.400 Each of us, I think, in 2021 needs to be deep in the process of unlearning and sharing what we've unlearned

00:29:54.180 to aid each other in deprogramming the brainwashing we collectively endured for centuries.

00:30:00.000 The good thing about a blank journal, though, is that you can fill it up yourself.

00:30:04.480 I want you to know that Terry Tempest Williams wrote

00:30:09.100 When Women Were Birds on the pages of her mother's blank journals.

00:30:15.180 But oh, the blank page.

00:30:18.020 Equal parts confronting silence and limitless potential.

00:30:21.420 Fill it with what?

00:30:22.920 I realized once I had already concretized my set list for this season,

00:30:26.520 ordered the stacks of books that would inform the episodes you're listening to now,

00:30:30.060 that I had chosen three writers.

00:30:31.360 I guess it's no accident that, in preparing to publish The Missing Witches book, available now, 0.89

00:30:38.260 my subconscious mind would seek out witch writers, 0.83

00:30:41.420 to steal some of their bravery and willingness to put it all on the page, 0.73

00:30:45.600 to explain to me why I feel compelled to write but remain a little scared to be read.

00:30:50.920 For those of you who write but don't know why, or can't bring yourself to write and don't know why,

00:30:55.520 Terry has her answer and inspiration penned in Red, Passion and Patience in the Desert.

00:31:02.600 I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.

00:31:06.360 I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.

00:31:10.760 I write to discover. I write to uncover.

00:31:13.700 I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue.

00:31:16.400 I write to imagine things differently.

00:31:18.680 And in imagining things differently, perhaps the world will change.

00:31:23.280 I write to honour beauty.

00:31:24.400 I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation.

00:31:29.160 I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy.

00:31:34.760 I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.

00:31:38.720 I write to the answers that keep me complacent.

00:31:42.420 I write to remember. I write to forget.

00:31:45.420 I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words.

00:31:49.420 I write because it is a dance with paradox.

00:31:51.740 I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.

00:31:56.620 I write because it belongs to the force of the moon, high tide, low tide.

00:32:01.480 I write because it is the way I take long walks.

00:32:05.800 I write as a bow to the wilderness.

00:32:08.120 I write because I believe it can create a path in the darkness.

00:32:12.400 I write as ritual.

00:32:13.820 I write because I am not employable.

00:32:16.020 I write out of my inconsistencies.

00:32:18.520 I write because then I do not have to speak.

00:32:20.760 I write with the colors of memory. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness

00:32:26.140 to what I imagine. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say

00:32:33.520 the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient we are.

00:32:41.560 I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.

00:32:45.400 In When Women Were Birds, Terry reminds us,

00:32:50.580 a pencil is a wand and a weapon.

00:32:53.680 There was one day when Kenneth and I spent probably an hour

00:32:56.760 bouncing Terry philosophy back and forth in DMs

00:33:00.220 like some non-competitive tennis game.

00:33:03.100 Kenneth is what one might call the shy, quiet type.

00:33:06.440 But he equally fits the old adage,

00:33:08.260 still waters run deep.

00:33:10.340 I teasingly call him Emily Dickinson

00:33:12.160 because he keeps his own poems tucked away in his own head.

00:33:15.400 I wrote to him. Terry wrote. Emily Dickinson wrote poems in her bedroom and kept them largely

00:33:20.920 secret. Terry continues. The poet Susan Howe writes, she may have chosen to enter the space

00:33:26.240 of silence. A space where power is no longer an issue. Gender is no longer an issue. Voice

00:33:32.420 is no longer an issue. Where the idea of a printed book appears as a trap. Send.

00:33:38.940 Kenneth replied with another Terry quote

00:33:42.780 To write, Marguerite Dura remarked, is also not to speak

00:33:46.800 It is to keep silent

00:33:48.460 It is to howl noiselessly

00:33:51.020 I hit back with erosion

00:33:52.480 Page 14

00:33:53.560 These essays are my howl

00:33:55.980 Remarking, I guess a silent howl is still a howl

00:33:59.720 I asked, is the howl more about getting something out

00:34:03.280 Than having someone else hearing it?

00:34:06.180 Kenneth agreed, the howl in this context means expression.

00:34:09.720 But surely not all expression constitutes a howl.

00:34:12.880 Griping doesn't feel like howling.

00:34:14.860 Howling is different than, say, wailing.

00:34:17.340 Howling comes from a place of powerfulness, where wailing is powerlessness.

00:34:21.780 Kenneth asked, would keening, the action of wailing and grief for a dead person, be somewhere between a wail and a howl?

00:34:27.420 It would have to be, I replied, because grieving is both powerful and powerless.

00:34:32.040 always something to break the binary Kenneth added we continued to unpack the howl howling

00:34:38.880 represents the possibility of agency further action we decided a call to personal arms a

00:34:44.780 howl wants to be heard by one's self as much as by others discontent maybe but full in the

00:34:51.860 knowledge that one is ready and capable of creating a world in nature a howl is simply

00:34:59.160 a wolf's way of saying, I am here. And this is perhaps the most profound statement of all. I am

00:35:07.360 here. Terry wrote, the world is holy. We are holy. We are here. Many critics and reviewers talk about

00:35:21.520 how Terry's work transports the reader into her landscape, but I kind of disagree. To me,

00:35:26.240 Terry's words are a landscape, and a confrontation. We are a landscape, part of the earth as much as

00:35:35.260 the inner, outer, literal, metaphorical birds and vistas Terry describes. We are not separate.

00:35:42.360 For me, Terry's work is less of a transporter and more like a pair of glasses, a vision changer.

00:35:47.380 Not so much where we are and what we see, but how we see. You see, different creatures,

00:35:56.240 see differently. Melissa Mance writes,

00:36:01.040 Birds see more colors than humans in several ways.

00:36:04.680 Not only are birds able to perceive the familiar rainbow of colors as well as parts of the

00:36:08.920 ultraviolet spectrum that are invisible to human eyes, but they also have better visual

00:36:15.200 acuity. This means birds can determine subtle differences between similar shades of color,

00:36:21.140 gradations, that human eyes are not able to discern.

00:36:24.060 The cells in the eye are responsible for colour detection, the cones are in the retina, and birds have four types of cones, rather than the three humans have.

00:36:36.020 The exact number of cones varies with each bird's species, but it typically is higher than humans and all other mammals.

00:36:43.760 When we read Terry, we aren't tourists in her world, flicking through images on a rack of postcards.

00:36:49.200 not transported, we are transformed. We become, or perhaps more accurately for Terry, we return

00:36:55.360 to our previous state of being birds. Being the birds in her air. We see differently. Colors that

00:37:04.320 were always present become more vivid, more nuanced, and more importantly, the environment

00:37:08.780 becomes an extension of ourselves. Being a witch is not to create imaginary colors, but rather to

00:37:15.340 see the colors that science and souls and birds know are there. What we know and what we dream

00:37:22.860 adding layers to augment our reality. When Women Were Birds ends like this. I thought I was writing 0.61

00:37:31.000 a book about voice. I thought I would proclaim as a woman that we must speak the truth of our lives

00:37:36.240 at all costs. But what I realize is that I will never be able to say what is in my heart because

00:37:42.720 words fail us. Because it is in our nature to protect. Because there are times when what

00:37:49.840 is public and what is private must be discerned. There is comfort in keeping what is sacred

00:37:56.460 inside us. Not as a secret, but as a prayer. The world is already split open. And it is

00:38:04.760 in our destiny to heal it, each in our own way, each in our own time, with the gifts

00:38:12.400 that are ours. I hear my mother's voice. In the emptiness of this beloved landscape that

00:38:18.660 has embraced me all my life, I hold my mother's journals as another paradox, journals without

00:38:25.200 words that create a narrative of the imagination. My mother's gift is the mystery. Each day

00:38:31.920 I begin with an empty page.

00:38:38.940 I want to remind you all again

00:38:41.040 that Risa and I didn't set out to write a book.

00:38:43.620 Available now!

00:38:45.500 We wrote songs.

00:38:47.600 We wrote text messages and DMs

00:38:49.740 that became essays, that became podcast scripts,

00:38:51.900 that became a book.

00:38:53.780 So I implore you, dear witches,

00:38:56.380 sweet coven, just write.

00:38:59.320 Write limericks or bullet points,

00:39:01.260 emails, love letters, letters to the editor, letters to congress, fanciful to-do lists,

00:39:06.540 write your pet's biographies or post-it note haikus. Though words fail, though words are

00:39:12.420 inadequate, write and see where it takes us. Write and transform our vision. On paper or in

00:39:22.220 your head, create a narrative of imagination. Do not look away from all that is breaking our hearts.

00:39:28.660 A pencil is a wand and a weapon.

00:39:32.360 The world is holy.

00:39:34.280 We are holy.

00:39:36.260 Imagine things differently, and in imagining things differently, perhaps the world will change.

00:39:41.640 Embrace the gift of mystery.

00:39:44.800 See like a bird.

00:39:46.660 Howl like we're holy.

00:39:48.600 And reveal our secrets in prayer.

00:39:52.640 Every day we begin with an empty page.

00:39:57.900 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, you can do so by buying our book,

00:40:08.380 reviewing it on Amazon and Goodreads, using offer code MISSINGWITCHES when you shop at

00:40:13.720 Foxglove Farm, become a Patreon patron, or pick up some Missing Witches merch at TeePublic.

Missing Witches - April 04, 2021

MW Terry Tempest Williams - A Pencil Is A Wand And A Weapon

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