Missing Witches - May 27, 2024


Rx. 52 - There's Writing On The Walls, But They Can't Read It

MW Rx. 51 - Darkness Bring The Light Indigenous Futures 2024 Part 3 - Stewarding Tears

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

141.43

Word count

2,930

Sentence count

53

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 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.
00:00:11.820 Stay with us in the off-season for The Missing Witches prescription, plus interviews and Sabbath specials all year round.
00:00:19.400 Join us as we change with the seasons, but always return to our roots.
00:00:24.520 If you want to support The Missing Witches project, join the coven!
00:00:28.920 Find out all about it at MissingWitches.com.
00:00:32.700 The spirit is rising, she's rising, she's rising.
00:00:38.420 The spirit is rising, it's rising, it's rising.
00:00:43.320 The spirit is rising, they're rising, they're rising.
00:00:48.660 Hi, Kevin.
00:00:50.200 Hi, Kevin.
00:00:51.660 Hi, Amy.
00:00:52.940 How are you doing?
00:00:54.060 You have really cute bangs.
00:00:55.380 I think the listener should know.
00:00:57.520 I got bangs.
00:00:58.920 change it up yeah i think it's like related to my um new medication and just like feeling like
00:01:08.540 a tiny shred of a bit of a new person and so i kind of wanted the outside to reflect that i'm
00:01:15.580 like feeling better on the inside and slightly more glamorous maybe congratulations may we all
00:01:23.740 get to bask in a little bit of slightly more glamorous aiming i feel that i feel the afterglow
00:01:32.060 it's happening it's happening for sure yeah i'm in a weird place where i feel
00:01:41.920 better because i've like taken care of doing some tests but for my health but i'm waiting
00:01:49.320 on the results so I feel like good job me I did those things but also now like in quiet moments
00:01:57.060 it's that feeling of waiting you know that like that heartbeat of waiting and finding out and
00:02:03.600 I people are I'm sure delighted to hear details about drippy kids but we went one week without
00:02:10.560 that kid coughing and puking and dripping fun week and now she's back yeah yeah now we're back
00:02:18.580 in the drip zone puky mccoffee mcdrip zone well i hope everybody is being well taken care of
00:02:26.800 listeners i hope you're taking care of yourselves and taking care of your community and
00:02:32.000 not too drippy but it is allergy season so we feel you if you're dripping out there
00:02:37.600 yeah or maybe you're just weepy with the state of the world maybe you know maybe we just gotta 0.93
00:02:43.060 weep and cry and drip the shit out a little bit longer yeah i know like it is terrifying waiting 0.97
00:02:49.580 for test results but i am a big believer in this like ritual magic of you know having your blood 0.96
00:02:59.020 drawn like a blood ritual that's that's for your health or you know having a a biopsy like making
00:03:05.960 a ritual sacrifice in order to gain otherwise inaccessible information so i hope that you
00:03:12.760 have a sense of the magic that that you did that you accomplished there that spell yeah something
00:03:19.760 like that there's also something to with a biopsy to feeling um really like a body like
00:03:28.320 really like a hunk of meat you know like a tenderized meat pile a little bit um I don't
00:03:35.840 feel in my waking mind too worried about the results but there was something that shoved me
00:03:42.740 into my body in a way about doing it and I have the privilege to have been able to sort of just
00:03:50.360 sit in that feeling for a bit it's also black fly season so be here in the mountains it's like warm
00:03:57.920 and the the lake is getting warm we've had like a hot spell but the it's completely clouded with
00:04:06.320 black flies and mosquitoes but we have a great big screen and porch that mark spends a lot of
00:04:10.380 time rebuilding so i don't know i've just been sitting there i learned recently that there is
00:04:14.960 a word that means something like um the meditative state next to dreaming that happens when sitting
00:04:24.520 by a lake and since I've been meditating a lot more in the last couple months I've just been
00:04:30.120 sitting out in the lake and like letting my eyes unfocus and not trying to accomplish too much
00:04:36.860 just wait and be in my body and yeah I'm waiting I feel I feel the ticking clock of all of the
00:04:44.860 waiting for something new to bloom and so I want to offer this song um because it feels appropriate
00:04:54.160 i don't know it feels feels appropriate for me right now i stumbled on this artist if you're from
00:05:01.220 um australia or new zealand you probably know i'm a plum um but i didn't um
00:05:12.040 but i stumbled on her work she's aboriginal singer songwriter she just sort of like uploaded
00:05:20.240 two songs onto a website in like 2017 and then ended up winning a bunch of song competitions
00:05:26.460 and having those songs do really well and then she released this EP um so beautiful called
00:05:37.400 Better in Black B-L-A-K I guess B-L-A-K Black is like a identity that a lot of Indigenous
00:05:44.680 young people have claimed um and that this album really felt like it was speaking to their
00:05:51.440 experience and it sort of is like beautiful mellow croony but also deeply honest and
00:06:01.520 politicized and heartbreaking and really lovely and the one that I am sitting with this week and
00:06:08.440 that I want to offer just for my own feeling, like this is my medicine this week. There's just
00:06:15.500 sort of a quiet repetition in this song that both acknowledges the truth of the moment and also kind
00:06:21.900 of holds you in it. It's called Love and War. And the repetition that sits with me is there's
00:06:30.020 writing on the walls, but they can't read it. There's writing on the walls, but they can't read
00:06:35.000 it hold up your chin don't let them win there's other lyrics but those are the ones I want us to
00:06:43.300 hold on to those are the ones that are sitting with me this week there's writing on the walls
00:06:48.320 especially from the perspective of someone like Thelma Plum her father is a lore man
00:06:56.540 learned a basically extinct language from his father and shares that culture with children
00:07:03.200 with people as an activist as a storyteller and you're talking about the longest continuous
00:07:08.140 culture in the world like this is a culture that has continued to exist it seems clear for like
00:07:14.220 60,000 years what kind of knowledge about the world about our relationships with animals about
00:07:31.180 our kin relationships about our relationships with the stones and the stars what do what do
00:07:37.180 they know you know and what is that writing on the walls when you're talking about a culture
00:07:42.060 that has kept history told stories in sacred caves all across their their land they're dreaming
00:07:49.400 the idea that there's writing on the walls has a deeper implication in that context
00:07:55.240 and it makes me think about the idea of I don't know like I wrote this piece about Lycan for our
00:08:04.160 kinship series you know the idea that Lycan are writing stories on the rocks around us
00:08:09.680 that there's right there's a story being told by the trees the water the rain you know and by our
00:08:17.380 own ruffled movements, you know, that not everything is being told by the largely white
00:08:25.140 men that dominate the news cycle. Like a great deal is happening on many, many, many interconnected
00:08:32.500 layers of systems. And we might only hear these loud, angry war stories, but there are love
00:08:41.160 stories all around us all over the walls so hold up your chin
00:08:46.760 it's there even if they can't read it hold up your chin we're gonna move through this part
00:08:55.580 together that's what I'm telling myself on my porch while the bugs drone anyway
00:09:00.040 the writing is definitely on the wall for sure for sure and it is a fascinating point that you
00:09:06.540 make that like humans have been writing on walls since there have been humans you know and we keep
00:09:15.840 finding more evidence the more we you know excavate and go deeper into caves and caves and caves you
00:09:22.360 know we find these these rituals and paintings and it's so much part of our dna to do that it's
00:09:32.940 gonna make me look at graffiti a little differently i think putting it into that context
00:09:37.420 i am um excited um as of this recording we are like eight eight days away from the end of our
00:09:50.860 fundraiser and we're only like 500 bucks away from reaching our goal so again i know you're
00:09:58.020 sick of hearing me talk about it uh it won't be it's not for much longer but if you haven't
00:10:04.180 joined the missing witches reparations fundraiser definitely now is the time um we're so close and
00:10:11.780 it's such uh it's such a good feeling to reach a goal we know that if we don't hit that number
00:10:17.300 like it doesn't mean that we failed um but there is that kind of like drive to like you know
00:10:26.160 to to reach that point that that big round number i have of course been thinking about
00:10:37.240 tina turner because it is the one year anniversary of her death and i remember hearing that she had
00:10:46.320 like um indigenous ancestry and i looked it up she turns out she grew up believing that she had
00:10:55.120 like significant north american ancestry but did a dna test in like 2008 that showed that she was
00:11:04.060 only one percent native american so this is a pretty typical pretendian storyline where a lot
00:11:12.540 of people grew up you know hearing that they had some ancestor you know that tied them to the
00:11:18.500 indigenous community and i'm i had no idea how common that was just to just to jump like i grew
00:11:25.660 up like that and then you meet everyone you spoke to in canada i was like oh me too for sure like
00:11:30.320 great great grandma probably and this is something that is so well understood in indigenous communities
00:11:36.640 that this is like a very common like white settler colonizer narrative that isn't even like
00:11:43.900 isn't isn't intentional necessarily and certainly not by like the second and third generations or 0.79
00:11:49.360 maybe it is some of the time by dicks but a lot of the time it's just being passed around as like
00:11:54.060 this unconscious way at which we say oh no we're not exactly like those yeah other or or centering 0.98
00:12:02.440 ourselves or like saying that we should be allowed in places where that that weren't made for us and
00:12:09.260 you know. And even if it turns out you did have like a sixth great grandmother, like suspected
00:12:15.400 in our family, like that doesn't mean that you lived any of the experiences which would define
00:12:20.880 an Indigenous culture today. Like, did any of your family live through any of the 60s scoop,
00:12:28.340 any of the residential schools? You know, you weren't just missing this romanticized culture
00:12:33.600 that you imagined. You were also missing the very real lived experience of being extracted from
00:12:38.820 and violently marginalized and all of those things.
00:12:42.480 So I don't know.
00:12:43.460 I think for me, it's been an interesting flag.
00:12:45.960 And I want to note it for, if you had it in your family too,
00:12:49.320 where you're like, oh yeah, us too, probably, we were always told.
00:12:52.060 It's just something to think about what those unconscious roots
00:12:56.340 of white supremacist bias can be weaving their way into our own lives.
00:13:02.100 And just to notice them and let those roots maybe pull out of your own story.
00:13:05.320 I have, like, been told, one particular Indigenous woman told me that people tell her that they were First Nations in a past life, and that somehow that should give them access to these spaces.
00:13:23.880 I mean, come on.
00:13:26.120 But I guess the thing is, like, we can't help what we were told, the legends and stories, what was written on the wall of our family trees.
00:13:36.400 Now we have like 23andMe and AncestryDNA that can sort of, you know, scientifically separate story from blood.
00:13:46.600 So I guess I'm just glad that Tina Turner didn't super lean into that as like an aesthetic or whatever.
00:13:53.880 But I'm still bringing her today because, as I say, it is the anniversary of her passing and she's such a force.
00:14:04.020 And this song in particular, like as we come into the last week of our fundraiser, is so beautiful and so poignant and so funky.
00:14:15.180 And I wish I were a radio DJ so I could just like play the whole song for you right now.
00:14:20.900 So we'll give you a clip and I'll read you some lyrics.
00:14:25.480 The song is called Working Together.
00:14:50.900 and some of the lyrics are like maybe i'm protesting the wars across the sea
00:15:00.060 i just want to remind you like this came out in 1970 so these are things that are so like
00:15:07.440 core to the human experience maybe i'm protesting the wars across the sea
00:15:13.100 because there are people here that are still not free working together we can make a change
00:15:19.460 working together, we can help better things. So let us put our hate aside and let us let love be
00:15:28.640 our guide. I say, let's try a little love for a change. Unless we get together, the world would
00:15:37.080 never survive. And the hopes of the world will surely, surely die. People like you and me speak
00:15:46.080 up for what's right only then will the world see the light working together we can make a change
00:15:53.400 working together we can help better things so we're sending that love out to tina turner and
00:16:02.560 everyone who has already made a donation to the missing witches reparations fundraiser and
00:16:09.620 everybody who is thinking about it or shared it again no shame no shame we get it like sometimes
00:16:18.360 you don't have two nickels to rub together and if i had to choose between like feeding my family
00:16:24.300 or making a reparation donation like i get it i'm gonna i'm gonna feed my family so um this is not
00:16:33.940 this is not me trying to shame you into doing anything i know i know that if you're listening
00:16:42.460 to this you're just doing the best that you can i know you are i know we're all just doing the
00:16:47.160 best that we can and so if you can't make a donation just like try to put some extra love
00:16:52.680 into the world today let's try a little love for a change and just go listen to the entire catalog
00:17:01.240 of tina turner's music her resilience her power her strength all of that i just want to add to
00:17:09.180 the no guilt no shame thing like we also are not stressed if you join the coven and pay a monthly
00:17:17.480 membership for a bit and then leave and then come back or not like these things do not you know
00:17:24.580 please feel feel all our love in all of those movements that you need to make we're you know
00:17:30.760 we're just happy for you to be out making your magic in your own way we're just gonna try to do
00:17:35.860 our thing we just love you please feel no stress you can join for a month listen to all of the
00:17:42.960 downloaded past episodes or whatever and then leave we're not we're not worried about any of
00:17:49.560 that so please be comfortable and please consider there's many ways to make repair um you know like
00:17:58.220 if you feel like you have some time today while you're having just like the length of a coffee
00:18:03.460 or the length of a Tina Turner album like just enjoy the pleasure of a research enjoy like
00:18:09.680 discovering an aboriginal culture an indigenous culture a native culture that you've never
00:18:17.280 read about before just imagine what their spiritual knowledge was and see what you can
00:18:23.580 learn about it from people who are actually of that culture see if you can find women artists 0.81
00:18:30.020 of that culture like just let yourself play and see what inspires you to love and appreciate and
00:18:36.000 learn about a culture and hold it closely in your heart makes repair too and if in that process
00:18:42.180 you find a non-profit you can send ten dollars to then let us know send your receipts and we can put
00:18:48.060 you in the draw and send you wonderful prizes and we can crash past last year's amount that we
00:18:55.920 raised together um but yeah remember there's so many kinds of repair that are loving and welcome
00:19:02.460 and that will heal you and your many generations relationships with the land and people here
00:19:08.600 and that are part of that great working together that tina turner calls us to
00:19:13.240 the writing is on the wall we are choosing love we are working together and we recognize that
00:19:22.000 no matter what the powers that be try to tell us we can make change when we work together
00:19:29.160 and especially when we work together and you can also have cute bangs in the process 0.99
00:19:36.000 i'm blessed fucking me throw a little glamour magic in it bless the fucking be 0.99
00:19:40.980 The Missing Witches podcast follows the wheel of the year. 0.99
00:20:10.980 with true histories of real witches in the autumn
00:20:13.960 and meditations on kinship with the more-than-human world in the spring.
00:20:18.820 Stay with us in the off-season for the Missing Witches prescription,
00:20:22.460 plus interviews and Sabbath specials all year round.
00:20:26.420 Join us as we change with the seasons, but always return to our roots.
00:20:31.900 If you want to support the Missing Witches project, join the Coven!
00:20:36.700 Find out all about it at missingwitches.com.
00:20:40.980 You