Missing Witches - April 11, 2024


We Are Granite Kin

Topics
granite kin witches
MW Rx. 45 - Carry On, Love Is Coming MW Rx. 46 - Iā€™m Burning So I Will Bring The Light

Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

101.31

Word count

2,348

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our kinship season, which is
00:00:06.140 dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our
00:00:12.260 more-than-human kin. In the fall, we'll do a season dedicated to people's stories again,
00:00:18.460 our classic Missing Witches stories, and throughout the summer, we'll have Witches
00:00:21.920 Found interviews and episodes of the RX, our list of people and of songs and other media
00:00:28.220 to learn from about craft and magic and resistance and re-enchantment is long and fertile.
00:00:35.260 But in the spring, we need to balance out against people logic by digging into soil,
00:00:40.820 learning about the plants and animals and rocks and winds and waters that are us too,
00:00:46.500 as we wind our wild ways through the hollow biont that we all are here on Earth.
00:00:51.840 These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek,
00:00:55.360 anti-capitalist motivational meditations, and we hope you'll take these offerings in that original
00:01:00.720 sense. Seed bombs hurled on the pristine, dying lawns of Mondays. Bless it fucking be.
00:01:08.420 To be honest, I have spent most of my life more like water than stone. 0.99
00:01:28.140 Tears are always on the edges of my eyes.
00:01:31.200 My thoughts are muddy or quick-flowing.
00:01:34.580 It's pretty easy to splash me around and stir me up.
00:01:38.420 But I am shield kin too. I have lived most of my life on a great plate of stone. And these days when things feel like shifting sand and roiling magma and howling winds, I am reaching down for my foundations.
00:01:58.400 We live on the Canadian Shield
00:02:06.300 a plate of ancient pre-Cambrian rock
00:02:10.260 mostly granite that has been scraped and revealed
00:02:14.240 by glaciers retreating
00:02:16.180 Shield pushes up through civilized lawns out here
00:02:23.340 like an elbow or a jawbone
00:02:26.600 It rises out of lakes like something ancient, always not quite surfacing.
00:02:37.040 Two million years of glacial ice and the bedrock shows its trauma bonding in shapes like flowing water, but it's stone.
00:02:45.300 Witches, we are flowing water
00:02:58.140 Witches, our bones can withstand more pressure than granite 0.99
00:03:05.160 We have been scraped and compacted over millennia
00:03:10.080 We are granite kin
00:03:13.860 Witches, we are the shield.
00:03:24.160 Quote, a very large area of eastern and central Canada is underlain by ancient rocks, which are mostly granite, and granite gneiss, with patches here and there of much altered sedimentary and volcanic rocks.
00:03:38.900 they are more than 600 million years old and maybe as much as 3 billion years old
00:03:47.860 predating almost all life on the face of the earth about 500 million years ago oceans began
00:03:55.700 to flood the continent and they overlapped onto this ancient surface sand mud and limey mud were
00:04:03.360 deposited in layers over the bottom of the ancient sea. The processes of erosion have
00:04:09.860 gradually stripped back this overlying cover to expose more and more of the old rocks beneath.
00:04:24.840 Geologists estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the earth's mantle is granite and granite gneiss.
00:04:31.240 quote, nice is a metamorphic rock
00:04:35.040 meaning that it formed when a parent rock
00:04:37.940 underwent very high levels of heat and pressure
00:04:41.640 that reoriented and rearranged the crystals
00:04:45.380 end quote
00:04:46.760 this is our earth stone
00:04:50.960 when earth seethed as an ocean of molten iron and rock
00:04:57.400 granite came from the cooling
00:05:00.120 Granite reckoned with its past
00:05:04.700 Was shaped by generational cycles
00:05:08.140 Masked the turmoil and destruction down below
00:05:12.720 So it could pass for a gentler planet
00:05:15.120 Its crystals are rearranged
00:05:19.080 It is a cycle breaker, just like you
00:05:22.780 It is our balance stone
00:05:27.620 The meeting place of fertility and destruction
00:05:34.100 We are kin to the balance of fertility and destruction
00:05:53.180 I asked my first boyfriend to lie on top of me
00:05:56.360 It came out of my mouth unexpectedly. I wasn't ready for sex. I just wanted to have the hot, sputtering oscilloscope swings of myself, cooled and weighted down. 0.98
00:06:12.060 These days I layer blankets on myself and lie in the dark, in silence, in the middle of the day.
00:06:18.520 I listen to my breath as it eases
00:06:23.920 as it seeps deeper below my gasping chest
00:06:27.860 settles in the darker depths
00:06:30.780 held in the cup of my pelvic bones
00:06:33.060 and I feel the weight come into my limbs
00:06:37.240 and on my eyelids
00:06:38.860 I listen for what is beneath
00:06:42.920 I listen for the stone that knows both sides
00:06:47.700 cool surface and endless lakes of fire
00:06:51.500 molten seething stone
00:06:55.420 and wind and rain and apple blossoms
00:06:58.980 and how to live for millennia between them
00:07:10.940 lichen, leaves, moss and sediment
00:07:14.160 are like thin folds of fabric
00:07:16.540 and the shield's bony knees and elbows push through,
00:07:21.920 remembering like arthritis, like how the body remembers.
00:07:31.280 My mom says seeing the shield makes her feel safe and also homesick.
00:07:38.880 I know what she means.
00:07:40.560 I felt it in the dark forests we'd roar past
00:07:43.440 on long, snowy drives across Ontario when I was a kid.
00:07:47.800 My mom clutching the steering wheel
00:07:50.020 and gritting her teeth alone in the front, 1.00
00:07:53.000 screaming, oh, fuck, 1.00
00:07:54.440 and throwing candy in the back seat to distract me 1.00
00:07:57.200 when she hit a squirrel.
00:07:59.880 I watched the fast-moving outlines of evergreens
00:08:03.400 and imagined pushing into the shadow brush.
00:08:08.140 Pushing my face into the plume moss.
00:08:10.960 lying down and letting my bones fuse to the shield
00:08:15.960 that can reset the crystals of our generational anxiety
00:08:20.360 anchor the panic swings
00:08:23.200 the shield is always right there
00:08:25.720 right beneath everything
00:08:27.720 holding space
00:08:29.280 a colossal anchor holding things in place
00:08:40.960 Then we moved.
00:08:43.360 We were kind of blown around for a while.
00:08:47.640 We lived in California for a few years,
00:08:50.080 and after we moved back to Canada,
00:08:51.960 we stayed at a borrowed cabin in the woods.
00:08:54.840 I sat outside in the snow, listening to the wind and the trees,
00:08:58.380 and I closed my eyes,
00:09:00.080 and it sounded just like ocean waves,
00:09:03.240 and I was homesick, but I didn't know wherefore.
00:09:05.940 i'm a settler colonizer descendant of people who lived right at the edges of land theft
00:09:15.000 trying to farm land that just kept pushing up more granite every spring after the ice heave
00:09:21.760 after they left countries where they died in workhouses tenants cottages and mines for hundreds
00:09:28.160 of years. I want to reach for what is everywhere but unseen. What is the bedrock of this moment?
00:09:37.600 Can I reach and touch the million years and feel my way back into some kind of resonance
00:09:42.900 with the planet itself by knowing its bones? I want to add my scraps to the compost and ritual
00:09:54.760 fire of extractions and brutalities to which I do not consent. I want to follow the birds here
00:10:03.740 and the lichens and the bedrock. As a way of resisting amnesia, I want to reach in the dark
00:10:12.780 for deep time crystalline ancestors and possible futures. I want to tell the truth about the
00:10:22.500 vertigo of writing a love song to our other kin, when at every turn you face the horror truth of
00:10:28.680 ecosystem collapse and you want to wail and puke and keen and join your ragged voice to the wordless
00:10:35.520 sorrow rage of the living world. And also, I want to tell you what it's like to canoe silently
00:10:47.520 through fog out here where the shield breaks the surface of waterways that feel as though they go
00:10:54.300 on forever and my forever is like a paddle breaking the surface of the water passing through and then
00:11:02.480 it's gone i want to take my sorrow rage and lay it at the feet of ancient mountains and let the
00:11:10.400 ways stone received time teach me how to hold it all and keep on paddling.
00:11:19.480 Quote, the Canadian shield is part of an ancient continent called Arctica.
00:11:26.720 Mountains have deep roots and float on the denser mantle, much like an iceberg at sea.
00:11:35.220 As mountains erode, their roots rise and are eroded in turn.
00:11:40.400 The rocks that now form the surface of the shield
00:11:44.680 were once far below the Earth's surface.
00:11:52.120 We are Shieldkin,
00:11:54.400 the bones of mountains that once stood here,
00:11:57.960 the tallest in the history of the world.
00:12:00.580 shield shows their faces everywhere that i have struggled to put down roots but which
00:12:12.420 for lack of a better word i have called home it's called basement stone mountain bones
00:12:19.760 the last layer before the mantle of the earth on which we float what is below is showing its faces
00:12:27.480 now. We are in an era of ugly truths uncovered, but where our true nature, our miles deep
00:12:35.920 protection and strength is coming to the surface too. We are shieldkin. We have been coming
00:12:44.280 to this time for a long, long time.
00:12:55.040 The summer I turned 30, I came home to the apartment I'd walked out on.
00:13:00.340 I'd been couch surfing for months while my partner of 10 years figured out how to move
00:13:05.340 out.
00:13:07.680 I sat on the porch not knowing who I was, and then the dynamiting started.
00:13:12.180 three new condos went in around my small apartment that year and they blasted their foundations and
00:13:20.780 parking garages through shieldstone on a schedule that i came to know in my body
00:13:25.460 such that i'd begin to curl and flinch away as my internal clock counted down before each
00:13:32.000 coming blast the sound was everywhere inside me and the cracks stretched up my walls and i wanted
00:13:40.280 to slip under the shield and disappear, but I didn't. Not for the last time, I was surprised
00:13:48.560 by how much pressure these wind chime assemblages of bone and nerve can withstand.
00:14:01.280 These days I drive winding mountain roads blasted right through shield. I drive between
00:14:08.240 walls of shieldstone, and I see its waves and depth and fractures, and I see just how
00:14:15.180 thin the layer is of earth and roots. And it's hard to believe trees can grow here at
00:14:21.340 all. Sometimes they can't find enough to hold onto, and it doesn't take much wind or snow
00:14:27.920 for them to fall. Just a little further north, they give away completely to the taiga.
00:14:33.840 we have been blasted and compacted
00:14:39.600 extracted from and scraped and choked and runnled by massive weighty systems and yet
00:14:48.140 with each of these gestures that paid us no care
00:14:52.620 we brought our ancient knowing closer to the surface
00:15:03.840 we are mountain bones in us beneath our water cells and our raging sputtering fire cells
00:15:16.400 and our earth cells all fruitful and squirming we are silently everywhere
00:15:24.780 holding whole continents of hope
00:15:30.440 and life in the cup of our hands
00:15:33.380 moving in waves
00:15:35.840 rising and falling on a timescale
00:15:39.020 that puts our daily troubles into context
00:15:41.700 the shield exists because of pressure
00:15:46.820 two million years of glacial ice
00:15:49.820 over a kilometer high
00:15:52.200 Scraping slowly back and forth
00:15:57.820 Till there's almost no soil left
00:15:59.800 And the bedrock is metamorphosed to a stone harder than stone
00:16:03.960 Pressure rearranges ourselves and ourselves
00:16:08.040 And we become stronger
00:16:10.000 We become crystalline
00:16:13.600 Aligned and singing
00:16:16.520 Witches, we are shield kin
00:16:21.260 we are on every continent 0.98
00:16:23.320 we appear and then slip beneath the shifting sands
00:16:26.840 but if you reach down with your breath
00:16:29.020 into the places where your body meets the earth
00:16:33.120 you can feel the deep gravity of the stone
00:16:36.480 calling from below
00:16:46.380 you can feel the care there
00:16:48.700 the hands that lovingly extend
00:16:56.420 and offer foundation and support
00:16:59.700 and protection
00:17:01.000 you can feel the massive way
00:17:04.680 they amplify our magic
00:17:06.940 breathe
00:17:11.100 and imagine
00:17:18.700 We are paddling together in a long, smooth canoe
00:17:26.900 through still waters,
00:17:29.240 and the air is dense with fog, so we cannot see ahead.
00:17:34.480 We feel the miles and miles of water-wound woods around us.
00:17:42.960 We breathe with the strokes.
00:17:45.500 One, two, three, and as we breathe together, the great quiet comes, four, five, six, and
00:18:06.980 as the great quiet comes, the fog begins to clear. Seven, eight, nine, ten.
00:18:23.080 The fog clears. We see in front of us at last an island in the waterways, and it's all dark gray
00:18:30.760 granite shieldstone pushing with a gentle curve out of the water like a whale with lichens gently
00:18:38.180 walking across its face and low juniper and blueberry bushes tucked into the curves and cracks
00:18:49.820 holding on where they can when the wind comes in the fall making sweetness for the wolves and mink
00:18:57.800 and birds and us.
00:19:02.940 Together we pull close
00:19:04.760 and pull the canoe up out of the water
00:19:07.620 and rest upon the stone.
00:19:12.860 We are barefoot on the stone
00:19:15.220 and the sun is warm.
00:19:17.800 we lie down near each other but not touching
00:19:29.620 just resting
00:19:31.900 we can feel each other breathing nearby
00:19:37.540 our communal electric
00:19:40.780 we feel all the warmth held in the rock
00:19:45.620 releasing into our tired backs
00:19:49.680 we lie and breathe
00:19:53.820 and feel held
00:19:55.860 and slowly all our muscles
00:20:00.000 begin to ease downward
00:20:01.540 the tiniest dimensions
00:20:05.260 of our myofascia and our bones
00:20:08.260 settle into the stones
00:20:10.160 blown clean in the gentle breeze
00:20:14.040 washed bright by the sun
00:20:17.860 loons call in the distance
00:20:22.980 we follow their echoing sound up into the sky
00:20:28.080 and then we can see
00:20:32.140 spread out below us
00:20:35.280 an endless archipelago
00:20:38.380 of small granite islands
00:20:40.660 softened by the weather
00:20:42.120 islands of shield just like the one we're on
00:20:47.420 they look separate and isolated
00:20:54.500 these small islands of stone
00:20:57.420 but we know the truth now
00:20:59.540 they are all one below
00:21:02.640 you are not an island
00:21:09.940 you are the roots of ancient mountains
00:21:15.200 below the surface we are one
00:21:19.760 we are kin to a deep loving protection
00:21:33.480 we are kin to a foundation that extends hundreds of miles around us and below us
00:21:42.020 ancient stone and all the things ancient stone knows
00:21:47.100 we are kin to the changing earth seen from the dimension of geologic time
00:21:55.740 the chemical composition of your blood and bones are deeply of this earth
00:22:02.260 they are descendants of people who learned to stand and walk across the face of continents
00:22:11.020 we have heard the resonance of deep granite rumbling in our smallest bones for millennia
00:22:20.800 whenever you need it you can stay with the shield
00:22:27.820 count to ten and come back here
00:22:32.400 feel us close
00:22:36.140 an archipelago of strength
00:22:39.820 and hope
00:22:41.420 breathe in the depth of our protection 0.99
00:22:57.820 You must be a witch. 0.99