Missing Witches - We Are Seedling Kin - Infinite And Inevitable

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 more

00:00:12.480 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,

00:00:22.960 our list of people to learn from about craft and magic and resistance and re-enchantment is

00:00:28.500 long and fertile. But in the spring, we need to balance out against people logic by digging into

00:00:35.600 soil, learning about the plants and animals and rocks and winds and waters that are us too,

00:00:42.400 as we wind our wild ways through the hollow biont that we all are here on earth.

00:00:47.760 These episodes were originally conceived of as tongue-in-cheek, anti-capitalist,

00:00:52.660 motivational meditations, and we hope you'll take these offerings in that original sense. 0.93

00:00:57.160 seed bombs hurled on the pristine dying lawns of mondays bless it fucking be the music in this

00:01:05.280 episode is by contemporary composer emily doolittle who you will be delighted to discover 0.73

00:01:10.760 composes music in response to and in collaboration with animal songs and also plants i met emily in

00:01:18.800 montreal when i was in grad school my memory is holy but i think our mutual friend robin invited

00:01:24.660 her to come to Diane's house where people met to stitch and sing and Emily taught us Georgian

00:01:31.180 harmonies. Then later I would go to her house. She would dumpster dive at the Jean Talon market and

00:01:37.040 make a big soup or curry and people would come and sing old folk songs, protest songs. One girl

00:01:43.520 played a banjo lay lay and another a zither and I let myself write some of my first songs.

00:01:49.880 Robin was always there, a strength, a wind behind her and in her hair around her from the bike ride over, a kindness, an easy laugh, and surprising twists of insight from cultural theory and island metaphysics.

00:02:05.660 Robin died last year from a cancer that seemed beatable and manageable until it wasn't.

00:02:11.220 my memory is frayed and blanketed by chemo and all the tight anxiety of the last years but

00:02:18.520 i remember singing in emily doolittle's kitchen and robin's clear voice and the bounty of gardens

00:02:26.320 rescued and piled high on the table

00:02:28.820 These songs Emily shared for this episode

00:02:44.280 were in part inspired by the orchard

00:02:46.340 wassailing tradition, she told me

00:02:48.380 a pagan practice of singing

00:02:50.300 and dancing in the garden and amongst

00:02:52.300 the fruit trees at the end of winter

00:02:53.980 to call good spirits back

00:02:56.060 and rattle away negative forces

00:02:58.200 and to together call in spring and hope and good harvest.

00:03:05.300 When we were writing to each other about this episode,

00:03:07.840 Emily also sent me a piece she'd composed called Gardenscape

00:03:10.840 and an essay she'd written about how that composition came to be.

00:03:15.000 She wrote of the early days of COVID lockdown.

00:03:18.680 Two parents with two young kids bouncing off the walls,

00:03:21.900 all wound tight with fear.

00:03:24.080 And then finally some sort of rhythm established

00:03:26.520 and she sits to make music again and she writes after several weeks of anxious nothingness some

00:03:33.020 inspiration crept in albeit in a form i did not recognize at first that form was a common wood

00:03:39.020 pigeon columba palumbus which took up residence in the cherry blossom tree outside my window

00:03:44.400 those of you who have spent time in europe in the spring will need no description of its call but

00:03:50.100 for those of you who haven't heard it some words that come to mind are repetitive persistent

00:03:55.400 and intrusive. The traditional mnemonic for the wood pigeon is, take two cows, taffy. But some

00:04:03.320 people suggest, for fuck's sake, shut up, is more appropriate, and I fully understand why. 0.99

00:04:09.540 I started a piece called, in reference to a Baroque dance, 0.99

00:04:13.820 I started a piece called, in reference to a Baroque dance form based on repetition,

00:04:20.280 chasson for bassoon and piano, or is this wood pigeon ever going to go away?

00:04:25.400 The piece sits half-finished on my piano, perhaps awaiting some future lockdown to be finished.

00:04:32.080 And suddenly, as soon as I thought of turning my annoyance into music, I was back.

00:04:38.660 I could think again, could feel, could engage with my surroundings.

00:04:42.780 Perhaps I could even appreciate and create art again.

00:04:46.520 Because in wrenching my attention away from my unsettled brain and the news feed,

00:04:50.920 this wood pigeon reminded me to attend to the world around me pandemic or no the shared garden

00:04:58.700 outside my window is home to a kaleidoscopically varied wealth of life not just the insistent

00:05:05.380 wood pigeon but also the joyfully melodic blackbird the cheerily aggressive wren the

00:05:10.980 marauding flocks of lesser black-backed gulls and the rotating cast of cats foxes and hedgehogs

00:05:17.800 that variously laid claim to the garden at night.

00:05:21.260 I may be complaining about the persistence of the wood pigeon's call,

00:05:24.780 but it was this very persistence

00:05:26.480 that began to bring me out of my own head

00:05:29.600 and back to the world.

00:05:33.060 Later in the piece she wrote, Emily continues,

00:05:35.800 as I listened, made recordings,

00:05:37.820 and transcribed the garden bird songs,

00:05:39.960 now a chiff-chaff, now a goldfinch, now a wren,

00:05:43.660 I began to relax into our bizarre time.

00:05:45.900 I relearned how to appreciate what was still around me

00:05:49.820 rather than just mourn what wasn't

00:05:52.720 I remembered previous times when increased attentiveness

00:05:56.520 to the natural world helped me form who I am

00:05:59.560 as a composer and as a person

00:06:01.960 so this episode

00:06:07.820 is dedicated to Emily

00:06:11.300 and Robin and the wood pigeon

00:06:14.020 and is a song of attentiveness

00:06:17.760 a love letter from a fragmented self

00:06:21.640 to seed selves, previous selves

00:06:24.020 and their sweet symbionts

00:06:25.840 singing friends in the garden

00:06:27.340 it is a basket of fruit and fabric scraps

00:06:32.540 and seed packets

00:06:33.840 it is a basket of fruit and fabric scraps

00:06:38.220 and seed packets

00:06:39.520 a song to wake our garden beds and orchards

00:06:43.460 and call in good spirits and beloved ancestors

00:06:46.580 and our wild, beautiful friends on their ghost bikes

00:06:50.360 so we may love what is here,

00:06:52.480 what grows, what cackles and sings at the window

00:06:55.200 and taps at the door,

00:06:57.120 what sprouts like infinite green stitches

00:06:59.920 belying the lie of endless nightmares,

00:07:03.760 of endless end times.

00:07:05.000 This is a song of seedling kin.

00:07:09.480 Come little spout, little pony under here,

00:07:13.220 Balloon or the mud

00:07:15.060 Jacket wrapped against the chill

00:07:17.220 Give us some green 0.96

00:07:19.220 Wink your eyes as well to shoot 0.96

00:07:21.220 Don't be too mean 0.99

00:07:23.280 With your cuddle bellies underfoot 0.93

00:07:25.520 Come little spud 0.64

00:07:27.500 Green to catch the sun

00:07:30.120 Swelling in the mud

00:07:31.780 Chilly safe till summer's done

00:07:34.240 Give us some green

00:07:36.260 Wink your eyes as well to shoot 0.96

00:07:38.980 Don't be too mean 0.99

00:07:40.620 With your cuddle bellies underfoot

00:07:43.020 Once, some years after grad school, I spent an evening in my friend Angela's tiny Montreal apartment.

00:07:50.180 She had put herself on the waiting list for a community garden plot in Little Italy years earlier when she lived down in the bottom part of the plateau.

00:07:57.940 Finally, her name came up, and funnily enough, she had only just moved around the corner from the lot on Beaubien, and so had I.

00:08:05.020 A little seed of hope for the future dropped half a decade ago, finally sprouted.

00:08:13.020 Let's put our names on dream lists.

00:08:30.720 Wait lists that seem impossible, witches.

00:08:33.760 Let's throw fishing lines of great big and tiny dear little dreams

00:08:38.360 into the great beyond.

00:08:39.520 it's spring, though I am still under deep snow. Let's believe in magic, even in the face of it

00:08:47.420 all. Welcome to the kinship season of the Missing Witches podcast. We have been missing you, all of

00:08:56.860 you, the great big all of you that includes the seeds of all sorts listening in the cool dark,

00:09:02.420 that includes the houseplants tilting in slow motion to follow the sun across the window of

00:09:07.840 the day that includes all our relations all our more than human kin we have been missing you

00:09:14.320 that's a truth that's like a bud bursting endlessly at the heart of the missing witches

00:09:19.680 project at the heart of what we call our witchcraft our feminist magic our dancing with the re-enchantment

00:09:26.680 we missed you we miss you and long for you and reach for you and make spaces to try and flicker

00:09:34.000 with you towards you on road trips and in jammed spaces in gardens and at kitchen parties in our

00:09:42.160 online coven where we are waiting for you to come and co-create with us and here and the coven we

00:09:48.940 make in the dark between our ears like synapses we leap towards connection and marvel at the

00:09:57.660 degenerative, world-making, life-changing, magical force in that crafting.

00:10:04.680 We are seedling kin.

00:10:27.660 I wanted in on the community garden thing with Angela.

00:10:35.340 I wanted my hands in the dark, dirt under my nails, even if it was just weeding and watering.

00:10:42.020 I didn't know much about gardens, but I wanted to help walk through the garden center,

00:10:46.860 picking little plants and seeds, turn the soil, learn which plants grew well near others.

00:10:52.820 I wanted to make it past the padlock on the chain-link fence I walked by all the time

00:10:58.360 on the way between the market and the metro

00:11:00.180 I wanted to walk through the community garden like I belonged there

00:11:04.440 what bureaucratic magic do we need to accomplish to belong there

00:11:08.860 whatever it was I wanted in

00:11:10.780 in the end, as is often my way

00:11:13.480 I made it in when someone else figured out the steps and held open the door

00:11:17.100 then I could rest there

00:11:19.460 with the round laughed man who I knew from the brew pub

00:11:22.260 who only grew hot peppers. Friends of friends with graying hair, wide skirts, wild permaculture

00:11:29.180 pots bursting with food in three dimensions, and the elderly Venezuelan man with the plot next to

00:11:35.280 us who raised a miracle of heritage seeds and offered us bags of vegetables and the gentlest

00:11:42.300 bits of advice for our barren, hopeful little patch. We feasted on kale that year, had a few

00:11:50.360 tomatoes and inherited a massive rhubarb. Maybe one small eggplant made it. We spent way more on

00:11:59.160 the plot, soil, and plants than we earned back in food, but we were in a place where that was

00:12:04.860 worth it. We were desperate for it. A sense of life, of something growing.

00:12:20.360 of the fly agaric, whose toads do heart brings pain.

00:12:28.360 Deaf and apt is the round dead cap, whose name is self and same.

00:12:37.360 Mushroom bait, mushroom bait, mushroom bait, mushroom bait,

00:12:42.360 the forager wants a mushroom bait.

00:12:45.360 Mushroom bait, mushroom bait, mushroom bait,

00:12:49.360 Montreal has been cultivating urban gardens since World War I, when 75 acres of vacant

00:12:59.940 land were opened and a thousand plots distributed to soldiers' families, unemployed workers

00:13:04.780 and returning veterans.

00:13:06.860 By the 1970s, residents transformed vacant lots into one of the largest municipal community

00:13:11.460 garden networks in North America.

00:13:13.900 Women, elders, immigrants, neighbors, carried together the invisible labor of managing compost, seeds, waiting lists, potlucks.

00:13:24.060 City blocks carved into little green plots where the roots are reaching out for memory.

00:13:30.400 Wait lists are still years long and the padlock gates still ask, community for who?

00:13:35.740 Angela and I sat in her tiny narrow dim apartment before that summer began and we dream planted the

00:13:43.560 garden while the snow clotted thick outside she made ointments and I helped a little stirring

00:13:50.240 and choosing lemony oils dreams of sunshine while we stirred and planned we made her kitchen table

00:13:56.740 and altar for the lives and loves we wanted cinnamon for passion honey for sweetness

00:14:03.620 guitar picks for music

00:14:06.060 rosemary for spirit connection

00:14:08.420 long talks, deep currents

00:14:10.620 a kid's toy

00:14:12.560 a hammer for repair

00:14:14.740 and all the plants in the house

00:14:18.420 and all the seeds for the garden

00:14:21.140 went on to that improvised altar

00:14:23.180 we wanted loves that were green and alive

00:14:26.940 we let ourselves say it out loud

00:14:29.620 and show it to the universe

00:14:31.460 in a little plot of living symbols.

00:14:34.800 Hopes scattered, each one a seed.

00:14:39.740 I'm Seedling Kin.

00:14:42.280 I set a berry in my mouth

00:14:46.880 The rose of sweet September

00:14:49.900 That was in my mid-thirties, I think.

00:14:55.220 Biking through Montreal nights from galleries to shows,

00:14:58.920 drinking too much, dating men who were bad for me, but the sex was good until it wasn't.

00:15:06.220 Always finding safety and return and myself again in circles of women friends. There were good men

00:15:13.640 too, and I longed for more of them, but I was always, as Audre Lorde puts it, a woman-oriented

00:15:19.740 woman i flourished in circles of wild girls and i knew i was bi or pan really because the gender

00:15:30.520 binary never summed it up and i always related to pan as an archetype and the beings who are

00:15:36.300 multiple who come from arcadia with their secret goddess worship and tumness and the wild hunt and

00:15:42.320 all the queer wood folk. 1.00

00:16:12.320 You wound my hands each time I pick it. 1.00

00:16:16.960 You melt my heart, sweet heart, and sigh.

00:16:23.360 I beat a berry with my teeth.

00:16:27.860 But also inside me was this unavoidable knowledge

00:16:31.020 about a future good man I could build a whole world with.

00:16:35.340 And a kid, the kid, I don't know how to explain it

00:16:39.700 except I always knew she was coming.

00:16:42.320 so I put them on the altar of my reckless thirties

00:16:47.540 and kept my sights set on them

00:16:49.360 and tried to hurl my body toward them wherever they were

00:16:53.200 and was content keeping my furry hooves and glances

00:16:58.380 to the garden, the dance floor.

00:17:01.560 We pour the lives we didn't live

00:17:03.560 into all the potential of this now

00:17:05.760 and watch what happens.

00:17:08.540 We are seedling singers, seedling sisters,

00:17:12.320 seedling kin, we called this world in.

00:17:42.320 that summer we sometimes went to the garden at night amy lived around the corner we brought

00:17:50.500 candles and wine and a joint gathered little twists of herbs and new green leaves and talked

00:17:56.380 to the plants and the stars about our truest dreams we were protected there the plants held

00:18:05.620 us the way they do, breathing out oxygen and nourishment, hoping we'd remember them.

00:18:12.940 Cynicism, bottom lines, and impossible endless growth charts stayed outside the chain-link fence.

00:18:19.240 When you walked through the gate, you could feel the change. I didn't know the archetype,

00:18:24.720 energy, spirit of doorways and forking paths and meeting places called Hecate then.

00:18:30.260 Not really, but that didn't matter to the feeling of it.

00:18:36.680 You know the feeling of those places, don't you?

00:18:40.260 In your body.

00:18:41.780 When everything is suddenly flickered into life.

00:18:48.040 Next door to normal.

00:18:51.040 Glowing and alive.

00:18:55.360 We're seedling kin.

00:18:57.260 We take an enclosure and use it to make a container.

00:19:00.260 that amplifies our desires, bright with this moment together, our minds light up with each

00:19:06.880 new idea, roots and vines, bright in the night in the garden. We sang and laughed under the

00:19:15.100 moonlight, small groups of women, queer people, so tender with each other, so nourishing to our

00:19:22.120 tiniest flickers of strength, of magic.

00:19:30.260 Two old women always sat on the porch of the seniors' home, overlooking the garden.

00:19:41.820 They kept an eye out for us, old trees giggling and keeping watch.

00:19:51.660 In the wild, most seeds never reach maturity.

00:19:55.440 Only a small fraction germinates, survive frost, drought, predators, and disease.

00:20:01.060 For every one seedling that grows to adulthood, thousands fail.

00:20:06.640 The failure is part of the rhythm.

00:20:09.040 Because survival is collective, iterative, experimental.

00:20:14.340 Even tiny green shoots that die return nutrients to the soil.

00:20:18.700 In the garden, we try to make a space to improve our odds.

00:20:24.760 I drank the berry down my throat, the rose of sweet November.

00:20:35.120 I drank the berry down my throat, and felt my heart remember.

00:20:43.340 The etymology of the word garden comes from a Proto-Germanic root,

00:20:49.140 gardo, meaning enclosure or fence.

00:20:52.520 It shares roots with yard, guard, and girth,

00:20:56.060 referring historically to enclosed spaces.

00:20:59.740 Though girth makes me think it also wraps around our bellies,

00:21:02.900 like clothing, what keeps us in and performs our civilization

00:21:07.280 and also keeps us warmed and fed.

00:21:09.700 concordia professor mitchell mclarnon creates toolkits of the team of students to connect

00:21:16.000 educators and community organizers with resources that support climate education through gardens

00:21:20.880 he asks what is this garden for and who is allowed in and who is kept out and why are they enclosed

00:21:30.380 before modern community gardens rural europe relied on commons shared meadows forests and

00:21:38.420 fields where people grazed animals, dathered fuel, and cultivated food. Beginning in the early modern

00:21:46.580 period, these systems were dismantled by enclosure acts, privatizing land and forcing rural households

00:21:52.440 toward wage labor in cities. The loss of shared land reshaped knowledge. Herbal medicine, seed

00:21:59.460 saving, midwifery, and small-scale cultivation, practices most often carried by women, the ways

00:22:06.120 we made our lives, saved lives, nurtured life, were marginalized, broken into fragments of

00:22:12.360 ecosystems, persecuted or displaced as professional authority expanded. They called them witches and

00:22:18.600 they hunted them, making it only more obvious how kin we are to every wild thing turned prey.

00:22:25.960 A lot of it was forgotten, but some hid in the woods or hid in plain sight and kept seeds.

00:22:32.100 some kept seeds in their dna in their genes beneath conscious memory but ready to sprout

00:22:40.600 in the moonlight when conditions were right dropped even if just for a moment onto crossroads

00:22:47.020 of connection of right relation 19th century allotment gardens gave workers small plots but

00:22:55.680 these were supplements to wages, not restorations of the commons, not reparations.

00:23:01.900 I drank the berry down my throat, the rose of sweet November.

00:23:11.940 I drank the berry down my throat, and felt my heart remember.

00:23:21.600 Hi, it's Risa.

00:23:23.060 And Amy from Missing Witches here to invite you to join a reparations movement.

00:23:29.820 Every year, we pay forward our coven membership dues to the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal

00:23:33.680 and invite you to join us in raising funds for Indigenous-led organizations.

00:23:38.700 Getting involved is easy.

00:23:41.000 Make a contribution of $10 or more to your local Indigenous-led org.

00:23:45.580 Land protectors, water protectors, housing, justice, rematriation.

00:23:50.820 Take a screenshot of your receipt and email it to witchreparations at gmail.com. 0.90

00:23:57.380 For every $10, you get one entry into a draw for fabulous witchy prizes.

00:24:03.320 So $50 is five entries, $100 is 10, so on.

00:24:07.660 Plus, everyone who joins the fundraiser will automatically get a discount code from Housewitch in Salem, so you literally can't lose.

00:24:16.240 The Missing Witches Reparations fundraiser runs through the month of May.

00:24:20.080 Go to missingwitches.com slash reparations for all of the juicy details.

00:24:25.380 Because it's not a gift, it's a debt.

00:24:27.840 And it's not a donation, it's a reparation.

00:24:30.100 I drank the berry down my throat, the rose of sweet November.

00:24:39.700 I drank the berry down my throat and felt my heart remember.

00:24:49.580 When inside a community garden, I feel the commons beneath it and around it.

00:24:54.020 i feel arcadia and that feeling informs all my work all the spaces i try to make or make my way

00:25:01.880 to the way we nurture our missing witches coven building nourishment and community and small

00:25:07.500 tender gardens enchanting for a version of the world where flourishing spills beyond containers

00:25:14.420 spirals out fills all our cups weaves us back into the thick heaving tapestry this is my witchcraft

00:25:24.000 as life practice i am seedling kin one million bright attempts feeding myself with my failures

00:25:32.800 making openings in the chain link putting roots down deep as we can to reach the common ground

00:25:40.360 we are seedling kin one million bright attempts making openings in the chain link fence

00:25:54.000 This winter, almost 15 years later, I stayed with Angela when I was in Montreal for appointments.

00:26:16.900 We'd been out of touch.

00:26:18.220 sometimes people are in your life for a season and that's okay and the lines diverge and after

00:26:24.120 I was diagnosed with cancer I was surprised by who I heard from and who I didn't but not surprised

00:26:29.340 that some people couldn't come up with the words what words could there be anyway but then after a

00:26:37.480 time once I was through surgery and chemo and was living in Montreal for six weeks doing my daily

00:26:42.260 radiation Angela did reach out and came to visit me and she brought me a little purple plant that's

00:26:48.200 been flowering ever since and she cried apologizing for not being there the whole time and it didn't

00:26:54.940 matter I was so happy to be back in the gravitational field of my friend so anyway a few months later I

00:27:03.120 came to stay for a few days and Angela drove me around making the slog in the snow between

00:27:07.380 appointments friendly by keeping me company her father had just been diagnosed too and so I felt

00:27:12.640 I had something to offer her in return for the kindness, if only

00:27:16.460 a little understanding, the immediate shock and the long

00:27:20.740 slog ahead. My meetings

00:27:24.760 were long and boring and scary and frustrating and

00:27:28.440 pinballed between opposite ends of town.

00:27:32.320 I had a meeting with a disinterested osteoporosis specialist eyeing

00:27:36.600 his $200 takeout sushi lunch while chatting about how I'm already

00:27:40.500 osteopenic and my bone density could plummet further now that all my hormones have been

00:27:45.220 turned off to keep my hormone positive cancer from returning. But he'd like to wait a year

00:27:49.940 before starting preventative medication to get a baseline, even though the loss usually happens in

00:27:56.220 the first year and the treatment to restore bone density isn't covered unless my cancer goes

00:28:02.360 metastatic. Even though there is a drug I could start right away that would prevent that crash,

00:28:08.020 which has no side effects at my dose.

00:28:11.360 And anyway, now I'm on that drug.

00:28:13.460 I seem to have prescribed it to myself.

00:28:16.180 I also had a follow-up with my lung specialist about lesions on my lungs,

00:28:20.700 which are still a mystery but not cancerous,

00:28:22.860 based on the lung biopsy that felt like a hallucination,

00:28:25.920 semi-conscious tools down my throat,

00:28:27.960 punching through the walls of my lungs to take samples.

00:28:31.580 I also had a pre-op meeting to plan my oophorectomy

00:28:34.440 so I could stop getting the large needle at the nurse's office every 28 days

00:28:38.520 that keeps my estrogen asleep.

00:28:41.580 The oophorectomy went well,

00:28:43.620 but it triggered my sixth infection and another stint in the ER,

00:28:48.100 and now I get two large needles, one in each hip every month for six months

00:28:51.620 in hopes of keeping the infection from returning.

00:28:54.620 And I'm sorry, I know, how boring.

00:28:56.980 I don't want to write a dirge of hospital returns.

00:29:00.620 i want to inscribe just enough on the record so you can see the outlines of the unseen parts

00:29:07.900 the secret indignities the boring lapse back into crisis all the time in sterile spaces

00:29:16.340 heaps of plastic used to heal and then discarded all my failed seedlings and the thick soil of

00:29:24.220 dead roots. We all move in all the time and how awful and beautiful it is.

00:29:54.220 Angela, this sweet friend from my wild 30s, shows up just in time, a long trajectory arcing back.

00:30:03.280 She drove me around, kept me company, and let me rest in the little home she owns now.

00:30:09.720 A tiny pocket I never knew existed in Montreal, these wartime houses preserved on arching streets that wrap around what used to be a massive community garden.

00:30:20.360 the neighborhood was built for factory workers making war machines for fighting nazis

00:30:27.060 they worked long hours then went home and tended to their liberty gardens trying to keep food on

00:30:32.480 the table when the war ended the city thought they'd all move downtown but they didn't they

00:30:38.300 insisted on their homes and they insisted on the school so the government let them keep their homes

00:30:44.740 and to make a school, they paved over the garden.

00:30:49.760 Breathe here with me for a minute.

00:30:53.260 I set a berry in my mouth

00:30:57.920 The rose of sweet September

00:31:00.920 What if we had homes, and schools, and gardens?

00:31:08.040 Is it so unreasonable to imagine a life where living,

00:31:11.900 its needs and joys and delights is centered layered yes and to all of it for all of us

00:31:22.340 evenings laughing in the garden learning kids and old folks the sick and the mad and the well

00:31:30.340 all our access needs all together casting spells of new life sprouting all us little seeds

00:31:39.480 is it such a wild dream let's build this with all our kin instead of war machines 0.99

00:31:47.180 so be it see to it blessed fucking bees 0.98

00:31:51.640 the love spell angela and i improvised with garden seeds in that tiny dark apartment a 0.98

00:32:15.380 decade and a half ago worked by the way. Angela's home is full of light happy plants and out front

00:32:23.120 she tends raised beds twice the size of our old allotment. Her partner is kind. They read quietly

00:32:30.660 and cook together. The basement is full of instruments. The fridge is covered in ticket

00:32:35.700 stubs. In my house the plants fill every windowsill. It looks like a jungle, an unlikely forest of

00:32:44.020 ancestors lovingly tended by Mark and our kiddo. He's rescued them from back alleys,

00:32:52.840 apartment plots when he had to move. They managed to keep them alive and thriving while also

00:32:58.480 tracking how much fluid was coming from my drains, keeping spreadsheets of medications,

00:33:03.960 driving me to blood tests and chemo twice a week. Even after that time had passed when their own

00:33:09.640 anxiety and death terror were allowed to unfreeze and take up space, they still watered and fed the

00:33:15.800 plants, calling each one by name. Slowly, we found tiny floating islands of calm.

00:33:24.420 Not normalcy, but an archipelago of new stable states.

00:33:30.980 I found the future I had always been throwing my body toward. This spring, we are dreaming of

00:33:37.160 starting seedlings again, planting our first small attempt at a small deconstructed community garden

00:33:42.800 practice all around the lake. One neighbor turned a tempo into a greenhouse. Another is donating

00:33:49.260 their sunny flat corner lot lawn, the only unforested spot on the lake. We have tomatoes

00:33:55.520 and sprouted potatoes in pots in the living rooms. In our plans, we are lining plant pots up at the

00:34:01.660 dead end of the road soon as the snow melts. It isn't perfect, and I've come to expect a great

00:34:08.480 deal of failure and suffering in the compost of all this living and joy. Angela has health stuff

00:34:15.920 too. Her dad's in chemo now. Mine had a heart attack this winter, but they're doing okay.

00:34:22.740 Living a magical life isn't an escape. We're all downstream these days from toxic, catastrophic,

00:34:30.460 extractive decision making

00:34:32.260 and death is our constant

00:34:34.740 companion no matter how much

00:34:36.820 we pour on the altars of purity

00:34:38.660 cultures

00:34:39.240 but if we want to

00:34:42.720 we can be witches

00:34:44.820 I drank

00:34:46.940 the berry down my throat

00:34:49.540 the rose

00:34:51.500 of sweet november

00:34:53.820 I drank the berry

00:34:57.440 down my throat

00:34:59.040 We can imagine turning any enclosure, any constraint into a container spell.

00:35:11.340 Declare a boundary within which we tend ourselves, our garden mates.

00:35:16.720 We reverberate and amplify and reach and plot and leap from there towards our densely interwoven futures.

00:35:25.460 Nurture the power of our will to be curse breakers

00:35:30.560 New pattern makers 1.00

00:35:31.900 Who worship life in every tiny inch of soil

00:35:36.160 We can be seedling kin

00:35:39.380 One summer, before cancer

00:35:46.700 When my kiddo was three or four

00:35:49.120 In the house in the woods

00:35:50.400 I bought on a wild dream

00:35:51.960 Before I had found the partner

00:35:54.140 that could build that life with me,

00:35:55.780 before I figured out how to stop working for other people,

00:35:59.260 before I learned to drive,

00:36:00.860 before she was more than a flicker in my eye,

00:36:03.100 I bought this house, and now we're here.

00:36:05.300 And one summer, we sprouted everything we could find.

00:36:08.460 Every bean in the cupboard,

00:36:10.060 every lentil, flaxseed, chia seed,

00:36:12.600 every dried pea,

00:36:13.660 all the little packets of old seeds

00:36:15.760 from the community garden days

00:36:17.280 hiding in the backs of cupboards.

00:36:19.500 The basement became a mini grow-op,

00:36:21.540 heating lamps, humming.

00:36:22.780 lots of our little seedlings failed but still somehow the windows filled with sprouts

00:36:28.700 some made it outside where the hares and snails and red squirrels and deer welcomed them with

00:36:35.640 delight we grew tomato plants that would never fruit in the short cold season butternut squash

00:36:43.680 that stretched in long hungry vines starved because i didn't know how much fertilizer they

00:36:48.900 would need and we can't use artificial fertilizer here anyway we're too close to the lake

00:36:53.620 i saw my parenting my attempts to build a life as an artist as a person as a woman as a witch

00:37:02.520 in all these failed seedlings tender hope over ambition joy tangled with frustration

00:37:11.060 I want to remember every lesson, every seed taught me, but memory feels so frail now.

00:37:20.300 I have to hope that things live beneath the surface of what I can hold on to, in the soil, written on our bones.

00:37:29.420 I whisper to my kiddo, to my younger self, to the self beneath memory, to Robin, to Emily, to the seven-year-old inside all of us.

00:37:43.180 The attempt, the laughter, the failure, being here together was the lesson.

00:37:52.540 we are and remain seedling kin each one reaches vulnerable and brave upward toward light and down

00:38:02.880 into the dark where all our little deaths feed us and keep us company to my kid to my kid self

00:38:11.760 to the kid in you to the kin in you tiny green rooting in wild selves learning failing reaching

00:38:24.220 into a world that feeds us with light water and the mathematics of soil and has a million ways

00:38:31.080 to kill us here's to a million more failures together here's to our wild reckless hoping

00:38:40.760 here's to all our seedling kin one million bright attempts cresting each spring like a wave

00:38:50.660 may they carry you forward and keep you company and hold you in the truth that we are tiny

00:38:58.820 and bound for statistically massive failure and also we are bursting with a power beyond

00:39:06.060 all reckoning we are infinite and inevitable and ancient throwing our bodies toward the gates

00:39:14.580 bringing a green time and a harvest beyond what short-sighted systems could ever imagine 0.98

00:39:20.720 we are seedling kin and we are coming blessed fucking be 0.89

00:39:28.940 I set a berry in my mouth, the rose of sweet September. 0.99

00:39:38.840 I set a berry in my mouth, so sweet and tart and tender.

00:39:46.760 Oh, bramble, brow, and thorny thicket

00:39:54.020 Fruit of canes and fragile flower

00:39:57.620 You wound my hands each time I picket

00:40:02.560 You melt my heart, sweetheart, and sigh

00:40:06.640 I bit a berry with my teeth

00:40:13.200 The rose of sweet October

00:40:16.320 I bit a berry with my teeth

00:40:22.460 And let the juice be long

00:40:26.140 Oh, bramble, brown, and bonnie thicket

00:40:32.180 Fruit of canes and fragile flower

00:40:35.960 You wound my hands each time I pick it

00:40:41.100 You melt my heart, sweet heart and sun

00:40:46.020 I drank the berry down my throat, the rose of sweet November.

00:40:56.380 I drank the berry down my throat, and felt my heart remember.

00:41:05.960 O bramble, briar, and holy thick pit, fruit of canes and proud of flower.

00:41:14.680 You wound my hands each time I pick it

00:41:20.140 You melt my heart, sweet heart and scar

00:41:24.760 I felt a thorn stick in my hand

00:41:31.620 The fading rose of autumn

00:41:34.880 I felt a thorn stick in my hand

00:41:41.680 The pain of friends forgotten 0.99

00:41:46.180 O Bram, O Bride, glorificate

00:41:53.440 Fruit of Cain's and fragile flower

00:41:57.760 You wound my hands each time I pick it

00:42:03.260 You melt my heart, you melt my heart

00:42:08.060 You melt my heart 1.00

00:42:11.720 O bram, o bram, a bloody picket

00:42:17.880 Fruit of pains, a fragile flower

00:42:22.220 You wound my hands each time I picket

00:42:27.540 You melt my heart

00:42:30.120 You melt my heart

00:42:32.640 You melt my heart

00:42:35.660 Hi, this is Amy.

00:42:57.860 And Risa from the Missing Witches podcast and Coven.

00:43:00.860 Each May, we donate 100% of our coven membership earnings to the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal, and we rally our community to raise money for Indigenous-led support organizations.

00:43:13.780 By contributing incredible prizes for our draw, donating, and signal boosting, we all make a hopeful wave of repair together.

00:43:22.020 We make reparations to re-enchant the world and its magic.

00:43:27.440 This year, we're weaving the biggest web yet, and we'd love for you to join us.

00:43:32.520 Donate, share, or become part of the coven.

00:43:36.080 We believe community is something we build together.

00:43:39.920 We built Missing Witches because we were missing you.

00:43:43.780 So check out missingwitches.com slash reparations. 0.96

00:43:48.920 Ding!

00:43:49.560 Ding!

00:43:52.020 Thank you.

00:44:22.020 Thank you.

00:44:52.020 Thank you.

00:45:22.020 Thank you.

00:45:52.020 Thank you.

00:46:22.020 Thank you.

00:46:52.020 You

Missing Witches - April 16, 2026

We Are Seedling Kin - Infinite And Inevitable

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