Thank you to Frances Denny for capturing this for her Witches of America exhibition, featured in the New Yorker, CNN, Vice Magazine and on display at the ClampArt gallery in Chelsea till November 24th 2018. Feel so honored to be up there among so many witches I respect and admire like Starhawk, Kristen Korvette, Pam Grossman and Lyndsey Harrington.
Witch means so many things to me, but I think most profoundly it’s a way of being in conscious co-creation with the universe, of finding ways to manifest will through power with (rather than power over, as Starhawk writes) the natural world. That sense of flowing with the forces around one & of the interconnectedness of all life is fundamental – making witchcraft, in my mind, inherently political. That way of being is in direct conflict with the western paradigm and its institutions as it stands now. As Barbara Mor writes:
“…we can make no separation between “spirituality” and “politics.” We are this world, we cannot leave it. We can only work to transform it as we transform ourselves, in acts of evolution and revolution…The notion that “mind” and “spirit” can be abstracted from the body is a patriarchal lie….It is patriarchy that devalues and disconnects the body from the spirit in order to make that body’s energy accessible for exploitation. A feminist spirituality must begin with the fact of being alive as a biological body, on a living and conscious biological planet.”
I first (re-)discovered I was a witch in October 2010 and at the time I didn’t know of any other witches and I thought it was the one piece of my identity I would really never share publicly, that here, finally, was a role too stigmatized and easily mocked to talk to most people about. Eight years later and CNN is writing about witchcraft and feminism and Sephora wants to launch Starter Witch Kits. I’m not thrilled with witchcraft entering the mainstream and being taken on by capitalism but I will say that I’m amazed to be sitting here writing on the internet about it and on display in a Manhattan gallery, out and proud.
Gives me hope and reminds me how quickly social change can happen. Let’s see what eight years of popular public witchery can bring to this world. Let us not forget, witches have always been healers and radicals… here to heal ourselves and each other by taking on forces of oppression and creating new energetic possibilities, both outside and within.
🔮🙌✨