Yesterday was the one year anniversary of The Meadow: Meet Me Here, my original newsletter, which was reborn as CrossWitch in January. This anniversary marks one full year of commitment to weekly (and sometimes more than weekly) content creation. In honor of the occasion, I decided to revisit some of my most personally meaningful posts from the year as a way to remember where I started, and where I have ended up.
March 28th, 2022
This, my first post as The Meadow, is still one of my best pieces. Tears sprung as I reread it. I did not feel as brave as I sounded when I wrote it. Mostly, I felt angry. I was FED UP with the version of Christianity and “God” that we were getting shoved down our throats Sunday after Sunday. When I first wrote the story that would become the centerpiece of “Umbrellas” I thought I was writing about the pastor with whom I had locked horns. It wasn’t until I began rewriting it for my (VERY FIRST EVER PUBLIC) post that I realized the story was actually about me. Of course. Writing is sneaky like that. I think that by starting the newsletter with that post I was declaring my intention to choose life instead of fear. This is still my daily struggle, and my daily hope.
April 25th, 2022
Rereading “Blood of Grapes” was bittersweet for me, since we will not be doing a family sedar this year. I don’t know what to think about that. All of my objections from last year still stand, as does my reluctance to part with the ceremony that every spring of my life has brought with it since I was seven years old. I had hoped that, this year, the new familiarity of magic ritual—lighting candles to create a sacred space, speaking and singing blessings and readings that are repeated year to year, eating together to ground the ceremony—embodied in the sedar would infuse the experience with new meaning. But, the ritual still lacks intention for me. It was always a bonding experience for my family, something we did every year, a celebration of our collective spirituality. If my intention is not to partake in a spirituality that is not mine any longer, what would I be there for, anyway? I don’t have an answer, still. I don’t know how to be a part of my family while holding an entirely different set of core beliefs and values. Still. I had hoped that would have changed by now.
May 9th, 2022
I almost didn’t write this post. May 9th was a Monday, the day I was publishing at the time. It was also the first Monday, May 9th since she had been stillborn. All of the two-quiet horror of the event is somehow contained within the word, stillborn. I was so focused on being calm, remaining calm. Not letting my grief become a thing with teeth and claws. I would not make my living daughter fear losing her mother, too. I would not take up so much space with my grief that my husband would be unable to grieve alongside me. I would do this terrible thing I had to do differently than I had seen it done. And I have. Perhaps, now, I can grieve in any way I feel, instead of only calmly.
June 13th, 2022
One of the bravest, and hardest, posts I’ve written. I’m proud of it.
July 25th, 2022
This post, while unusually short and seemingly inconsequential, was enormously empowering for me. I had never before spoken to the system of abuse so directly before, and it felt damn good. The poem at the beginning of the post was written the month before, just minutes from pulling into the parking lot of the Creation Museum. I needed to arm myself with a different version of the old story before walking through it, again, so emmersively. It was cathartic.
August 29th, 2022
The walk described in this post I mark as my spiritual rebirth. The path I took away from that tree, the warmth and lightness I carried with me, led directly to witchcraft and the forming of a spiritual practice based in nature and the elements. It really started long before this, of course, as all things have many beginnings. But this is the day I think of myself as having been born again (ha!).
September 24th, 2022
Oof. This was a lot of work. My most thoroughly researched post, and the one that carried the most trepidation in hitting that irrevocable button. With the recent school shooting in Nashville, it seems even more important than ever. As soon as I heard about the shooting I felt the urge to contact a friend of mine who is a trans man, like the shooter. And then I felt angry that I would even feel the need to check in with him. In the aftermath of every other mass shooting, the vast majority of which are perpetrated by white cis-males, never once have I responded by thinking, “Wow, I should I reach out to my man friends and see how this is effecting them.” Never once. Even after writing the damn post I still don’t associate gun violence with white, American, patriarchal maleness. But after finding out that one shooter identified as a trans man, I just knew that there would be all kinds of anti-trans blow back coming down. And, unfortunately, I was not wrong. Some days the amount of hate and hurt in the world just makes me want to delete all of my accounts and go hide in the woods. Nature is a kind of cruel that’s easier to understand.
October 10th, 2022
If August marked my spiritual rebirth as a witch, this post was my coming out. And it was terrifying. I was so afraid of losing readers, friends, family members, casualty to my honesty and the common misunderstandings that arise when the word “witch” is spoken in seriousness. Thank you, all of you who have stayed. I appreciate you so much.
November 16th, 2022
One of my personal favorites from the year, “Endarkenment” marked a very important turning point for me: the ability to sit in the dark, the dark of the year and the dark within myself, and be unafraid. In Father Richard Rohr’s 9 stages of spiritual formation, step 5 is described as: “My shadow self is who I am (The dark night).” I thought that was interesting.