Welcome back, witches and wildlings.
Come on in, settle down — and take a nice deep breath.
Wrap yourself into your cosiest blanket and enjoy a sip from your favorite beverage.
Let’s put the day and the world behind us, let’s close the doors and windows to our exterior — and focus on the voice within.
Take another breath. Look within. How do you feel — right now?
How is your mind doing — and how does your body feel?
The between
There is a term that really resonated with me when I read the book Queer as Folklore by Sacha Coward. Coward speaks about a book by Finnish writer Tove Jansson, who reflects on borders. She describes twilight as the border between day and night; the shore as the border between sea and land. Jansson says that the border is longing and that the border is to be on the way.
And then she concludes that the way is the most important thing.
As Sacha Coward puts it, a between place is a liminal space. Something and anything that appears or feels transitional and temporary. This can be you sitting in a bus riding home, waiting in an airport or at the doctor’s office, being somewhere and yet nowhere — because the fathomable goal of your movement is actually elsewhere.
To the buddhist in me, this resonates deeply on another level — because everything is temporary, only impermanence is permanent. But the nature of liminal spaces in a day to day context is that they are ever changing and thus naturally unfamiliar.
Unsettled, strange — and possibly, fear-inducing.
If you want to climb down into the deepest abyss of what’s hidden inside of you, be it in terms of emotions, memories, desires or wisdom — you are going to have to climb into the pit. The deeper you get, the further the way back seems — because you haven’t realised yet that the mountain itself is merely an illusion and once you acquire the skill to move vertically and horizontally, all of it will start feeling like a true home; like an organic part of yourself.
Because the liminal will not be unknown to you anymore.
Coward goes on to elaborate that queer folk and folklore operate in liminal spaces because we live outside norms and rules that transcend the conventional binary — and thus, are also, on first glance, unfamiliar and scary.
I love to be scary.
I embrace it fully. Every time I research or talk about female demons, scary legends and dark history, I observe how glorious a powerful woman in full force can be and how satisfying it feels to unleash that force into the world.
The process is not unlike training for a sports event. But you’re cultivating a muscle you don’t know how to localize or can’t even describe — a bit like doing a new physical activity and noticing how you have muscles where you didn’t know muscles would even be. So, to find your deepest spiritual anchor and manifest those powers of the mind, you also have to keep cultivating certain muscles — and that is the path we are on together.
Precisely in those kinds of spaces is where coming into your own as a witch takes shape.
Fear
But how to deal with fear and anxiety about things unknown, things that make you uneasy, topics that are uncomfortable — the darkness at the very bottom of that pit we are climbing into?
There is no way around but through. You can take your time and be careful and mindful with your personal resources, because this is a lifelong process — but you do have to touch and connect to the space itself, feel out the walls you’re climbing on, sense the safer etchings. You have to get a sense of your own stamina while practicing descent — and practicing ascent as well.
And you need to remember to always. Keep. Breathing.
As the Dhammapada puts it, those who are awakened, leave their home for a higher home. When you practice mindfulness, and achieve the ability to sense the void where all feelings dissolve, to touch the fabric of the universe itself, where a human experience is all human experience. She who feels at home nowhere, she senses home everywhere.
Once you can build a home without stacking bricks and buying beds but with your senses instead — you will come to see that nowhere is everywhere, because the between, all of the between, is connected — so now all of it is home to you. And a higher home you can truly carry anywhere because it remains within you.
Which is why nowhere is now your home. Because your home is called nowhere and it is between everything.
Witches
Witches, Shamans, Magicians and the like are between people. Because they, too, transform, do alchemy, communicate between the spheres, dip their toes into the intuitive, the void, the subconscious. All of this is and belongs to the between.
It is a place of darkness, a non-space, ou topos; a cliff, an abyss, a thing unfamiliar — where you must learn to find the paths that do not yet exist, to open invisible doors that you might have to craft for them to come into existence.
Trust that you know where you are going not despite but because the going is the arriving — and do not fear to receive and be open.
Inspiration
Sadhguru says in his book Death: Someday, when science goes far enough, we will find that there is nothing in the Cosmos that is not alive. The important question is: Are you alive enough to perceive it?
According to Zach Bush MD, we’re supposed to witness the world from a place of stillness, without owning or imprinting. If we really come into our own we will find ourselves in a place of quiet. Dr Lisa Miller describes how we have been educated out of our spiritual awareness although we are all born and built for transcendent relationships.
And lastly, Thai Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah describes the place in the middle in an essay titled Knowing the World: in a house, if someone goes upstairs, or comes downstairs, he knows he is downstairs, standing on the floor. But the space in the middle we aren’t aware of, because there’s no way to identify or measure it — because we don’t comprehend the space in between. But it remains as it is, whether or not anyone descends from upstairs or not. He uses the term saccadhamma, not going anywhere, not changing. The middle space is not marked or identified by anything. It can’t be described because its function is moving and transforming through it. Empirically there is before and after.
But, as we have learned today — it can be sensed, and your journey there, learning to sense what cannot be described, is our path.
Being a witch is knowing how to move and feel at home in the between, to connect what others cannot even sense.
I learned from Dr. Lisa Miller that we are all born with open channels, with the ability to sense and touch the inbetween. Don’t we all recognise the need to rediscover things we knew when we were children? There is great value in these discoveries.
I learned from Ajahn Chah, Tove Jansson and Sacha Coward that as we move in the between and pass through it with regularity, it is always there. But I also learned from Sadhguru that until we learn to perceive, embrace and embody it, truly fathom its existence and our interconnection with it, we cannot come into our own as awakened beings.
In recognising these truths as lessons for myself, I have solidified what intuitively has been appearing in my mind’s eye for years: starting to look at what cannot be seen and opening up to sense the between reveals the witch’s path.
Overcoming fear and trusting your intuition to feel your way along that path is what will lead you to your highest timeline in this life. Consistently giving your inner voice space to speak and gracefully descending into the abyss of your inner darkness are methods to forge that path horizontally and vertically — it is a journey that transcends binaries and linear logic.
We have now stretched our feelers into the darkness and started understanding that the unfamiliar is a space that belongs to us witches and wildlings. Our fear of it simply shows that we have not visited often and long enough. But going there regularly will further open the witch’s path.
You have begun.
We have begun.
Thank you for opening your mind and heart and for sharing time and space with me today.
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