Sunday Dispatch: My Queer Reflections on a Week in the Woods with Witches

I was supposed to be spending a week in NY, but plans changed and I found myself, instead, spending a week in the woods with about 120 Witches. Some of you may know about me that I’m a Witch, born and raised. As a Witch I believe in the power of the word, and the power of magick. (Sometimes I believe less, sometimes more.) 

I was brought to California Witchcamp by a few strong threads of relationship, and a lifetime of proximity to the Reclaiming Tradition; Starhawk (one of the founding members of Reclaiming) and I have circled together for many decades in the political community as well as the Pagan one. She was one of the few elder Witches, aside from my mom, Motherbear, who I could reliably find in both of those spaces.

Believing in magick, I have to believe that my ending up at this event at this time was propitious. I put one foot in front of the other, and the path led me deep into the woods, far from the nearest cell phone tower, far from the nearest concrete, far from the nearest store. 

Kind of how I grew up!

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Some of you may know about me that I was raised a step (or three) outside the dominant paradigm. My parents were part of the Back-to-the-Land movement. They moved to a piece of undeveloped land (or “underdeveloped,” in the language of consumerism. It had been logged twice—once in the 1920s I believe and once in the 1950s, but aside from that it was pristine, intact, holy and whole) in the outback of the Northern California hills. 

The whole “turn on, tune in, drop out” ethos was a lesson my folx took to heart. I was raised with the belief that the “shit is coming down!” (Indeed, I still believe it is—but the fall of Empire is a marathon, not a sprint.) 

The fact is, I was raised for The Fall. I’m the buddy you want on your apocalypse team; I know how to slaughter, dress, and butcher an animal. I know how to grow a garden. I know how to fix a car, and I know how to jack the battery for a limited amount of DC power.

During the majority of my growing up, we had no electricity, no phone, no indoor plumbing, no hot running water, no TV, limited external media in general. What we had in place of those things: a deep relationship with the land and the seasons, and the spirits of place. Uninterrupted hours of reading; mostly the classics. My first chapter book was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I loved Louisa May Alcott’s books, Bulfinch's Mythology, and classical faery and folk tales. Unabridged, raw, and gory as they came. 

I loved taking a book out into the forest and find a tree to sit with while I read. And, being pretty isolated except for my immediate family, those characters and critters in the books became my friends. As did the trees.

But before I allow you to fall into the revelry and glamor of thinking this was a wholly idyllic life, just know there was a lot that went wrong in the shadows. But that’s a story for another time. 

All this to say, I was a product of “turn on, tune in, drop out” taken to an extreme. I was raised with skill sets not designed for the current world and culture we inhabit. I was raised for what may come next. 

And, it had been a while since I found my way to a corner of the world that internet does not reach. And I am admittedly as dependent on my pocket computer as the next person is. 

To my surprise, I found that I took to signal-free living like a duck to water. 

Feeling Firefox-y in the woods.

Back to the Village

This was likely partially due to the fact that I was in a temporary autonomous zone; an intentional experiment at creating and living in community. I have been blessed to live in many such experiments, from days, months, and even years at a time. One could argue that even the—some 2nd gen friends and I joke — “semi” intentional community I grew up on was an intentional village of sorts, or at least a semi-intentional one. 

I was on the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament in 1986, nine months of marching across the country to bring attention to the nuclear arms race. This temporary village ran on a pure consensus model (one of few such experiments I have been party to), with all decisions being made by the collective. The meetings sometimes went on literally for days, and we all learned so much about collaborative living, and shared power. 

The March was the genesis of an offshoot that created demonstrations ongoingly for years at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Each year I would head out to the desert and join into a temporary autonomous zone, where I would stay for days or weeks. While not a pure direct consensus model, this experiment was run using the spokes council model, where a spokesperson would speak for each decentralized affinity group. 

In 1990, at 19, I left college and went to Germany with two loves to enter into the international Anarchist squatting scene in Europe. We stayed at squats in the US, and then Amsterdam, and then lived in Berlin at Liebig 34 in Kreuzberg for a few months. The Berlin Wall had just come down, and the squats on both the east and the west sides of “no man’s land” went on for blocks and blocks. Every evening, one of the squats would hold a “volkskuche,” a peoples’ kitchen, and host all the squatters from the neighborhood.

The decisions made at the squat were made using direct participation; those who participated in the decision-making process made the decisions. And it worked.

If memory serves, there were people of over a dozen nationalities living in our squat. Of all these amazing and diverse folx, I most clearly remember an “older” woman (maybe she was in her 40s or possibly 50s) from Italy. She was so strong and centered. Self-possessed. Beautiful. (I wish I could recall her name, but it’s lost to the tides of time at this point. Maybe someone will remind me.)

(And this story of squatting in Berlin is one I will get deeper into at a later date, as well.)

Later on, festivals became part of my temporary autonomous zone/intentional village experience. Whether Pagan gatherings, or New Age EDM festivals, or Burning Man, or a variation on the theme, festivals were working on a different level, and while they were working to create change too, they never hit the tenor for me of the politically-rooted experiments. I tried very hard to infuse my festival experience with the meaning and intent of my political experiences, but they always fell short for me; whether due to the lack of “real-life” application and intent in festival space, or the tendency toward “spiritual bypassing;” personified by the “white light” tendency to gloss over shadow work.

And, on another branch of experience were the initiation cycles I took an active role in as Priextexx. In those often years-long commitments and settings, there was weaving in political intent and magick and personal growth, all resulting in an intoxicating mix of self-annihilation and self-discovery. 

At Witchcamp, the magickal and the political felt deeply integrated. The context and contour and historical intent of the Reclaiming Tradition is rooted in affecting change on the political level. This being the case, I saw and experienced the threads of activist training woven into the structure of camp, and experienced the full integration of political intent braided into the fabric of the experience. 

Healing the Wounds of Community

We are imperfect beings, living imperfect lives. And as I have been known to underscore, the counterculture is defined by the dominant culture. We carry the wounds of the overculture into our experiments, and at best treat them openly as they arise. At worst, they become pernicious and persistent sites of recursion.

As a person who came to this experience with many wounds inflicted by community living, I had a considerable amount of “breathing through” to do as I decided to enter into Perfect Trust and Perfect Love with a village of strangers, soon to become community, and in some cases spirit-family, loves, and close confidants. 

In the early days of camp, I found myself describing my experience of entering into this experiment as a “trust fall;” that personal growth exercise where you close your eyes and allow yourself to fall, trusting that your exercise partner(s) will catch you? Yep, that’s what trusting a community experience felt like, after falling away from many communities and working my magicks on my own for many years. 

And in this case I found the community to be, if not perfect, at least authentically examining and addressing its own shit. 

And I found myself grateful. 

Principled Struggle 

In January of this year, I went to Creating Change, which is a conference of queer folx from all over the place. Mostly the US, but not solely. At the conference we worked with the concept of “principled struggle;” the recognition that we are not all going to agree on everything all the time and that we need to be able to disagree with one another and still see ourselves as allied, and behave in ways that support the shared goals and outcomes. 

I very much felt this current to be alive while at Witchcamp. It was alive in the story we were working with (The Morrigan and Cuchulainn), and it was alive in the culture of Reclaiming, and it was alive in the day-to-day engagements under the guideline of “You are your own spiritual authority, rooted in community.” It was alive in the democratization and trust of magickal decentralization and training. 

I experienced Witchcamp to be an incubator for revolutionary magick and activism, as an inseparably braided rope. This appealed to my ethos and aesthetic deeply. I felt awkward at times in my newness to the community, but I also felt at home. 

Making Magick

I felt at home in the making of potent and powerful magick, intentional living in community, and the recognition of the power of breath, pulse, body, word, and relationality. I found myself at home in the community of Witches intent on creating change not just internally, but externally too—with the recognition that both are, in many ways, the same. 

“…if that which you seek, you do not find within yourself, you will never find it without.” 

We are a microcosm, and we are the macrocosm. Change reverberates between the outer and inner terrains, the inner and outer. There is no greater magick, in my opinion, than tying our singular fate to the fate of The All, and working for our own liberation and that of the collective as one commitment; “I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.”

The act of being in community is magick, the sacred mirroring of joy and conflict, light and shadow, peace and passion. This is alchemy in action, a Petri dish, an incubator for great change.

The act of speaking things into being, and being witnessed in this, is an act of magick. Word as bond. The telling of creation myths, the weaving of incantations, speaking with love, power, and passion. 

At Camp, we spoke old ways into new ways. We wove the old tales into new outcomes. We found new possibilities by reading between the lines of old stories. 

Queering Our Magick

One of the new timelines born of ancient ones, was the queerness of the space. I was so grateful to be held in a container that witnessed and upheld queerness. From the basic element of integrated pronoun usage to the beautiful magick of queer relationality and articulated magicks, I felt held and known. 

This has not always been the case in the Witchcraft community. As I said above, the counterculture is counter to, and therefore to some extent defined by, dominant culture. Our parents’ generation carried the limitations of their awareness into the New World they were working to create. 

In Paganism, this was exemplified by the persistence of gender essentialism, along with vestiges of male authoritarianism and top-down models for power structure—in many cases. 

It was a deep-drawn breath of fresh air to be in a community that not only accepted queerness, but where it was centered; a bevy of trans folx living our best lives, a super queer-centered camper facilitated community ritual, and queer and trans love and identity being celebrated in the “all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals” vibe. (And some delicious and delightful T4T connections to carry forward all my own.)

And along the way, and in the time since, stories have been shared with me about the wending way toward this truth and reality. It has not always been this way, even in this transformative and social-justice-oriented community. 

I choose to take this as a lesson and example of the fact that change is coming, and it is coming faster than some think. Indeed, in some cases, we have arrived. 

Me and a sweet, cheesin’. Sweet “see you later”s.

Bears and Ravens and More Than Human Ancestors, Oh My! 

Finally, I was blessed and blissed to have many encounters with our More Than Human community; a bear in—literally—spitting distance of my tent as a (literal) wake-up call, ravens taking their fill of my snacks and leaving me a feather, and tree relatives holding our sacred circle of magick intact. 

I left the woods exhausted (the work of initiation is deep and affecting work), renewed, and connected. (Funny how dropping out can be a version of plugging in.)

I face the path ahead of me with more questions than answers as to my future direction, but with renewed trust in my footfall’s ability to lead me where I need to go, and a renewed awareness that my True North abides within. 

And with the sacred reminder that earth, water, fire, air, and spirit are all only a breath, a slight shift in perspective, away in any given moment. (It is our attention, and intention, that wanders.) And that community and intentional village is always possible, when two, or three, or more gather. And a reminder that those beings may be More Than Human. 

A Prophesy, Born of The Collective

Before I go, I share with you a Prophesy, transcribed from the writings of the Seers, born of the collective voice and the California Witchcamp 2024 experience. May these words whisper the Mystery to you:

There is a verdant belonging in beauty. May our forsight be indomitable enchantment. Eyes that see pain and ears that listen for potential.

Listen to the radiant sweetness of the ecosystem, and with confidence in the Hag and Collective find truth, belonging, and health.

With queer rage and empathy we fight for peace and follow each other home.

In acceptance of our confused faith let us float toward integration. Let us be present with freedom.

By our action your forgiveness and your fierceness unabating you shall find the reciprocity that is a Beyond Human prosperity.

The Aunties Three sing, sing of madness, of the floating spark. The Hag of clarity declares the Crows Dedication. For your safety, surrender your nuance to the Collective Present.

Unfurl instead your bravery.

Your accountability is to the Collective.

Courage, Warrior. Choose to dedicate yourself to Love.

Sigils born of The Collective Work; Be a Revolution.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to any thoughts you may have. 

And for now, merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again. Love you, Witches!