Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry (Emergent Strategy Series Book 6)

by Adrienne Maree Brown

hold space, hold change, when I doula, when I work as a healer—and when I write. I call it witching. Witching is a practice of engaging the essential, natural world with magic and supernatural intentions. Throughout history there have been many names for witches and the work of witches, including shamanism, sorcery, healing, herbalism, midwifery and doula labor, conjuring, rootwork, ritual and spellcasting. There are lineages that provide a lot of guidance for the developing witch, and there are intuitive paths where the practices are shown, felt, called. I am definitely an intuitive witch—I answer the call and I trust the love in the universe to guide my actions. And I use my witching

reawaken the black hole at my center the part powered by what we lose what we grieve, and by longing to reach is to live, to reach is sacred be attached to aliveness and nothing else trust: when life is done, it will let you go

let us never give up on each other even when grief is the only match for the pyre we honor life it is the end of a day, a season, a way, an era the change is tumult, terrifying and beautiful we will never be convinced to be expendable. alchemize every death system, liberate our divine lives

Dino: The cycle is truly mysterious. Learn to grieve, learn to resolve harm without violence. Death will still come, but it won’t be from ego, or fear. Practice is the way to make prayers come true.

Dino: Life is about being honest, courageous, connected. And eating. Those things happen at the level of relationship. All the big horrors end because of relationships healing, mending. Or asteroids…which are still small on a planetary scale. Me:

Dino: Dreams, visions…are like sun in the consciousness. The present is giving you spiritual seasonal affective disorder. But the sun is in you, you have to become a light, one of many lights that help the species feel inspired to root down, to conserve the water, to reach up to its highest self.

amb (tearing up): How can I be part of the light when I’m so scared and small? Dino: Everyone on earth should be scared right now. Scared is part of caring. So is sadness, confusion. Grief. It’s how we love. Don’t stop caring about life. Don’t stop moving towards life. Look at me…I’m still learning.

eventually be folded into such heaven the galaxies exist to feed gravity

remember you are water. of course, you leave salt trails. of course, you are crying. flow.

that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community.

you. that the sacred comes from the limitations.

leave me be in my orbit, watching the world change while i cling to the small joy of known cycles

The low-commitment interaction of online conversation suited me. I could walk away when I wanted, be vague, silly, sad, provocative—it was all acceptable, meaning every version of myself had a set of people who would accept me. This was infinitely more compelling than real life, where I often felt that there was nowhere I could feel accepted, even in my most universal performance of self. I was grieving for people who had never even accepted my truest self. Though it is a foreign object in my programming now, I remember each shameful contortion of myself on behalf of someone who did not love me, the duel griefs of being unseen and then abandoned. Loving myself became the goal

had never had my grief met. I had never considered that it was possible to be held through it. I thought grief was the same as loneliness. My grief was turned away from so many times, dropped, sullied, quieted, soothed to silence, buried.