• Read all the books and other info you can, but learn to read critically.
• Don’t be afraid to read things you might not agree with or identify with. Study is study and just because you read it doesn’t mean you have to believe it or incorporate it into your practice.
• That being said, don’t appropriate cultures or cultural practices that do not belong to your or that you have not be trained and/or initiated in. There are ways to study cultures that are not appropriative, pay attention and be respectful.
  
• Let your personal curiosity lead your study. What are you interested in about witchcraft? History? Divination? Plants? tarot? sigils? candle magic? charms or talismans? knot magic? Energy work? Study what you are interested in and see where it goes. There is a learning theory called “unschooling” that believes humans are naturally curious and that we should follow that curiosity to create our study. So, seek what interests you about witchcraft and find information about that.
  
• You don’t have to buy all the fancy witchy stuff, especially if you don’t know if you are even going to use it. Stuff you already have is fine.  Things from thrift store are cheap, and work just as well. You might not ever use that cheap athame from the witch shop, but you might fall in love with a thrift shop mason jar.
• You don’t have to spend a lot of money to practice witchcraft. Walk around your neighborhood and get to know the plants and animals, even urban spaces have unique magical things. Check out the spices in your spice rack and look up their correspondences. There are lots of books on witchcraft online for free as well as phone apps that could suit your needs.
• Check out your local library. If they don’t specifically have books on witchcraft they will still have books on plants, history, and folklore. you might also be able to check things out with inter-library loans.
  
• You don’t have to publicly document your path. I’m really happy there isn’t a public documentation of my witchling years or my baby punk years. Seriously, so much stumbling embarrassment. However, it is always helpful to document your progress for yourself; a hidden blog, a notebook, or google doc are just fine to start.
• There is no universal witch. If you don’t want to work witchcraft in a religion, don’t. maybe secular witchcraft is for you. If you don’t want to work with deities, don’t. If forests give you the creeps and you love cities more, great, maybe urban witchery is for you. Make your witchcraft, your witchcraft.
  
• There is little good in arguing with people that disagree with you, especially on the internet. If someone is not being hurtful and they just happen to believe differently than you, leave them alone. A witch that believes differently than you does not diminish what you do.
  
• Remember that witchcraft is a collected set of skills and practices. These are things that you hone as you find what works for you. It is not something that will be given to you or that you will have instantly. It is something to be worked at that you can always learn more.
• Basically, if you study and practice witchcraft, whatever that means to you, you can call yourself a witch. Also, if you do those things and don’t want to call yourself a witch, you don’t have to.
  

The Ancestors

I really want to tell y'all something really validating, especially as a Black witch though it's a little sad too. 

You know how we just choose our ancestors? We decide that on these people of the past, the Black people we remember and such, they're our ancestors now?

They do the same to us. 

I was 13. Walking the same footsteps that many slaves had on Washington's plantation. Seeing these little shacks that could barely hold up. Those were where our people slept, spoke of freedoms, whispered fears. That is where they stayed and we're forced to reside. I looked at the fields that our people used to be in.

Spirituals rang in my head that day, songs I've never heard before while I was lingering behind the group. Sounds of whispers and the feeling of eyes laid on me.

Eyes of wonder, amazement, curiosity. They didn't know me, I didn't know them. But in that moment, they understood we had prospered, we were thriving. In that moment, I was their child, I was beyond their wildest dreams. 

Small black girl, cuddled up in warm clothes, not confined to labor, free of chains. Staring back into how far we have come.

As far as I know, I have no connection to that plantation. I don't know where we came from, and I doubt I ever truly will. 

Understand that they had to deal with their friends and families being split apart, sold to another who would brutalize and torture our people, creating hell on earth for us. 

They know we can't find our specific ancestry! They know and just as we reach out to them without a care of how they are connected to us, whether we are truly related or not, they don't care either. They see us, and call us kin and cheer on our prosperity because we are their legacy regardless. 

 We do not claim them. They do not claim us, we just reached and grasped the other side. So if you're willing, reach.

I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache

life just goes on no matter what

No fr tho

I got asked to explain Open and Closed Practices on TikTok

The Joshua tree is on its way to extinction because so-called green energy companies want to keep the death machine of civilization going by installing large swaths of solar panels over the desert floor, a big metal blanket that will kill everything it covers: the desert tortoise, the sage grouse, the hawks and snakes and beautiful flowers that have flourished for thousands of years. Gone. Gone.

All so that we can keep the dead heart in the rotting corpse of industrial civilization beating into the next decade. These are the "good guys" btw, these are the "renewable" "carbon neutral" options: covering the desert in miles of metal and microchips until every living being without a bank account is dead.

People in the notes: “You dumbass. Don’t you know we need to keep producing the exact same amount of energy we do now or all of humanity will die? We either maintain the world capitalism build or we all live in caves and die from an infected wound when we’re 26 years old, those are the only two possible societies.”