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Low Energy Witchcraft

Witchy things for you to do when your energy is low but your need to witch is high.*

Hi-res download available on my ko-fi for monthly and one-time members!

Energy Observation

Not everyone can sit in a serene and silent room and meditate efficiently, so pop on your noise-canceling headphones and maybe do a quick guided meditation to help get in tune with the flow of energy in your body. Simply observe, don’t try to force energy to flow

Tea spells

Herbal teas are great for spells because they already have “spell components”—herbs—and they’re designed to be easy to make. Choose a tea that incorporates herbs that fit the intentions of your spell. If you have the energy for it, come up with a prayer, chant, or rhyme for your spell while you wait for the tea to brew!

Touch Grass

No really—go outside and just appreciate the nature around you try to see if you can let go of yourselves and just be a part of the world around you.

Spiritual Soup

If you can’t go outside then try to get in tune with your indoor space and allow yourself to become part of the spiritual soup that is your living space.

Digital Offerings

If you can’t physically create an offering for the deities, spirits, etc in your life, make a digital offering. You could create a mood board, collage, cobble together a Pinterest board, and more. The possibilities are endless!

*Keep in mind that this is my personal experience and your mileage may vary. While these seem pretty low energy for me and others, this may not be the case for you. Take what clicks with you and leave what doesn't.

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Being a writer in a relationship is being continually caught in the fear of not spending enough time in with your significant other while simultaneously fearing not writing enough before you die.

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“The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.” ― Douglas Adams

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Wrecked (part 4)

Strength is supposedly in our roots. Can even poisoned roots provide somewhere to grow from?

A friend once told me, after her break up, she wished she was as strong as me. I said no, you don’t. You don’t want to endure what I did to get this way. I should have been safe as a child. Instead, I had to be silent – or die.

It made you this tough, the trauma, people tell me. It’s simply not true. I made me. I raised that little girl. No one left me a choice. I walked back from that crippling agony and madness, blinded by darkness. No direction. No guardian. Only a wreckage and my own two feet.

I’ll never go back.

(Image by Ramdlon on Pixabay)

You see, strength doesn’t come from trauma. Strength isn’t conditional on how devastatingly you’ve been broken. I break. I collapse to my kitchen floor, crying. Sometimes I find the bottom of a bottle to drown once more. Other times, I drive until I’m crazy again.

You shouldn’t have to face down a semi on a darkened road or hide your kids in a motel room to be called strong. My friend was a wreck after that break up. But it didn’t destroy her. She found love again. As for me…

I have a long time until love might grace me once more. I choose alone. Closing off the world. A glass house. Outside, looking in, unable to relate or engage. I break things. Hearts. Glasses. I break things so nothing ever breaks me again.

I’ll never go back.

(The End - Wrecked 2 coming soon)

Part 1 here

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My write up on the Kouri Richins case to follow up my rant from last night. This case just gets more and more wild.

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A lot of people on here don’t seem to realise that the witch trials that happened in Europe in the Early Modern period aren’t some vague legendary events to carelessly use as an allegory or feminist/Wicca/witchy martyr myth. Real women AND MEN, many of whom are named and known, died in these events. They may have been executed for witchcraft, but often this had nothing to do with a folk practice, and more to do with social, political and ethnic tensions.

These victims are no one’s to claim as martyrs. Their deaths are communal tragedies that drastically reshaped the social fabric of many places and hold an important place in folklore traditions and local identities up to this day.

Please stop appropriating these events, claiming the dead as yours without care for the local context in which they lived and died. A lineage lives locally that is not yours to take. Have some respect.

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C-PTSD with low empathy but I usually end up being someone's therapist at parties and get togethers because everyone deserves a chance to heal, even if in short doses at a time.

Monthly reminder that low empathy doesn't make someone a bad person.

High empathy doesn't make someone a good person.

Empathy is just 1 ingredient to a whole person.

I'm low empathy but run a blog dedicated to helping people.

❤️ We're more than our individual ingredients.

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Kouri Richins: Jailhouse letter reads like a woman who feels above the law

So, I've been followingthe Kouri Richins case and writing about it over on Medium. But can we specifically discuss the "Walk the Dog" letter?

For background, Kouri is a real estate business owner, mother, and now accused murderer. Investigators claim she killed her husband, Eric, with a fentanyl overdose in March 2022. A year later, she wrote and published a children's book about grief. The irony.

Now, from prison, she's accused of penning a six-page letter addressed to her mother in which she appears to direct her mother and brother as to the story they're going to use for her defense, claiming that Eric used drugs and drank throughout their marriage, despite the fact his family says otherwise. He said, she said, as usual.

Law & Crime posted the letter in its entirety. While reading it, I couldn't help but marvel at how self-absorbed and almost narcissistic the letter is. It doesn't read like a woman who is grieving her husband, but rather like a woman trying to cover her tracks in a way that would inevitably be discovered. She mentions her children maybe once, b ut only as a source of ego - that whatever Eric's sisters did, she "could do better" and that they were insanely jealous of her for it. That she built her real estate business while being a stay-at-home mom.

The Daily Mail also reflected on an interview with Kouri's mother before the letter was public, during which she relayed the narrative outlined in the letter as if perfectly rehearsed.

On the same token, one of Kouri's friends mentioned how Kouri allegedly felt like an "outsider" in Eric's affluent world and how she came from nothing. Yet based on the letter, it seems Kouri was happy to brag about everything Eric's wealth brought her. God knows she wouldn't have been able to build a successful real estate business within a few years on the housekeeper's salary she claimed she lived on in college. (And I can vouch for this, as someone who also cleans for a living and barely gets by on said salary.) Clearly she had no idea how to manage that much money - she was allegedly millions of dollars in debt that ironically Eric's life insurance could help dig her out of.

To the public, she played the grieiving widow card and revelled in the sympathy and attention. Now, she's trying so hard to backtrack and it's becoming evident that, like many female killers, she thinks she's much more clever than the system and everyone around her. She lives in an illusion and will carry that to the bitter end, at the expense of her kids and with no remorse to how it impacts them.

These are just my thoughts as I am writing up this article. Watching the trial play out in this case will be really interesting, and tragic - it saddens me that all Kouri is worried about is herself, while her kids have been robbed of their dad, and his family is still grieving. Betraying the outside world is one thing, but betraying your own kids like this is another level of cruelty.

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Wrecked (part 3)

Part 3

Neon lights. Another pub. Loud music. Escape. Another man smiles my way. I die inside. I don’t think I can love again. This heart is like daisy petals on the wind. Unlovable. Untamed. Unworthy. I might laugh like a dream come true.

But I’ll wreck you.

(Image by Nicky ❤️🌿🐞🌿❤️ from Pixabay)

I don’t think anyone in this family have left that darkened highway Mom took us down. Seeking a light. The refuge of that motel. I’ve since had a soul for places I’ve never seen. Roadside motels. Street signs. A vagabond life. Always running from something. From him.

Motionless on a one-way street. A distant dawn tinging the horizon gold. Demonic shadows of night beyond tail lights. Somewhere in between, I remain with my mother. Wrecked in different ways but too damn similar and stubborn to speak of it. A wedge he forever left stuck beneath a flat tire. And there’s no one around to help.

I keep driving.

(Image by Michael Walser from Pixabay)

I sped down a pitch-black road without headlights, pedal to the floor, awaiting self-destruction that never came. Desolation. Emptiness. Cigarette smoke curling around me. A cold gas station coffee. No idea where I was. I stopped to stand on the road and scream.

Only echoes came back.

I had not even an angel to pull me back. No one wandered through that with me. Stumbling blind, sometimes drunk enough to remain numbed to self-sabotage. I can still hear the roaring of the semi passing me by the same way I can still hear him screaming and throwing her around. Down the stairs. Against walls. Wildflowers withered without the sun. Limp. Pathetic. Lonely.

(Image by Валерия Крячко from Pixabay)

I still see the raging glint in his eyes. His fists clenched. I can hear a slamming door when I just knew it was starting again.

There seemed to be no end.

I don’t know for how long I remained there. On my knees. Shrouded in the darkness he left. Starved. Aching. Too numb to cry. Disconnected. Detached. No one was coming back for me. Not even to finish wrecking me.

Part 1 here

Part 4 to come.

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they nappin’

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I believe my great-grandmother murdered my great-grandfather.

Family history research takes you some really wild places. A decade or so ago, I began my journey in exploring my family tree. This is one branch of the tree that has been a mystery for a century in my family, and one I have obsessively been researching and trying to crack for years. I believe my great-grandmother murdered my great-grandfather. It's a hefty accusation rife with secrets, silence, generational trauma, and a death that tore the family apart, leaving ripple effects that still have an impact today. Over on my writer's blog, I write about my family research. (Free to read, always). I've been working on this series about Frederick, my great-grandfather, his life, his death, and what possibly happened to him. Have a read, and feel to share with me your weird and mysterious family history stories!

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Wrecked (part 2)

A highway going somewhere. Yellow flowers in the ditch. Exquisite. Abandoned. Forgotten.

He knew my father was dead. That Mom struggled to make ends meet. Instead of being a father figure, he slow-dripped poison down our throats until I resented her. This is what he wanted.

For that, he gets my hatred. Deep-seeded. Poison.

I was innocent. And he wrecked me.

(Image by FK-JACKSON on Pixabay)

He didn’t deserve my mother’s love. She was lively, fun-loving. Would do anything for anyone. Now she’s emotionally unavailable and crippled with anxiety 17 years later. She’s still in that car on the dark highway somewhere, running from him. She’s the wide eyes in his headlights as he crashed into her, obliterated her.

It isn’t her fault, why the family is broken. It’s his. 16 years after the burning the house down, he called her to re-instill that fear because he gets off on this power and control. I see him now. I’m not a scared child anymore. I’m 32 fucking years old. And I am furious.

She was innocent. And he wrecked her.

Sometimes I wonder how much of a dream come true you must have looked like to weasel your way into the life of a woman so independent, loving, and strong. Her, widowed, raising three kids. You, hiding your narcissistic sociopathy. Wearing a mask. Love bombing until you scorched her to smithereens.

Then you turned on me.

(Image by Michael Bußmann from Pixabay)

There I was. Fourteen. Standing before the house, in ashes. Residual smoke like grey wisps from an ashtray. Unable to breathe. You thought we were home. You slithered your way into this family, destroyed us, cackling while watching the house burn.

I still drown in this poison.

That semi I nearly drove into to end me – it resembled the way you came into our lives. I’m still standing there looking for the tail lights. In case you aren’t really gone.

Part 1 here

Part 3 here

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That moment in your mid-30s when you realize you've traded Friday nights spent at clubs/bars and drinking too much, for Friday nights at home, smoking weed, writing, and listening to old country music. (Willie Nelson's first album, back in 1962, to be exact. Highly recommend.)

Growth is so weird sometimes. Weekends at clubs, getting lost in neon lights and pulsing bass which shook walls, in rooms with sticky dance floors that reeked of alcohol and cheap colognes and perfumes, was all an escape. From my divorce. From the childhood trauma. From myself. Those were the days before I learned how to be alone. How to be content single.

I traded heels and dresses for PJs and slippers. The nights of getting dolled up in a dress and makeup while jamming to a club music playlist are replaced with staying at home and enjoying my own, and my cats', company.

Sometimes we spend so many years trying to outrun ourselves that we don't see the years passing by. They're just... gone. They're some sort of haze, some sort of blur, you spent fleeing what was inside of you all along. Demons from someone else. Ghosts of someone who inflicted terror upon you as a child. Agony of yet another relationship gone wrong despite your best efforts. Functioning through work, trying not to give into the suicidal thoughts, then escaping to the nearest bar room until it's time to stumble home to the silence.

Now, going out and having a hell of a night isn't a bad thing at all - and I even miss it sometimes. Every once in a while, I'd love to do it ahain, but not to escape myself now. Just to have fun. And I've learned that's the difference: there's a line between having fun, and running from yourself. I went to therapy. I still use journalling as therapy. I still work on myself.

I'm even in a relationship again. He's gone for work for ten days at a time. A few years ago, that would have been really hard to deal with. But tonight, I went thrift store shopping, got a pizza, came home to smoke and listen to Willie Nelson and write. It's been a beautiful Friday night.

May you go out and have fun in your way (and may you stay safe in doing so) but may you also find a balance in being with yourself and enjoying your own company. It's a strange place to be. But it's oddly peaceful.

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"I want to live simply. I want to sit by the window when it rains and read books I'll never be tested on. I want to paint because I want to, not because I've got something to prove. I want to listen to my body, fall asleep when the moon is high and wake up slowly, with no place to rush off to. I want not to be governed by money or clocks or any of the artificial restraints that humanity imposes on itself. I just want to be, boundless and infinite."

– Via "svnflower-blog" on Tumblr

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Anton Chekhov, "after the theatre"

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"If reincarnation is real I wonder how many people stare at their own art in museums, listen to their own music they made in a different life and read books they don't remember writing"

@themachomoron