The witchiness in all things

This is my mother's faithful garden lion. She has handed him over into our care because she doesn't anticipate having a garden when she moves to Portland as apartment life is what she'll most likely have.

I believe in the power of sage to clean, to heal, and to taste good in butternut squash soup. One of the things my mother taught me that has always stuck with me, no matter where I go, whether I'm talking to her or not (there have been times when we drifted), is that you should always plant some sage wherever you are living. Always.

I was prone to getting sore throats as a kid and in our house we rarely used traditional medicine to cure what ailed us. My mom would cut some fresh sage from the garden and make a tea out of it with lemon and honey. I can remember when she first started doing this. I remember because the smokey green taste of sage made me want to vomit. I objected fiercely to being treated so wretchedly by my own mother. Sage smells like cannabis (as most people know even if they don't admit to such questionable knowledge) and it even tastes like it.

I will tell you an unsurprising secret: there was a lot of pot smoking going on in the commune. There was quite a bit of it that followed me through out my life. I have even smoked it myself, but should not have been surprised to find that it would make me gag. So when I say that sage and pot taste alike, I do know whereof I speak.

Though I could never get over the awful taste of pot (or the cotton mouth torture that inevitably accompanies the consumption of this weed), the taste of sage is something that eventually came to be a comfort. A signifier of all things healing and nurturing. It has power. It would cleanse and then soothe my sore throats. It also uplifted my spirits when I felt under the weather. As an adult I have come to value it in the kitchen as well. So I always plant sage just like my mother taught me.

The witchiness in all things is an underlying current in my life. I have spent a lot of time denying my hippie roots. I even tried to distance myself from Cat Stevens for a while, not because he became a Muslin, because I really couldn't give a monkey's ass if he wants to pray to "Allah" instead of "God", but because he symbolized and epitomized my earthy patchouli scented up bringing. People who are super cool do not listen to Cat Stevens, they listen to Laibach really loud.

Here's another (not so secret secret), whatever you are in that neatly hidden tightly folded core of self will follow you wherever you go. It's no use trying to outrun it, it can always run just as fast. Sometimes it's faster than you and waits for you to catch up. It's built into your skin. You may evolve in many ways, you may come to be defined by many different factors, but the kernel from which you came is the one that will always feed you, always inform you. Eventually we all fold back into that core of self and die. We die within the same vessel that brought us life. I don't mean our mother's womb, I mean the cell that divided to build us.

The one and only apartment I ever lived in completely by myself (the one with all the cockroaches I wrote notes to) was the place where all the things I tried to run from waited for me. They waited til I found myself in a building so shady that most of my friends would not visit me there. They waited until I was thoroughly alone with myself. All those aspects of myself that I had tried to deny coalesced into this vibrant inner life that I embraced because it was all I had at that moment to embrace. I was lonely. I found myself. I was nineteen years old and apparently as attractive to men as a giant ripe cod fish out of water. I found only myself. All of my selves. All of us sat in my very own one bedroom apartment with the clogging toilet, the brick wall for a view on one side and prostitutes getting business and shots from the other view.

Ah, but we were not alone. Because there were the cockroaches.

And we had me. Me and all my selves.

When I was eighteen I stopped abusing my body with razors and self loathing. I had an epiphany in which I realized that if I hated myself so much I should either just off myself right then and there or get on with life. Because torturing one's self, literally, will get you exactly no where and accomplish exactly nothing. I am a Capricorn, after all, I love to get stuff done. I love to achieve things worth achieving. I stood up and decided that I would choose life. Deliberately choose life over a state of half living; over a life with one foot always in the grave.

It's not enough to have epiphanies like this. You have to do more. You have to replace that half life with something fresh. By nineteen years old I had not yet completed my transformation from a half dead person into the person I wanted and needed to become. Until I sat with me and all my selves and embraced my crazy in that cockroach filled apartment on Hyde Street between Geary and O'Farrell in San Francisco. A block from the apartment where an eighteen year old girl from Santa Rosa (my future city) was stabbed to death on the first night of her adult life. Her first flight from home.

What happened in that apartment was my discovery of the witchiness in all things. I had wanted to find out that I am a person of fire and ice, of mystery and power, of awe inspiring beauty and desirability. I wanted to find out that I could conquer nations and be rooted to no spot on earth. I wanted to hang from the sky like drifting illuminated clouds. As is ever the way in life, this is not what I discovered. All of that wishing was rebellion against what I already knew. I am connected to this earth by cords much stronger than a spider's web magnified; with roots much deeper than the roots of a redwood tree.

I bought my first cookbooks; "The Vegetarian Epicure", and a 1948 copy of the "Joy Of Cooking". I started teaching myself to cook. I needed to because I couldn't afford to eat lunch out every day that I went to work. I also wanted to. From learning to cook it was an easy leap to tackling bread baking. I had one success and a few notable failures before abandoning bread baking for a few more years.

Soon I was making my own shampoo and getting dressed up to clean my house and to go shopping which I took great pleasure in even though it's doubtful others enjoyed my enjoyment in the store because to them I was just another crazy chick talking to the salt in the spice isle. I was learning to have fun doing the most mundane activities. I was learning to laugh at myself, something I had never been able to do before. (Being the serious writer type, it was important that I be broody and serious all the time.)

I drank a lot of coffee. I wore nineteen forties slips as dresses around the house and composed stories about young women living by themselves in shady apartment buildings wearing slips for dresses and finding God in all the little things. Talking to herself. And not caring. Crying for the loneliness and then realizing that I was pretty good company for myself. I made things. My selves merged into self. I collected all those discarded earthy bits I had tried to out run and put myself back together. I knew by this time that I was crazy, literally, and that being me was never going to be an easy proposition, but I also discovered that that didn't mean I couldn't have fun. I embraced my crazy.

I think about all this as I prepare to plant more herbs. Herbs for living. For food. For putting into pillows for sweet dreams. Herbs to satisfy the witchiness in me. Herbs, roots, and flowers to satisfy the witchiness in all things.