I sage-smudged the house today while the sky poured buckets and the mutt dog looked on skeptically. Overdue, this rain and the smudging, and maybe a bit desperate, both. I can’t speak to the sky’s intentions, but my humming of, “May all beings be well, may all beings be happy, may all beings be at peace” came with intrusive thoughts about the yard needing weeding, the corners of my teen’s room screaming for a good dusting, and people in charge of our world need a good wake-up call. I waved my sage and gently blew the embers, hoping but not hoping some of them would fall on the carpet and force me to deal with something other than my sticky thoughts. Monkey mind, the yogis call it. Anxiety, my therapist calls it. Annoying as fuck, my husband calls it, he, whom I don’t want to think about right now because there are papers sitting on his desk we’re filling out. The reasons we’re filling them out are things we don’t speak of around others but speak too much of when it’s just us two and we walk the neighborhood sidewalks side by side on the better days, or when we sit together on the couch or he in the tub and I on the bathroom floor on the not-so-good days.

This rain must be drowning earthworms. My smudge stick stutters. I’m not surprised. I’d stutter, too, if I sensed what I was up against on an energetic level in this home, but a little herbal smoke might do at least the house some good, and maybe my psyche to boot. “May all beings be free, may all beings be loved,” I continue, and then the next intrusive thought pops up like a chipmunk from a dirt tunnel. Pop! goes the image of sneering faces spreading lies, and I need to be honest here, I’m not feeling it. I don’t think I can genuinely wish freedom and love onto people who take others’ freedoms away and spew loathing and pain. All those years of peace poetry and meditation and chanting mantras, yet here I go, suffocating the good smudge vibes again. It appears I need more practice channeling good thoughts. “Dropping from the head into the heart,” my yoga teacher calls it. She also says, “We don’t have to believe everything we think.”

So, maybe I don’t believe the crossover thoughts about wanting to wrap my thighs around something resembling a medieval broom, riding off into that rainstorm, cackling curses into the wind. I remember my sweet, long-haired velvet skirt-wearing neighbor told me a while back her idea to create little representative bobble noggins of those bloviated talking heads and deliberately place needles into certain places before burying the voodoo dollies under the cross she’s placed in her front yard. A cross, she adds, that her indignant tongue-lashing neighbors nod at with respect when they drive by.

Off they gallop, my thoughts – and I ride on them, with them, whether it’s on a mental broom or inside a mole’s head as it comes across the buried voodoo dolls. I see it distinctly now, this subterranean encounter amidst clumps of loam. Maybe just entertaining the possibility that greater forces are at work can give me a sense of comfort. If we’re all learning anything these days – whether we wave a tricolored flag or a sparkly cross, a stick of sage, a scolding finger or a really large sign with nonsense numbers – all of us are learning that control is not ours, and that it never was. Whatever larger plan is coming to fruition, a sense of surrender is required of us now. That is why I pulled out the decade-old hand-thrown plate and the old sage, which lit up in an instant despite the 70% humidity as if to say, “Witch, let’s burn some shit.”

Three things led me to this moment:

A sign I saw in a counselor’s window that boldly claimed, “We’re the daughters of the witches you didn’t manage to burn.”

A lovely novel by Alix E. Harrow – lovely is the wrong word since it is a spicy, provocative novel of witchcraft set against the history of women’s suffrage but in a fictional setting that I bought hook, line, sinker, and witching wand.

And – surprise – a memoir by Augusten Burroughs.

What I got from all that was possibility.

Our planet is the parent of possibility, of mystery.

Years ago, the best and only effective treatment I found for a stubborn, debilitatingly intestinal infection that had stumped even the snarkiest regional medical specialists was from a Chinese herbalist. She ushered me into her brooding, shelved-to-the-ceiling living room, clucked her tongue while she inspected mine, and then sent me on my way with handwritten instructions and a bag of nasty-smelling roots, bits, and pieces with which I concocted the foulest tea ever to cross my lips. I gagged. I puked. I drank. I pooped. And within two days, I was healed. Maybe we’ve forgotten that our globe is the ultimate witch. She brought us forth, warts, sparkles, and all – and she can take us out of circulation if we piss her off too much, too. The Earth giveth and she taketh away – or doesn’t she? Based on the climate reports and the daily news, I’d say we’re well on our way to causing the next planetary rage fit – and no bank account or gold-plated toilet seat can protect us from the forces we’re not trying to understand or respect anymore.

All our universe ever asks of us is respect and understanding. To just try, even if it contradicts what we think we know.

My people had a saying, “He’s been washed with all waters.” It implied that he’s such a slippery eel, he’ll get away with anything he wants to. This could be applied to so many people nowadays, but there is also a literal meaning. Someone has been washed with all waters, with ALL waters … the amniotic fluid before and after birth … the blood during the exit through the birth canal … countered by the body’s own vernix … then that first sponge bath by a doting parent or grandparent, when the mewling critter is cleaned of those fluids and welcomed … maybe a loved one’s tears at one point or another if they cry together … the rain from above, if he’s so lucky as to get caught unprotected in a storm … salty ocean fluid if he’s lucky enough to immerse himself in one of the great bodies of water … and then, whenever the time has come, the washing of the body after departure from this material world when whatever energies are left of him merge with whatever energies are waiting to commingle. Water, what a powerhouse.

My smudge stick has long stopped smoking. I sit here on my porch. My house smells of wildness and of womb, and I’m leaving the doors and windows wide open while the rain rages on. Sometimes, energy just wants to move through. My mind now calm, I think about fire power and water energies and how it all fits and how we come into this world and, if we’re lucky, we seek a meaning that goes beyond numbing ourselves with things and power to forget that we’re all mortals and that nothing we do and nothing we say can prevent that eventuality. Nothing. There are papers on my husband’s desk that deal with his assertion of last wishes, knowing the little cells in his body are having a party; the symptoms are multiplying. This illusion we once had of time as chronological is turning into knowingness about the circularity of existence, how to give life not more days but how to give the day more life, and how his dignity, his whole gorgeous beingness, demands and deserves to be acknowledged despite systems that would like to reduce him to a chart number or a treatment plan, an insurance policy or an expiration date. The choices we make matter. The thoughts we create matter. The realities our feelings whip into being, matter.

I choose to believe a smudge stick can save the day. That a mudra shaped with intention, a mantra sung with conviction, a heart opened can and will change the outcome of things. Maybe too, about the way our witchy Mother regards us little mortals. I choose love. Even if it rides on a broomstick, red hair whipping above all the waters with which it has been washed.