Kitchen Table Alchemy: Living in Full Color

Grounding meditation learns from Tree how to ground and establish boundaries around our personal space

In the wake of the November full moon, known as Baba Yaga's Feastday, we discuss the necessity of Good Counsel in navigating turbulent times and what it looks like when it comes.

A decades’ long musing about the beginnings of patriarchy is given new musings after reading the chapter on Hags vs Heroes in Max Daschau’s book. What role did hero epics play in the wiping out women’s power needed to establish the patriarchy? www.mywytchyways.com

A call to Memphis cuts the Ohio portion of the journey short, but I am able to make it to my 2 biggest priorities, the Serpent Mound in Ohio, which is known as aligning with the solstice sunset, but further research has shown to also track the full 18 year lunar cycle, as well as be a pregnancy calculator. After that, I head to the very powerful National Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati. www.mywytchyways.com

More #vanlife chronicles of a creeper on the campground and trying to find another spot close to dark near Lake Erie on a weekend with a jazz festival happening, and what happens when I do finally find a place to land. www.mywytchyways.com

A #vanlifesucks day gets worse when I walk into the Seneca Falls Visitor Center as a way to take my mind off of all the technical difficulties I’d had all day. Early history of the Seneca Falls area makes a bad day worse as I learn about early interaction with the native residents, and the patterns of disrespect for people and land paving way for industry that inevitably collapses that is repeated all over the country www.mywytchyways.com

A visit to Plimoth Plantation, the living history museum outside of Plymouth, MA brings shocking interactions with the impeccably trained actors in the English Settlement and forces me to stretch my heart open wider to hold on to their humanity in the face of the impact of the Plimoth settlement. www.mywytchyways.com

Hartford County’s progressive history, including providing refuge for the Mendi people from the Amistad as they awaited trial, has its own gaps and has certainly shifted in the present. How does a place that was so forward thinking move into such conservatism? www.mywytchyways.com

Patriarchy has long called women crazy as a means to silence them and get them to doubt their own intuitive wisdom. Fear of being seen as --or even actually going--crazy inhibits many women from connecting with their ancestors. www.mywytchyways.com

From the Quaker Ancient Burial Ground in London Grove Township, Pennsylvania, I’m processing the anger left still grinding from my visit through Virginia and an ancestor that owned slaves as well as the Jamestown Settlement and the summer of the first shipment of slaves as well as the Tobacco Brides coming into the colony. I reflect on the damage that sources toxic masculinity and wonder if there’s a difference between those that are traumatized and then become conquerors and those that have always been on top and defend their position. www.mywytchyways.com

Visiting the Friends Ancient Burial Grounds in Pennsylvania and attending the Chester Quaker meeting outside Philadelphia lead to a discussion on inclusion and the feeling of being an outsider- which seems like such a universal human emotion, but upon further reflection, is more likely the result of the colonialization that cut us off from our bodies, our ancestral practices, and the world around us. www.mywytchyways.com

Healing Turtle Island, a 21-year cycle of rituals dreamed into reality by Sherri Mitchell, focused in 2019 on Healing from Colonialism. The first day of ritual centered on colonialism’s impact on gender roles and how they relate with one another. www.mywytchyways.com

The stories of the struggles of reclamation and the joys of reconnecting with traditional tribal ways shared at Healing Turtle Island lead me to reflect on my own shamanic process of reconnecting with the Forgotten Dead of European tribes first hit by Viking raids, then further impacted by Roman colonization. www.mywytchyways.com

Rich conversation with decolonialist and teacher Sara Jolena of Sequoia Samanvaya about moving into a space of ReMembering our place within nature and the line of those that came before and those that will come after and what is required of us Here and Now to work through our history and move forward. Sara Jolena had great insights into the self-care necessary to do a reclaimation trip like mine. www.mywytchyways.com

Recorded in Franklin County, North Carolina at the ordination site of my oldest known ancestor on my Father’s Fathers line, I wrestle with the welcoming I feel from the land and the anger I feel about the exploitive and abusive energy I feel on the line. The worn gravestones made me realize that "written in stone" does not mean something's permanent. Stone wears down. The second segment delves into this and I recall a conversation I had with the stones at Burney Falls, CA.

Recorded at the Redcliffe Plantation in South Carolina, where many of the slaves reportedly stayed on as freedmen and sharecroppers until the 1970s. Their decision to stay on is usually seen as evidence of how much the plantation system met their needs and worked for them, but I believe it was more likely the result of terrorism like the lynchings that happened with such frequency in the South. I also speak about my experience at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. www.mywytchyways.com/podcast/staying_on_the_plantation Works referenced in this episode: Beloved book by Toni Morrison and film starring Oprah Winfrey

Recorded in Mobile, AL at the Old Plateau Cemetery near Africatown in the north side of the Mobile Bay. Survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to come to America, are buried there. I also visited the St. Michael’s Churchyard on the Faunsdale Plantation in Faunsdale, Alabama. www.mywytchyways.com

Recorded in Austin, TX at the beginning of my Ancestral Borderlands Truth & Reconciliation Tour, this episode traces some of the yarns woven into the present moment as an introduction to the podcast www.mywytchyways.com www.patreon.com/wytchyways

Recorded in the Redwoods National Park spring of 2019 during a #vanlife trial run. While meditating in the ancient forest, a family cluster of redwoods invite me to tap in. Second segment is a visualization to tap into our own root systems and experience the support that is there.

With guest Kaden Sheffield, we discuss the spiritual practices couched in traditional women's work, the feminine side of spirituality and religion, and the way text vs image impacts how we see the world.