[CW – there will be reference to symptoms of trauma but I will not discuss details nor will I indicate any specific type of experience other than to discuss how it affects my magico-spiritual process.]
Half moon this morning. Waxing gibbous. Serendipitously, this is the card I received in a single draw from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot. How apt.
I have been posting a bit more openly about music lately. Mostly here on the blog. I want to talk a little more specifically about why this – for me – constitutes witchcraft and deep magical healing work.
If anyone wants a recommendation for an amazing young musician and singer coming out of the American ‘Old Timey’ Trad world (as distinct from modern bluegrass!) they should check out Nora Brown. Holy shit her work is good. She’s currently collaborating with a fiddler named Stephanie Coleman and equally her style is deep, rhythmic, and rooted.
I’ve known of Nora Brown for a few years now but yesterday I made an attempt to watch the Tiny Desk concert above. I say ‘attempt’ because by the time they started into ‘The Old Blue Bonnet’ I was shaking, hyperventilating and so on. Having too many visceral and deeply loved memories of American-specific experiences… looking up at the moon through pine needles… fireglow shining through a cabin window at the bottom of a mountain valley… a small trickling stream beneath my feet… elk in the morning, bears on a walk. The music of the unassuming – jeans and t-shirts – trading information, laughing, and the deep heartbeat of boots on a floor keeping the tunes flowing. People talking with their feet and singing with their hands…
I couldn’t do it yesterday.
I told my partner it felt like a world had vanished but that I (and only I among anyone I know now) could hear faint echoes of it calling out “Goodbye! Goodbye!”*
So today is the half moon and I drew the half moon card. To me, the card says ‘Now you can do it and I will help.’ I took slooooow breaths, clutching the deck (my bridge between worlds), listened to this gem of a video and let what once was run its course through the channel of my emotions. Tears again but more manageable this time.
It is, of course, not at all accidental that so much of American trad songs are fixated on war, death, loss, poverty, jail time, labour, loneliness. (The backbone of the ‘American dream’?) When people move too fast over land that isn’t theirs their own pre-existing problems grow with them. I don’t find much to ‘redeem’ about this… but I do find subtlety and nuance, I guess. The tunes I like the most have the least pretense – they’re tunes by and for flawed people. Maybe even the damned (depending on your worldview… I use demonic imagery in my witchcraft for many reasons). They carry no false promises and their dogma sounds tired.
I don’t know if I will ever use my violin for fiddle music again… I have no idea how that would feel in the body. Playing music, by definition, replicates the movements and bodily experiences of the past. That’s what practice IS… taking what you have already done and keeping it alive. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard and so rewarding at once. I am comforted by the knowledge I have of different forms of music and the fact that deep down I am fortunate to have some access to those skills and worlds… but I tend to feel shattered by the awareness that I come from a world in which I did not fit and I live now in a world that doesn’t know about any of that – at all. And I still do not fit.
This, incidentally, is how trad music is formed. Traditions carried. Stories retold and reworked. Sources cited (as is done so amazingly in the Tiny Desk video!)
To be a witch for me (among many other things) is to go to the altar and lay my music at Her feet. To carve a space that is mine… with bits and bobs of my story – the stuff that makes me howl and cry; the stuff that makes me dance; and the stuff that I know emerges syncretic and flawed… and to let it emerge and take its new form anyway. I take it all with me. These things are in my satchel. It’s painful to perceive, now, that no one around me knows it. I’m a person with no context. It must be enough that I know it.
The half moon will help me see that and shift my perspective back towards joy. And, I’m not totally alone… I can still light a bonfire on occasion and surround myself with other music makers. I know I’ve left things behind for a reason and I guess I’ll keep the practice of fitting into nowhere at all. Chronically transatlantic like so many before me… but hopefully reckoning a bit better with empathy and collective responsibility!
Below, a couple poems I wrote a few years ago, during an earlier phase of processing these things:
This one (from 2021 or earlier… can’t remember) makes reference to two songs, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” ** (performed by Bruce Molsky) and “I Lost Something in the Hills” by Sibylle Baier.
The Morrígan often ‘speaks’ to me through verse (UPG) and the following poem felt like an answer to wondering if she was there ‘even then’.
From 2022, it makes reference to John Prine as well as “Blackbird” performed by the Lonesome Sisters (written by Debra Clifford about her mother… Debra herself passed away in 2022.)
~ Saoirse.
* Rayna Gellert*** has composed some great songs out of this tradition that capture many of these feelings for me – “Strike the Bells” from her album ‘Workin’s Too Hard’ and “Nothing” from her album ‘Old Light: Songs from my Childhood and Other Gone Worlds’ come immediately to mind. Whew!
** This link is to a live performance (including the only mistake I’ve ever heard him make! ^_^) This is important firstly because I think his live renditions have a more dirge-like quality than his recorded version (which is on his album ‘Soon Be Time’) and secondly because he performed this song live for the first time one night at my college (a few years after I had stopped going to the mountains each summer to a camp where he and others taught) … I was talking to him after the gig and he asked me how the tune came across. I told him it was beautiful and made me cry and he told me it was the first time he’d done it on stage!!!
*** Incidentally, the same summer location was where I first had the privilege of meeting Dan Gellert, Rayna’s father. Holy shit that man can play and on the most gorgeous fretless banjo to boot!
I would love to hear your responses, thoughts, etc. in the comments. But please note, I’m not soliciting for comfort or validation. I’m wary of encouraging what I so often interpret in comments as codependent language. I’m fine! I am me and you are you. Concepts & practices such as witchcraft are shared but also truly individual – this is what makes them so potent! 🙂
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