How Letting Magic In ALMOST Began...

my favorite of the abandoned intros

Writing a book is often about drafting and drafting and drafting again. Each attempt gets the writing a little closer as the author plays with wording, tone, and voice.

I’m not being even a little hyperbolic when I say I worked on the intro to Letting Magic In for years. You’ll find a favorite version below. But it’s not the one you’ll read in Letting Magic In. When you get the book, you’ll see the (major!) difference!

I am a witch.

At least that’s what my friends, family, and strangers on Instagram tell me.

What you hold in your hands is my story: the story of how it happened.

Witch is a strange, shapeshifting sort of word. It’s constantly acquiring new connotations and dropping stale ones, making it a slippery moniker. Some days I’m fairly certain I have no idea what the word witch actually means. Are we talking The Red Witch from Game of Thrones? (I’m not that sexy.) The wizened woman from The Princess Bride who shouts “I’m not a witch! I’m your wife!”? (I’m not that wifey.) Cassie Nightingale from The Good Witch? (Getting closer, but hopefully not that cloying. And I definitely curse more.)

But while I have trouble labeling myself a witch, I have an equally hard time finding another word to take its place. What’s the word for a person who craves a relationship with the earth, plants, rocks, and stars? What do you call someone who finds their spirit sparked by these relationships and whose concept of the sacred is altered by the scent of jasmine in bloom or the deep indigo of a sky awaiting nightfall? We’re taught that doctors know our bodies and priests know our souls. But what if you’re a person seeking to understand both for yourself without an intermediary?

What is the word for these feelings and the person we become when we honor them?

There’s a woman in my town who has the words Village Witch printed on her business cards in the space where a job title typically appears. You might think she’s a twenty-something, having a bit of fun and taking advantage of the current witch renaissance (#witchesofinstagram!), but the Village Witch is actually a decade older than I am. The women in her family have been witching in these mountains— the Blue Ridge— for generations. But in my Northeastern, suburban family, “witch” was Samantha on Bewitched, Willow from Buffy, or Piper from Charmed. Being a witch wasn’t a real world vocation. It wasn’t even a real world hobby. It wasn’t even real.

And yet…

stone and salt and dark of night;

the moon a silvered crescent to the west;

the screech owls final warble as dawn creeps in;

comfrey leaves bedecked with morning dew;

a single raven feather under the hawthorn tree;

wind on my cheek and tacky rosemary resin on my fingertips…

Yes…

Yes…

YES!

A million times YES!

My brother-in-law intuited the truth early on: he smirked when I sold my house, left my teaching jobs, and traipsed off to study in Ireland. From the first he called it “witch school” and in many ways he was right.

But it was also an apprenticeship of the old fashioned variety, the chop-wood-carry-water kind of training that no one in America does anymore. The closest thing we have is the internships twenty-two year olds procure after college. Those same twenty-two year olds would snort their IPAs if they knew that some thirty-something with a mortgage, three jobs, and multiple useless degrees had paid good money so she could spend her afternoons weaving her fingers between the Hawthorn’s long, bony spikes to gather its berries.

Does that make me a witch? A woman becoming a witch? I honestly don’t know. There’s no on/off switch, or certificate, or decree. Instead, there’s a series of subtle shifts in the way you understand the world around you until, one day, there’s enough room in your psyche for something new to take root. This opening, this internal spaciousness, might happen when you’re seven, or seventeen, or seventy. For me, the transformation happened in fits and starts, gaining momentum through my thirties so that, by the time I turned forty, everything in my life had changed and I was well on my way to having a giant W pinned to my chest.

People sometimes ask me did you always know you wanted to be a witch? And all I can do is sputter. They may as well have asked me if I always wanted to be a rose or a raven or a pearl accreting luster inside an oyster’s shell. A spoof, a lark, a twist of fate… there was nothing rational or planned in the choices that culminated with my year in Ireland. Serendipity grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, gave me a gentle shake, and deposited me on a totally different track than the one I’d been walking. There was a dream (the sleeping kind, not the wishing kind), a very bizarre internet search, and a whole host of cosmic sign-posts. But mostly there was a feeling, like a fish-hook in my psyche, pulling me inexorably across the Atlantic.

But before I could become the witch’s apprentice on the Emerald Isle, before my nose could learn to tell French from American peppermint or my fingers the difference between lady’s mantle and coltsfoot, I had a lot of unlearning to do. My mind had to shake off much of what I’d grown up believing was true. I had to teach myself to let magic in.

It wasn’t fast or easy to become the type of person who could read the signs and know the proper moment to shed one life and step into another. Truth be told, the entire time I was studying in Ireland, my teacher despaired of me ever becoming that woman. But now I get to throw her own words back at her: you can set the magic in motion, but you can’t control the timing. Becoming someone new can happen in an instant but often it takes its own time.

This book is about that becoming. It’s about the process of opening the door and inviting the magic of the world in. It’s about the things that change you in unexpected ways and guide you to become the person you never knew you wanted to be but, perhaps, always were.