Remaking ourselves, one word at a time

Finding your true name so you can call yourself home.

This past weekend, for about half a heartbeat, it was warm enough to open the sliding doors. The dogs ran in and out leaving mud prints on the floor and the stale winter air seeped from the corners. I curled up on the sofa and listened to the latest post from

Sarah Blondin

. If you haven’t discovered her yet, give yourself a gift and check her out.

Sarah talked about how our language affects our perception, how what we name things changes how we think about them. What if, she posits, we don’t call a feeling we’re having depression, but instead name it something like “Powerful Sage of Rest and Reformation?” How would that change our experience?

I remember being in a writing workshop where the teacher encouraged us to call ourselves writers, to let that word tumble from our lips when someone sidled up to us at a party and dropped the all-American getting-to-know-you greeting So, what do you do? My workshop classmates side-eyed each other, as if saying, what do you think? Could you claim that? That you’re a writer?

Claiming a name begins to craft a new reality, one that starts in our own minds and moves slowly outward, shifting other people’s perceptions.

In the fantasy books I devoured as a kid, and still eagerly consume as an adult, words hold deep power. If you can learn the proper name of a thing— the wind, an animal, time itself— you can control it. You can create change. (This is probably why my younger self, a girl who found the world around her ill-fitting and in need of a makeover, desperately desired to become a writer.)

Last year, someone scrawled the word WITCHES in fat black Sharpie across the sign of our Asheville Herbiary store. WITCHES! The black marker felt ominous, completely different from the happy altars and tarot spreads which populated my Instagram feed. It seemed like a curse, an accusation.

As I stared at the photo Andrew had taken of the defaced sign, my breath became short. Some primitive part of my brain started jibbering and, in my mind, I was running, branches and rain lashing my face. Prey. I felt like prey. And for what? Drinking peppermint tea instead of taking Pepto Bismol? Using a vetiver deodorant instead of an aluminum based antiperspirant?

We’ve long since replaced the ink-damaged shop sign and our wonderful (and witchy) employees seem to have settled back into their comfortable routines of teaching people how to brew an herbal tea and assisting with an essential oil choice. Still, the incident has lingered with me. I’m struck by the way one word— a word I had used for most of a decade— caused such a visceral reaction. I replay the incident in my mind. In the reruns, I’m coming up the sidewalk as the Sharpie squeaks across the lime and raspberry letters. The person glances at me from under their hood before darting down the street. I picture myself running, yelling, Wait! I just want to ask you something!

My imaginary self is speedy. Amazingly, she’s not even breathless as she catches up and taps the vandal’s shoulder. Please wait! I just need to ask you something. It’s important, she says. She takes a deep breath before saying, What do you mean when you use the word witch? What exactly is a witch?

What I really want to ask is something bigger than that: How can one word bridge so many meanings? How can it slip so effortlessly between cultural realms? What did you mean while penning that word?

I’ve been watching words at work in our culture. How a false word can shape a narrative as easily as a true one. How realities can change at the drop of a noun. How a new name can shift the perceived nature of things.

This is magic, this word play. And it can be used for good or for evil, for kindness or for cruelty. Meaning can be made, or unraveled. Minds can be changed. Cultures can be transmuted.

But it is also a kind of illusion… It’s the emperor’s new clothes, flashed and fleshed onto a giant billboard. Somewhere under these shifty words must be something more like truth, more akin to bone.

Growing up, witch was a cartoon version of evil, then it became, for me, a word for a person who mediates between the human built world and the natural world. I watched others step into that definition… and then that gave way to something more to do with style, with long pointy nails and shadowed photo shoots. The website for The Today Show had a list of top witchy names and Vogue did a guide for becoming a modern witch. And lately there’s been something else, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, till I read

Jennifer Louden

’s post We Are All Witches Now: Witch has now become, in Jennifer’s words, “a transgressive truth teller.”

With each passing year, I feel like I have less of a grasp on witch than I did the year before. For those of you who are newer to my writing, I built my online house on the word witch and for a decade ran a program called Witch Camp where we explored the path of the female mystic.

What is the word for craving a relationship with the earth, plants, rocks, and stars? What do you call someone who finds their spirit sparked by these connections, 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 clergy 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?

—from my book Letting Magic In

Having had such a deep relationship with a word makes it all the more disorienting when to realize the word is slippery. It is constantly remaking itself.

I think back to those novels I read growing up. A thing’s proper name, its true name, is never the obvious one, it wasn’t the one you would put on your business card or expect all of Instagram to use. It is instead a hidden word, only shared in the deepest trust, because it connects to the core of your being. In a way, the word is you.

And then I think of Sarah Blondin asking what happens when we rename things to show their archetypal wisdom and power.

There’s a poem I learned while I was studying in Ireland. It is originally in Gaelic and there are a number of translations available. This is Michael Burch’s:

I am the sea breeze
I am the ocean wave
I am the surf's thunder
I am the stag of the seven tines
I am the cliff hawk
I am the sunlit dewdrop
I am the fairest flower
I am the rampaging boar
I am the swift-swimming salmon
I am the placid lake
I am the excellence of art
I am the vale echoing voices
I am the battle-hardened spearhead
I am the God who gave you fire
Who knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen
Who understands the cycles of the moon
Who knows where the sunset settles...

What if you sank into your most mythic self and said I am? Who would that person be? What could that person become?

In these uncertain times, we all need to find and know our hidden power, our true name. Not so we can shout it from the social media rooftops but so we can kindle ourselves in its glow and remember how to find our way home.

Reminder:

We are chatting about tarot
Saturday, January 25
from 1-1:40PM EST

I will send an email to paid subscribers with the Zoom the day before!

xx Maia