oh Ebenezer, we’re really in it nowΝβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ Νβ€Œ 

Hey, hi, hello,

I kind of can’t believe I’m ACTUALLY going to hit send on one of these. You have no idea how long I’ve been too much of a big ol’ chicken to do it. My therapist does, though. Anyway, hello, I’m here, and you’re here, and I hope it’s a good time. Scratch that, IT IS A GOOD TIME.

In these letters I’ll write to you about the journey I’ve been going on to heal my burnout, the art I’m making, the coolest thing I learned this week, the new song I’m obsessed with, etc. etc. I hope it reads like a 2 AM conversation in a hotel lobby bar, weird and goofy and unexpectedly, gloriously sincere.

In this letter:

  • An essay on my great grandpappy Ebenezer, witches, and rituals

  • Ritual suggestions for the upcoming cross-quarter on Feb 1st & 2nd

  • My first publication, artist obsessions, and a snack

Until next time, stay safe, stay magical,
Janae

On Cycles

My earliest years were spent in the cult of the Mormon church, a tradition passed down through my mother’s family since 1848, when my great-great-etc-grandfather Ebenezer (really) was converted by Mormon missionaries visiting Scotland. He followed them all the way to the Sonoran Desert, where he died in Arizona in 1913.


My earliest memory of the church is a hand clamped around my wrist. I was three years old and stubborn, struggling against a group of women who were trying to force me into a pretty dress for a ceremony. My mother remembers looking down at my tiny arm during the service and seeing the red finger-shaped welts still left there.

We left when I was eight, only a few weeks before I would have been baptized. My mother’s family, those descendents of the disowned Ebenezer, disowned us in turn. I like to think that when we got disowned it broke the generational Mormon curse on my lineage, like that bit in Practical Magic when the women and their brooms and their love for each other are so strong they go back in time and heal Maria Owens. 

Right, magic. One year we were taking sacrament and the next we were burying spells in the yard under moonlight. Why do so many ex-Christians go witchy? It’s the β€”dare I sayβ€” forbidden fruit of it all, sure, but I think it’s something more, too. Much of Christianity is rigid; it is deeply linear, your life preordained before birth and destined for one inevitable end or the other. The rituals I experienced in the Mormon flavor of Christianity were colored in fear, practiced mostly to avoid an afterlife of suffering. Witchcraft, on the other hand, is often wild, cyclical, playful. 

Modern witchcraft is deeply colonized and appropriated. Most popular practices are a hodgepodge of a dozen cultures and belief systems. β€œThe Wheel of the Year,” the cyclical celebration of witch holidays, was formed from a collection of Celtic and Germanic festivals not historically linked and not even known as The Wheel of the Year until the 1960s. Attuned to religion-makers peddling bullshit β€” looking at you, Joseph Smith β€” that kind of history ultimately turned me away from witchcraft as a teenager just as much as I had turned away from Mormonism.

When I started looking for ways to heal my relationship with…well, everything, in order to heal my burnout, I found a few consistent themes. One of them was the importance of ritual in human lives, and the ways we’ve been stripped of it through capitalism, colonization, productivity culture, perfectionism. Jenny Odell, adrienne maree brown, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Marlee Grace, Casper ter Kuile, even Marie Kondo’s books on organizing: ritual is present in every single one of them. If there’s one truly unifying note in all of my research on burnout, this is the one. 

But as a person who’d been so burned by religion, uncoupling ritual from religion was complicated. I had this yearning for ritual more spiritual in nature than, say, a morning coffee routine. What does spirituality look like for an atheist?

Creator LadySpeech Sankova (here are links to pay her!) posted a TikTok I’ve been chewing on for months. In it she says: β€œBefore a lot of European people started colonizing the rest of the world they colonized their fucking selves…You have very magic ancestors, who were colonized, who have a magic that is native indigenous to you.” Indeed, centuries before Ebenezer was complicit in the colonization of the southwest (unceded land occupied in Arizona by the Tohono O’Odham, Pasqua Yaqui, Apache, Navajo, and many others), Ebenezer’s homeland of Scotland was so thoroughly colonized by Christians that we know little to nothing about what religions were practiced there prior. 

Is the Wheel of the Year Scottish? No, though its Celtic elements are likely similar to what we assume was celebrated in Scotland. Am I Scottish? No, I’m doing the American white people thing where I’ve glommed on to the one bit of genetic soup I know the most about. Much like the Wheel of the Year, I am a hodgepodge. But it felt like a place to begin, so in December 2020 I gave myself permission to explore: I started by celebrating Yule and I just kept going. 

It’s been over a full β€œturn of the year,” as they say, and here’s what I like about it: the cyclical rhythm, the connection to the changing seasons, the playful ways to mark time passing, the reminders to celebrate, the invitations to reflect, the emphasis on gathering. I’m still learning which rituals to keep and which aren’t right for me; I think that in itself is a practice: less perfectionism, less ultimatums. More play. I’m creating a hodgepodge all my own.

This turn of the year I want to share what I’ve learned and practiced so far when it comes to healing. I like to imagine this period of my life as the glow up after the burnout. The burn up, if you will. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

A β€œcross-quarter” is the date at the halfway point between each equinox and solstice. The upcoming cross-quarter in the Northern Hemisphere is February 1st & 2nd, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Some call it Imbolc, others Candelmas, others Groundhog’s Day. In all cases, this celebration is about welcoming the first signs of spring.

What I like about this cross-quarter is that it feels so resonant with how I feel in my body and life around this time of year. Despite not having any snow in this part of Arizona, the period after Yule is the time I tend to rest and spend time with family. By February it’s like all wheels are turning again, all systems go! There are many different traditions, but this is one of my favorites for its ease and plain good sense. 

  • Pick up your broom and sweep the whole house! Go Sophie Hatter style, tackle every floor with enthusiasm. If you can, dump everything you sweep up outside, or sweep it straight out the door. This tradition is probably rooted in simply cleaning up the house after winters spent largely indoors. For added magic, you can think of it like stirring around any stagnant energy from your space and banishing what you’re letting go of from your home. Yell! Do a victory dance! 

  • When the sun sets, place a candle (or battery-operated candles, or fairy lights, be safe, please!) in each room of the house. As you light them, focus on all the things you’d like to welcome in now that you’ve swept out all of that crud. In this way, you invite the new, fresh light of spring into your home.

Do you have a ritual you tend to practice around this time of year? Reply to this email and let me know, I’d love to hear about it!

  • Last month my short story IMPRESSIONS, about community and also vampires, was published in Elegant Literature Magazine Issue #01: Future Fears. It’s my first fiction publication and I’m super jazzed about it! Read it here.

  • I’m completely obsessed with new-to-me artist and author Hannah Batsel who makes experiential books like COME ON.

  • Shing Yin Khor, one of my favorite artists and game designers, has just the motto we need for 2022.

  • I have an obsession with sour candy, and while I am pro a healthy helping of sour gummy worms, sometimes my mouth is like β€œallllll the worms!” and the rest of my body is like β€œthanks I hate it.” I’ve started having sliced granny smith apples sprinkled with tajin, and it is both delicious and scratches that sour itch. TRY IT. REPORT BACK.

Find all my favorite anti-burnout books on my Bookshop list!

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Small Magics Rd, Tucson, AZ 85712, USA

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