"Everyone's psychic," said my psychic friend. "Only most people shut down those abilities early on, suppress them, you know, because they aren't socially acceptable. Believe me I would have if I could have. I freaked out my teachers, other kids, even my parents. I was spooky."
So was I when I was little but, unlike my friend, I learned quickly how to pass, if not for "normal,"ie unworthy of being teased, than at least for ordinary enough. Which meant that I didn't share the dreams I had that mysteriously came true, the sense some times that there were people in the room who were there and not there, that I flew in my dreams to places I eventually traveled in real life, that I had memories I knew were memories but could not contain in the framework of my life. I was simply a day dreamer. I had an overactive imagination. Maybe I had generalized anxiety disorder.
My parents, raising me in the sixties and seventies, were believers in science, rationalism and psychoanalysis. They watched each other for signs of psychological dysfunction and used the theories of Freud against each other in their epic fights. You were too attached to your mother. You weren't attached enough. Beneath the surface lay the spectre of my grandmother's severe depression, her electric shock treatments, her trips in and out of institutions. "Are you depressed?" my mother would ask at the slightest hint of expressed unhappiness.
I wanted a different vocabulary and I didn't know what it was. Is it depression to be anguished about the state of the planet and feel the pervasive species extinction happening all around us? Is it depressed to be able to imagine oneself the last of one's kind calling into the night with no answer ever again of a lover? Is it depressed to remember tidal waves, and ice ages, and volcanic super eruptions that plunged the whole world into disarray?
I dutifully went to therapy in my twenties to sort things out, even submitting to, yes, five days a week on the couch. Only on the very last day woul the psychoanalyst admit to me, before ushering me one last time out the door, that I had, disconcertingly, been dreaming out his life, seeing his life, psychically tapping into his life the whole time. He'd never admitted as much. Such abilities were best ignored, right? But even so at the end he had to let me know.
So what about my apocalyptic dreams? Were they visions of a distant past or a possible future? What about the beings who sometimes appeared in my room in the middle of the night? Where they ghosts, haunts, entities, or figments of my imagination? Nothing had taught me how to identify or listen to my own intuitions. They'd all been oursourced to the modern priests of the medical world.
It was frightening to begin to tap into my own psychic abilities. Not everyone's are the same. Some people are better at one thing than another, like artists or athletes. I began talking to the dead and not just talking with them, receiving answers in return, collaborating with them on my life, asking them for help and receiving help. And here is the crazy thing: the more I felt their presence, the less anxiety I felt at long last. Getting to know the dead relieved depression and anxiety surprisingly. Better than any talk therapy with a living being.
More and more I no longer felt alone and I also didn't feel like I had to be so relentlessly in control. I could get into the back seat and let the dead do the driving and enjoy the view. After all, they'd found their way through calamities of all kinds over the eons. Surely they knew what to do about global warming.
And now many people reading this will think that I have become too kooky for comfort. I am no longer normal or ordinary. No one's going to condemn me as a witch like they would have centuries ago, no one's going to hustle me off to the sanitorium like they would have just a few decades ago, but many will write me off, as they have my friend the extraordinary psychic—as silly, inconsequential, deluded, not worthy of attention.
They'll grab another drug--the anti-depressent, the anti-anxiety agent, the glass of wine, the pot, even the psychadelics--before they'll try to find out why it is that I'm no longer afraid, why I am happier and wilder than ever, why I am able to read the climate report, look at the future, and not feel overwhelmed. They are terrified of being mocked. They mock me, mostly behind my back, or ignore me and pretend this is not what I write about, what I now teach others how to do, what I believe is what's most needed in the world, why it is that I call myself a witch.
Everyone's psychic. Anyone can talk to the dead and receive their guidance. Anyone can access the wisdom they have within them from other lives. Everyone has intuitive powers they can recover and activate. And what would happen if we did? To all our capitalist institutions making money off our anxiety and our distress and our fearful obedience to societal norms? What would happen to our art, our marriages, our entire relationship with the natural world? What would happen if we let the dead show us again how to be alive?
We must risk the mockery and the foolishness to reclaim our innate wisdom and our natural joy. But we can reclaim them. At any moment in our lives. Such abilities were frightened out of us, trained out of us, but they are still there.
"When did you start calling yourself a witch?" asked a friend of mine who has a kind of push-me-pull-you relationship to all that I am. As if there were a single day in this life. I answered practically. "Oh it was a Facebook whim one day." But the truth was I was born knowing my mother was a witch, that I was a witch, that everyone I met could be a witch, and the world would be better off if we did identify ourselves this way. My grandmother was a witch--who could grow anything, around whom animals thrived--who felt defeated by all that she wasn't rather than empowerd by all that she was.
The word "witch" derives from the old word wicca which gives us the word wick. It is the green juice of life that flows up and through us. That was what civilization has tried to burn out of us--our very life force.
I call myself a witch not because I'm part of any organization or institution or program (I most definitely am not) but because I claim that green wick of life within me that is my soul and connect me to all the grows and lives on this planet, that sends me dreams and visitations, wisdom and company, friendship and consolation.
I claim that name not because it brings forth a performative set of behaviors--but because everyone has the wick within them and the right to claim it as theirs and come alive again.
Yes, I talk to the dead because the dead have shown me what it means to be alive.
[this is part four of a seven part series I am sharing before for the Day of the Dead]
If you would like to learn more about how I help people collaborate with the other side, do visit my website at takebackthemagic.com for a complete list of upcoming workshops.
My book Take Back the Magic is, of course, an in-depth exploration of these topics, and I will be speaking about it on November 2nd The Day of the Dead in Woodstock, NY
I recently spoke with Ayana Young on her For the Wild pocast, about how essential our conversation with the other side is in navigating the changes of climate collapse.