I’m an anarchist. As a decolonizing, anti-racist, feminist, doublequeer, intersectional environmentalist, I see that mutual aid and cooperation are the only way forward, the only way to have a better world for all.
What have I been doing as an anarchist during this pandemic? Redistributing what little wealth I have and planting and tending Giving Gardens (inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass!) , where anyone who wants food can take food. I planted them in the boulevards around my home. I didn’t ask permission. I just did it. Neighbors LOVE IT. The gardens bring joy to people whether they take food or not.
Yesterday (7/12/2020), I added a Take Food/Leave Food shelf. That’s anarchism. That’s power to the people. That’s a gift economy.
Neighbors have contributed mulch, edging, a hose, limestone, and plants for the gardens. I’ve also been gifted homemade jam. That’s the world I want to live in, and the world I’m creating with others starting where I am.
I’m a storyteller, and I’ve been really digging into the problems with the stories we tell and all the ways they reinforce dominant ideologies of hierarchy and coercion. The vast majority of lauded texts in our English-language canon are racist, patriarchal, colonial, classist, ableist, xenophobic, etc. Those are not “bugs” of those texts, based in “they didn’t know better back then” mythologies of innocence. Those are FEATURES of those texts and a large part of why they are so popular. For a small example, see my letter to Lisa Cron about her writing book promoting White Supremacy.
So I haven’t written a ton of new stories in the past few years as I’ve been working to decolonize my storytelling. I have written a few! And I’m working on a novel based on anarchist values of love and mutual aid and flourishing for all our relations.
Love & Solidarity!
harmony 🙂
I’m not a website designer. Try not to be mad about how bad this website is. Ok? Thank you.
This is quite old, but people like it, so I’ll leave it. I’ve evolved since then and also come out as genderqueer. I use they/them pronouns!
What Is a Witch?
What is a witch but a hag, an unruly woman, a spinster, a crone, any woman who exerts her own power and right to exist and act how she wants without the approval of the patriarchy?
They try to burn us at the stake, hang us, drown us, imprison us, throw acid on us, rape us, murder us, for not doing what they want or being how they want us to be.
A witch is any woman who does not play by the patriarchy’s rules.
A witch is a “nasty woman.”
A witch is any woman who embraces her own power and self-determination, who dresses and acts and works and plays how she pleases with little to no regard for what is expected of her or what other people think “her place” might be.
A witch is a person in touch with her own magical powers to transform herself, others, and the world we all share.
“Sun Kitsune” art & image by Evgeny Hontor. One of my favorite witches, who makes AMAZING art.
Harmony Is A Witch
I refuse to let other people and their bad cultures and religions impose their beliefs on me, what I look like, how I act, what I learn, what I value, what I write, the stories I tell.
I am a magic-user, broadly and narrowly construed. I am fascinated by physics and hypotheses about parallel worlds and universes and the implications of those possibilities. For laypeople, scientific knowledge can come across as magic. No, really, HOW does your television or computer actually work? How do they display images and colors and sounds and react to our remotes and keyboards and the internet? We don’t know. It works by magic for all we know.
I am a magic-user in that I create entire universes in my stories. Stories have the ability to change individuals and cultures. They’ve shown again and again that readers of fiction are more empathetic than non-readers of fiction. We understand our fellow humans better because we’ve experienced what it might be like to be all sorts of different people in different circumstances with different problems.
I take my magic very seriously and tell stories that will make the world a better place and open up opportunities to those who have been systematically oppressed and belittled and ignored. Not only do I try to make the world a better place for other humans, but I am desperate to make the world a better place for plants and animals that live here too!
I am the sort of witch who sits on her porch watching the various birds and squirrels playing in the trees and bushes, who tunes into the natural world and isn’t constantly distracted by technology and capitalist impulses to buy more and own more and spend the majority of my life completing meaningless tasks for slips of paper that I can turn into meaningless, transitory goods.
I am witch who balances my life to the best of my ability within the horrific society I was born into with all that comes with that. I minimize the amount of time I spend performing relatively meaningless tasks and conserve those slips of paper received for necessities and goods that actually improve my life and the lives of others, and reserve most of my time and energy for loving relationships, writing my stories, and communing with the natural world.
harmony is a witch 