What does it mean to be a witch?
It's a question worth pondering. Coming from my strict Catholic background, there is still a part of me that feels 'rebellious' when I call myself a witch. Like I'm playing a role or defying my elders. Perhaps this was true when I was a teenager, and first became interested in the occult. (Occult means 'hidden,' incidentally, and refers to the entire, vast array of secret and forbidden knowledge - alchemy, magic, spirits, tarot, and the like.)
Today I had a moment that made me smile and think, this is what makes me a witch.
Dig if you will this picture of a startled and stunned yellow finch. I have a large picture window in the living room, and birds fly into it pretty regularly. Most often I hear them bounce off and never see any further evidence. On one occasion I got out there in time to see a sparrow with a broken neck take its last breaths. I buried it in the back yard.
For about twenty minutes, I just held him in my palm. Eventually he got his legs under him and perched on my finger. So thrilling! This beautiful bird watched me from his tiny black eye as I got him to move from one finger to another (avoiding poop successfully two out of three times it emerged), just hanging out there, getting his wind back. I petted him with one finger and talked to him while we sat on the stump in the middle of my yard, next to the finch sock full of thistle seeds that hangs off the cottonwood tree. Two of his friends kept coming by. (Friends or rivals? Who knows.)
This went on long enough that I got tired of petting a wild bird and needed to find a place to put him down. I set him down in a pot of violas by the front door, got him a tiny cup of sugar water, and let him be. He was pretty badly shaken up even then, and needed more time to get back to himself.
About twenty minutes later I checked on him. It startled him, and he flew over to the trellis, then took off across the street, out of sight. I hope he's truly okay and recovered.
This is not the first time I have recovered a stunned yellow finch.
About a dozen years ago, I was walking to work at 5:30 am when a little bird flying across the road ran smack into a car windshield. Fell to the pavement and lay there twitching. Beautiful yellow finch, exactly this one. Exactly as today, I picked him up and saw he was still alive and unbroken; I took him to work (my restaurant, a block away), set him outside in one of the whiskey barrels full of flowers out on the patio, and about an hour later he flew off, apparently none the worse for wear.
Being a pagan, being a witch, is all about the connection to nature. To the land, to the animals, to the waters. I believe that the love a person bears for the living things around her is sensed by flora and fauna alike. The bird was stunned, yes, but it trusted me, long after it had gotten its legs back under it and could have flown away. It knew I meant it no harm.
I'm the Snow White of the neighborhood. Squirrels, birds and rabbits frequent here. Neighborhood cats come and go. A few weeks ago, that little gray one took a dump in my vegetable garden not twenty minutes after I dug up the soil for spring. Looked right at me through the window while she did it, too. It was so funny I couldn't even be mad.
Over the last few years, working in the garden, I have lost all fear of spiders and bees - though wasps still make me a little uneasy. Last week, when I mowed for the first time, I startled a little garden snake. Tried to take a picture but by the time I got my phone from my pocket and found the camera app, it had disappeared. Quick little buggers.
To be a witch is not just to have this connection, but to recognize it, celebrate it, be empowered and overjoyed by it. I can scarcely describe the thrill I felt gazing into the tiny eye of a wild bird that looked at me in perfect trust as I stroked its feathers. The connection.
I was raised to believe in other gods, other ways of thinking about the world, but I was born with this sensibility.
It's a gift.
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