What does healing mean? In this ableist society, we are constantly asked to heal ourselves. ” Go to therapy,” has become an easy quip, as “self-development” and “growth” become buzzwords. We are supposed to rediscover spirituality to heal. The demand to heal seems to produce this amazing dichotomy between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘sick,’ the ‘productive’ and the ‘unproductive.’ If you are not working on healing yourself, you are not doing enough, we are often told, loudly or implicitly…
This framing seems to suggest that healing is some goal to be reached, a destination to attain, after which you can rest easy. And for those who are healthy, they have already reached this destination. So, all this also cultivates judgment and hierarchies between the healed and the unhealed. This is also very characteristic of settler societies that stay divorced from the land and the Earth, constantly objectifying it and treating it as resource or property than of which we are a part…
Magic and witchcrafts are often called upon these days to heal, but personally, I am pretty annoyed of the implicit reinforcement of this framework of healing. The hard line between the sick and healthy is an ableist one, and one which is rooted in the pathologisation of experiences that stray from the most dominant and popularly told stories. “Oh so your experience has been a difficult one and different from the norm? Oh, you must be sick..” Easy peasy tool to ensure conformity, consolidation of the status quo.
But unsettling witchcrafts means anything but reinforcing conformity…I would argue even the general practice of witchcrafts has always been about the edges, creating space for the unusual nonconforming experiences of pain, violence, sexuality, death etc. which are largely seen as undesirable. If cures offered through healing ‘solve’ or help avoid these ostensibly undesirable experiences, witchcrafts has little space there.
Which is why I find travel or journey to be a more apt description for what we are doing here with unsettling witchcrafts and reality-bending. Not that healing cannot be understood or defined differently, but in an ableist society that word has way too much baggage. And why suffer through the baggage when we can step sideways? (part of my transition strategy too ;)) No need to muddle through this haystack when another metalworker somewhere else has the answer. A journey does not seek a destination, it seeks to see differently what the traveller starts moving away from. And movement in inevitable in this Creation, of which we are. A traveller well knows that it is important to detach and let things rest too….Hmm well, maybe not all travellers, lol. In any case, that’s how I like travelling. Light. It allows space for all experiences that deviate from the norm, without the judgment of both pride and shame. Lots of laughter as we shed the tears. Not to mock or belittle, but to enjoy the wondrous beauty of the contradiction, the great mystery which is existence, which is Creation, which is love… o life, embrace me i too, your every grief, have embraced, yes? Song is here
and here
Will you join me? :3
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