Book Review: Chronically Magickal
Danielle Dionne’s recent book, Chronically Magickal: Navigating Chronic Illness with Witchcraft, is something I wish I had ten years ago. As someone who identifies as a witch, pagan, and disabled person with a chronic illness this book spoke to so many aspects about both my daily life and my spiritual practice.
Guest Post: Reimagining Our Relationships With Divine Entities
I’m very excited to share this guest post with you. The below essay centers Doozy’s lived experience with an autoimmune disorder and how it informs her relationship to her own body as a way of critically examining relationship-building and power dynamics within establish cosmologies. It dives into the reciprocal relationship between deity and devotee and asks us to deconstruct the idea of “worship” in a way that acknowledges the way both ends of the relationship interact with and depend on one another.
Ritual: Cleansing Salt/Herb Shower Scrub
Those who follow me on Twitter may recall a thread I posted a few weeks ago about messages that were channeling me to work through my impostor syndrome. Writing and sharing ritual is a first tentative step in that direction and it challenges two things that I get very anxious talking about - providing rituals or spellwork ideas for folks, and my disabled identity. Whenever I think about writing up a ritual to share I always doubt whether it is good enough, if it is “too basic”, and I tell myself there are probably hundreds like it already posted online or in books so what value is this adding? And when it comes to disability for years I’ve grappled with the internal ableism of not feeling “really disabled” and like claiming that term is somehow wrong, even though I do have physical limitations due to my arm and mobility issues when I’m experiencing a flare up (not to mention the mental health aspect when my depression/anxiety are severe.)
Ritual: Cane Blessing
I realized over the holiday break that a lot of my craft centers and celebrates my marginalized identity as a queer person but this was yet another space where I was distancing or ignoring another identity that is increasingly central to my world experiences: being a disabled person.