Seasonal Shifts is a quarterly piece on folk magic & medicine, seasonal living, and animism through the lens of a queer & disabled Italian-American folk witch. Patreon receives Seasonal Shifts early, and supporting my Patreon is the easiest way to support my work & receive early access to blogs, weekly collective readings, discount codes & more.
Summer is my favorite season. It is when I feel the busiest, happiest, most myself - fully in my Leo sun/Solar energy, similar to spring allowing me to feel fully in my Aquarian rising/Air energy. Summer is when everything begins to not just bloom, but thrive - the night of San Giovanni comes closer. The Nemoralia, and celebrations to Diana + the Virgin Mary, loom on the horizon.
Summer folk practice will be different for each individual, their location, and their tradition - but this season has some general associations we can utilize to create rituals:
- growth, blooming, green allies
- liveliness & long days
- healing & blessings
- solar energies
Summer is the time where my work with many plant teachers is in full swing. I spend most mornings in my garden, checking in and talking to the tomato plants, watching my vervain grow back after a difficult year, and overall getting my hands in the soil. This is the first way in which folk magic becomes seasonal for me. I focus on tending to the spirits of place, including being present with those that are struggling, identifying plants, and later in the summer I will harvest some of these teachers and allies to make into medicine to carry me into the next year.
In a folk herbalist sense and my experience, many herbs we work with in spring into summer are based in supporting vitality, lighter flavor profiles, and nutritive qualities. I tend to focus on herbs that will awaken the digestion and immune response, like chamomile, or herbs to support the allergy response like nettle. Winter may bring fire cider, heavy, or denser foods, but summer is about lightness. For an autoimmune-compromised individual and in the age of COVID, my immune support continues throughout the seasons with specific focus on treating hay fever/allergy responses, lighter foods, and herbs to support a healthy immune response.
Some tinctures I'm making right now and herbal allies that have been present in my practice, both magically and medicinally include:
- nettles
- catnip
- fennel
- tulsi/holy basil
- lemon balm
- rose & clematis
- monarda/bee balm
- st john's wort (flower essence)
For more on medicinal plants and learning herbalism, I recommend Rowan + Sage's Herbaria community.
Plant work thrives in my practice when they begin waking up. I happily identify all the green allies on my walks with my partner and stop to check in even on the most "annoying" of weeds to say hello - during this period, I'm also diving deep into "The Tameless Path" by Kamden Cornell for information on working with weeds and invasive plants in my practice, especially bindweed and dalmation toadflax, which are everywhere in Colorado.
Summer is the time where we work on not just creation, but tending. While my practice tends to grow slow and internal in the winter, summer brings about the time where my focus turns externally - this year this is existing through teaching, traveling, but also tending. Tending to my garden. Tending to my body. There's a focus on bringing blessings to the people in summer - but also healing after illness.
This year is the first that I am in rest-mode in the summer. I feel as though I am still a root, slumbering deeply. I feel grief, rage, and much pent up energy. Previous summers were spent traveling, celebrating, performing, attending festivals and workshops, spent embodying the solar energy of movement, quickness, and presence.
There is still some of that this summer - I will be teaching "the Bane and Blessing of Italian-American Folk Magic: Cures, Communal Protection & Justified Work" at the Salem Witchcraft & Folklore Festival (which you can purchase either an in person or online ticket to) and being present with some of my most beloved peers - Loo Ledesma, Sterling Moon, Mahigan Saint-Pierre, Marshall WSL, Professor Porterfield, Dr Finch, Austin Fuller, Matthew Venus, Nick Dickinson are a few names of folks that I hold dear that I am excited to share space with this summer.
This season, I am still creating and brimming with energy and ideas, yet instead of immediately pouring that energy outwards, I am pouring it inwards.
This is where our animistic folk practices meets a modern-day need. Our bodies, minds, and lives are not given the rest often needed during the dark months like our ancestors' did - instead we are constantly bombarded with movement. This, for me, leads to my body deciding that rest is needed in any season, and I begrudgingly oblige.
I do not think summer is just the season of quickness, movement, blessings, and growth - but we have to take into account that the world, for the most part, does not move seasonally. Capitalism asks us to be 100% all the time, and often my most energetically outwards periods for my shop are during the winter.
I often think we talk a lot about living seasonally and in tune with the seasons. We often get inundated with information on the sabbats, seasonal practice, information on equinoxes, solstices, moon phases, and more - all of which are important to take into account as animistic folk practices, however... when we exist in a society, system, and landscape that already does not take into account the seasons and living seasonally, this becomes complicated.
Even within the "wheel of the year" that is often shared, it is created based off the Northern hemisphere's seasonal shifts without accounting for the vast amount of bioregions (an area defined by natural characteristics) within the Northern hemisphere, leading to an importance in formulating our own relation to the environment around us.
In Pennsylvania, where I spent most of my life, spring was humid and perpetually rainy. In late March, the American dogwood flowers began to bloom, a telltale sign of spring, and winter was confined, beginning in November and ending late February/early March.
In Colorado, late March may bring warmer days and some rain, however we always have late snowstorms, sometimes even going into early May, and the rain is characterized by an evening descent rather than a whole-day.
Both of these experiences and climates also don't take into account climate change, which has led to many "false springs", less snow in my current region, and a shift in what is "normal" worldwide.
All of our environments are communally changing - leading to a need to revisit and revise how we approach seasonal practice.
Reconstruction requires us to recognize core beliefs, rituals, and ways of being that have been passed down to us while also asking us to acknowledge that not everything can be duplicated. It’s both important and possible to look at how we can grow new roots while staying connected to old ways of being.
In many ways, we are told that tradition is best - that it is done because it's how things are always done. Tradition is upheld on a pedestal, but when we can not critically engage with tradition through the lens of our modern experience as folk practitioners, we lose an important aspect of ancestral magic; our bodies. Our needs. The needs and reality of the structures and systems we operate within. The needs of the land around us.
How is what our bodies and minds need reflecting a harm and system that is unsupportive to the folk? What do the folk need? How are these shifts an indication of shifts that are occurring across communities?
Seasonal practices operate off of our ability to sense into the environment around us, the way the world turns, and living in tune and in relation to it - yet sometimes our bodies, experiences, and accessibility don't match up. Instead of pressuring ourselves to discount our these aspects of our practice, let us ask:
- What season are you in? (this question was posed to me recently by a friend in the Ancestral Garden container, Kaela. it has stuck with me and I give her full credit for her amazing prompts.)
- What is your body asking for right now?
- What is accessible to you?
- How do the needs of my body and mind reflect systemic harms and injustice occurring on a larger level?
My body is asking for slowness. For silent growth, tending to roots, ideas, and magic without the need to be seen within it. It is grieving, crying, screaming to the stars. It is asking me to listen to the teachers I have given everything to - the green allies, the plants, my ancestors in living form.
Rather than pushing myself into a space of burnout, lack, and harm by forcing myself to emulate the season I am in, instead I am leaning into the allies I work with during this time and ancestral magic to refresh my energy and creativity.
Nettles asks for wards to be replenished - for a nutritive return to reconnection. For gentleness with myself instead of cruelty. There is a gift in being the first to tend to yourself.
Rose & Clematis asks me to wail. It calls me in to crying at every occasion. I cry while making pasta. I cry while watching "Nonnas". I cry while watching "The Wild Robot". I cry when I see ancestors on the side of the road, waving hello. I release, and in my release, I am reborn.
Tomato asks me to be present and tend to her differently than the other plants in my garden, and within this asks me to tend to myself differently than I have been and how I was taught to tend to my body. She feeds me nightly. She thrives when supported.
Tulsi & lemon balm ask me to pay attention to my mind, my thoughts, and my mental health. In dreams, Diana's altar appears washed with wine and mugwort salve.
Plants as Ancestors - the online container
"Plants are our ancestors that are still alive." - this quote comes from my teacher, Lisa Fazio, owner of the Root Circle, who just launched her next container of Della Medicina, a nine month initiation and journey into Italian + Italian American folk medicine & magic. As I write this, I am wrapping up the final month of this container and class, and can not express how transformative it was in the best way. This course is incredibly in-depth, providing the student with a community space, a supportive teacher and cohort peers, and a regenerative, full-body and mind approach to folk medicine & reconnection.
Through being present in not only this course, but Lisa's Della Medicina I & II classes for several years is how I truly began to embody my practice as a reconnector and Italian-American folk practitioner. There are things that the plant teachers taught me, told me, and allowed me access to that I lost fully from assimilation. From this, I created the "Plants as Ancestors" container to pass on these teachings.
This class and these living ancestors is based in the three principles:
1. RESPECT
To approach a plant as an ally is to approach it on an equal footing. Respecting the plant ally, including respecting receiving a “no” from them when asking for assistance, is key in this aspect of our journey as well as in all forms of spirit work.
2. RECOGNIZING AUTONOMY
Recognizing the autonomy of a plant spirit is recognizing that it is not something for you to command. This plays out differently in different practitioners’ workings with plant allies. For some, this may be asking consent from a plant before communicating with it, asking before gathering/foraging a plant, or even recognizing that the plant’s lesson for us may not be something we are ready to receive or like. To recognize plants as autonomous is to acknowledge that their lessons will not abide by what we want to gain from them, but rather what the plant believes will be best for us to learn.
3. RESTRAINT
To honor plants, not just ancestral allies, but all allies, is also to recognize when a plant is not for us. There are many plants that are commodified, capitalized on, or romanticized for the entire population while they were originally sacred to one specific group in a specific area. Native plants outside our door, although accessible, may not always be for us. Not all plants are made for us to pick or work with, nor do any of the plants that do want to teach us belong to us. To recognize, especially as settlers on stolen land, that we are not entitled to the sacred allies of Indigenous peoples is the key to recognizing our own ancestral and cultural allies.
I often talk about plants as teachers and ancestors and working with them through this lens, and yet I have found through experience that the best way to learn this is not through me - but from them. One of my students, in my in-person Plants as Ancestors container, while we sat in a circle on the floor in our plant share talked about how they mentally knew I've been saying that plants are teachers, but now they had gained a felt understanding that transformed what they knew to be possible — that the plants have a lot to share.
I think that this, in many ways is how we begin our reconnection to ancestry and folk magic. It has only been recently that we, as a people, separated ourselves from nature and began seeing nature and natural phenomenon as separate from us. It has only been recently that we saw plants and the environment around us as tools, rather than beings we are intertwined with.
Especially right now, when we are facing threats against the environment, rampant climate change, and capitalist viewpoints that center what we can use from the earth rather than how to be in relationship with it, centering plant allies and connecting with them helps us remember why we should treat them as living spirits.
To respect plant allies, recognize their autonomy, and to exercise restraint is to push back against the teaching that plants do not hold spirits or knowledge past what we have discovered about them. Rather, it is to accept them as elders and recognize that we can learn from them in ways that aren’t written about in books or taught in our science lessons.
I am excited to begin the online container of Plants as Ancestors in July, with it running to September and dedicating more time, space, and energy to this container and vessel for the plant ancestors and allies. This space will have thirty slots open for those within the container - meaning access to our Discord community, all five classes, + a plant profile made based off the plant you choose to work with through this container - and some select slots for our two classes that are open to outside attendance;
Plants as Ancestors & Living with the Seasons: Animistic Viewpoints and Land Veneration and Plants as Protection: Italian-American Viewpoints on Apotropaic Ritual & Charms.
We recommend taking the whole container, however we understand that not everyone has the financial ability to do all five classes. These classes still build upon what we will learn in this container.
We have three tiers available for this course;
1. Consolida/Comfrey Tier - $175 for the five class container, plus the discount code for Patrons.
2. Mallow/Malve Tier - $230 for the five class container, plus the discount code for Patrons.
3. Fennelcello Tier - $280 for the five class container, plus the discount code for Patrons.
Each tier includes access to the five classes, plus access to our Discord (rolling out late June) + a personalized plant profile made by Frankie for the plant you choose to work with. Learn more about the classes available and our tier structure here.
We hope that you join us - and thank you for supporting Chaotic Witch Aunt.