Time, I have often wanted to stop time. I needed more time. I needed time to be still. As we all know, time is far from still and moves differently for each person through their experiences. It is undoubtedly not forgiving and requires a lot of trust. In this need to be still, I wanted to commune with my dead ancestors since childhood, looking for their guidance and comfort. Wrote to them and sat with them. There was a space I could still be in, and it felt like time stood still.
Cattail Healing began in a bathtub, in a little house, with a whole lot of trust and love. Before that moment, though, I was deflated by my academic career. I took to art as a young adult because it filled my world with a way to make sense of my experiences and the world around me. I took to teaching because I wanted to bring that kind of healing into the classroom. To bring together body, mind, and spirit. Unfortunately, academia is not interested in that kind of time or philosophy. While performing this bathtub ritual, I felt utterly and totally held by my ancestors, grounding me and working through me in this healing ritual. I realized then my path was a healer’s path, but also that I didn’t know how to be what I was supposed to be in this world. I was guided to death work through the witch community at the former Catland Books. That is where I took my first course with Hannah Haddadi. Hannah holds a significant and special place in my rebirth cycle throughout 2023, for which I am eternally grateful to them. Through their Scared Death course, I felt so many scattered pieces of my childhood finally align.
I have known death from the tender age of 5, expected and brutally unexpected. I have seen the way people react to grief and death to the point it destroys relationships, bodies, and shared history. However, amongst all of that human messiness, I never felt alone. I felt held by knowing they were there with me, watching me and rooting for me. This connection to the dead is a core truth that has always been a part of me. Many times, in loving and unloving ways, I have called death a friend.
I stepped fully and intentionally into magic and witchcraft in 2017. While it was an interest before, it needed a foundation. I came to magic in the American South. It felt like a punch to the gut, calling for protection and understanding because of the land's energy and past. I strengthened my foundation by tending the tangled roots in my chest. This rebirth cycle of my life led me to feel crazy at times, and this experience heavily influenced my thesis work for my graduate degree. These callings later made sense as I began to uncover a forgotten side of my mother’s family line. A scream to “know me” rattled my head. My ancestral line has always been the key to my craft and growth as a witch. My craft is based in these midwestern and southern magic practices inside my respective lane.
With Cattail Healing, I aim to achieve a place where people can come without fear of judgment to start untangling the roots that might be bound in their chests from grief, loss, shame, and anxiety. Through the use of esoteric rituals and tools to tap into a deeper part of our human existence, there is a need to have marked passages through times of struggle, celebration, and resistance. As an American raised in the oppressive Western ideology, I have observed a decline in all three of these moments in our lives, especially as a queer person. The lack of these rituals is often experienced by those who don’t fit into the nuclear way of life. We usually only have a few unique or ritualistic moments in our lives that are shared with the community. What happens when we expand on these? That is the question at hand with Cattail Healing. Here, we refuse to believe the future is set in stone. That there is doom, that there is no potential to be the catalyst for a new and better future, an investment one might never see the returns on. This mindset of doom is often stifled through the survival mode most of us are living in, suppressed through stagnate grief.
Cattail Healing is not a place of a quick fix, as a quote that has stuck with me throughout my life is from the book Where the Red Fern Grows: you have to meet the intuition, the want, the emotion, the divine manifestation halfway, through almost always deep shadow work. When kudzu runs wild in your garden and home, it takes a lot of knowledge to pull it from the roots and constant tending to keep it at bay. Tending the tangled roots and confronting that hard-to-face part of ourselves is shadow work. A self-knowledge that can be used to look outward and grow our community.
Cattail Healing in the future is a place for radical community growth that can foster conversations of creativity so that we are resilient and adaptable in our grief.
I am so excited to be on this journey with you all and watch it unfold. Thank you to all my new and old friends who supported me this last year. Nothing in life can be done without friendship. And thank you to sacred death, who understood getting my heart broken would be the best thing ever to happen.
