Burnt Sage & Blunt Truths

  I hit two metaphysical fairs this week. Two. Back-to-back. Normally that’s my idea of a good time: stickers on my coffee thermos, antique tarot decks, hand-blended oils, someone selling vintage bone beads out of a velvet box — the whole carnival of curious energy. But let me tell you something: both of these fairs had the same vibe. Sticky. And not in the “sweet, honey-on-your-fingers, beeswing-on-the-altar” kind of way. I mean sticky like when you walk through it you feel like somebody tried to sell you a healing crystal with back rent attached. These two fairs usually pack the room. Normally, you’re fighting the crowd just to even see the tables. There’s a tarot reader in one corner with a line ten people deep, a forest of incense smoke in another, and vendors out here trying to talk you into buying hand-drawn sigils on birch bark for $45 a pop. Not this week. This week felt like someone had pressed pause. Very few quality vendors. Think multiple vendors with duplicate p...

  Someone posted a reply to one of my Facebook posts in a group: "I can't wait to come to your shop and try your coffee." People love romantic business ideas. “Have you ever thought about a cute little coffee shop downtown?” Sure. I’ve thought about it. We’ve all thought about it. The reclaimed wood counters, jazz piping out of speakers, witchy candles in the corner, maybe a bone on the shelf for attitude. People walk in, buy coffee, I smile, life is soft-focus sepia tones. I have beautiful satellite shops on Whidbey Island, by every Ferry terminal, in Pikes Market....etc.  Beautiful fantasy. Now let’s burn it to the ground with math. The 1,200 Square Foot Dream… Until The Rent Bill Comes Let’s pretend I hit the retail lottery and find a 1,200 sq ft storefront in downtown Everett (not picking on Everett, it's just for an example) for $2,400 a month. People say, “That’s not too bad!” They say that before we add reality: Utilities: $350–600 Insurance: $10...

  I finally did a thing I’ve been quietly wrestling with for months — maybe years if I’m honest. I launched a coffee brand. Hollow Bone Coffee Co. is alive. Let me tell you something: building a business is not lighting a candle and chanting your way to passive income. It’s paperwork, legal nonsense, nitpicky website battles, late-night research, and a whole lot of “What the hell is this error message and why is everything suddenly sold out?” It’s a spreadsheet and a spell. A credit card and a prayer. A ritual and a strategy. You don’t slide into alignment — you fight for it. I went through all of it: sourcing actual small-batch roasts deciding which origins to keep and which to cut naming blends from a place of real magic , not Pinterest wrangling Shopify like it owed me rent cussing at dropship sync settings at 2AM writing copy that felt honest, not cute And somewhere in all that mess, something started to click. That’s how you know you’re on the r...

 I don’t need anyone to tell me about economic downturns, climate change graphs, or supply-chain whatever. I listen to the land, and right now, she’s groaning. She’s tired. She’s trying to hold up people who have been holding her up for generations. Drive through Northeast Arkansas right now, and you’ll see what I mean — not by looking at the houses or the storefronts, but by looking at the fields. Cotton bales sitting untouched like gravestones. Soybeans plowed under not because they weren’t grown, but because nobody bothered to take them. Acres of potential just left there to rot because somewhere, a spreadsheet said “not worth it.” These are my people. Folks who pray over seed in February and break their backs in August. People who don’t do TikTok, don’t run trend pieces, don’t have time to explain the difference between perseverance and punishment to outsiders. They just get up before sunrise and do the damn work. They sacrifice silently. No Facebook fundraiser. No glossy ...

And this is where the posers step aside. Some books are easy to buy. Click, add to cart, delivered with the toothpaste and the cat litter. Then there are the others — the deep-rooted ones, the smoke-heavy ones, the ones the land itself protects. The ones you have to hunt. I spent weeks slipping through used-book graveyards, stalking listings like a wolf after a deer. Watching prices spike, vanish, reappear like ghosts. And then — finally — not one, but both of them dropped into my hands like bones from an ancestral altar: 📚 Mountain Magick — Edain McCoy 📚 In a Graveyard at Midnight — Edain McCoy Not reprints. Not watered-down summaries. Not “inspired by Appalachia” cottagecore. The real damn thing. Old-road knowledge, creek-bed knowledge. Magic made from necessity, not novelty. Witchcraft that still smells like woodsmoke and lard, not lavender-aesthetic Instagram filters. I didn’t just buy books. I reclaimed a lineage. --- Why These Two Matter (and why most wi...

  A Burnt Sage & Blunt Truths Dispatch Let me tell you something: Appalachia may get called a lot of things — backward, isolated, rough-around-the-edges — but stupid sure as hell isn’t one of them. And lately, folks in the hollers have been serving up some of the finest, funniest, pettiest resistance this side of the Smokies. And who are they trolling? ICE. Yes, that ICE. The same federal agency that still can’t figure out that an Appalachian grandpa named Burl has more survival instinct, community loyalty, and strategic stubbornness than their entire PR department combined. Turns out, when ICE shows up in the mountains trying to do whatever it is they think they’re doing — locals have decided to… well… play dumb in that razor-sharp, bless-your-heart Appalachian way that slices like a switchblade wrapped in homespun charm. **“You Seen So-and-So?” “Well, reckon I might’ve… unless I didn’t.”** Appalachian folks have perfected an art form: answering a question in a way...

  If trolling ICE with misdirections were an Olympic sport, Appalachia would sweep the podium in every category. But the latest trend? Whew. It’s pure, undiluted mountain-grade mischief. Folks have started telling ICE agents things like: “You’ll find him if you go whistle in the woods.” “Look straight up in them trees.” “Just follow them crying baby sounds.” And listen — anyone actually from the mountains understands this is the equivalent of telling someone, “Go pet that bobcat, it likes strangers.” “Go whistle in the woods” — translation: absolutely not On paper, it sounds harmless. To outsiders, maybe even whimsical. But in Appalachian dialect? That’s basically: “Get out of here before you embarrass yourself further, and enjoy being lost.” It’s a polite middle finger wrapped in folklore. The kind we deploy when we’re done answering questions we don’t want to answer — which, surprise, is most of the time when the federal government shows up uninvited. “Look...