These Are My People

 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 charity gala. Just diesel receipts and aching joints and credit they hope to God they can roll over one more year.

You know that phrase everyone loves?
“From dust we came.”
Well, out here, dust isn’t poetic — it’s a daily reality. It’s what rolls in behind a tractor that’s two payments behind. It’s what settles in the lungs of a man who damn well knows he shouldn’t still be working that field but does anyway, because if he doesn’t, nobody will.

Witches talk a lot about harvest. The Wheel of the Year. Reaping what you sow. Sounds cute on Instagram. Out here, harvest is a gamble every single season. A blood oath between humans and the earth that doesn’t always pay out.

Everyone wants to romanticize rural life — mason jars and rocking chairs, farm-to-table brunch nonsense. Let me tell you something: there is no romance in watching a crop die because you can’t afford to pull it.

That hurts in places whiskey can’t reach.

And let’s talk about unseen suffering. Because this year, it’s not dramatic. It’s not floods washing away fields or tornadoes ripping barns apart. It’s quieter. More insidious.

It’s the sound of nothing moving.
No trucks hauling cotton.
No engines running late into the night.
No grain dust smell at the elevator.

Silence is a hell of a warning when you’re used to the hum of survival.

People who’ve never watched a crop fail don’t understand that kind of grief. They’ll talk about federal aid and insurance policies like that fills the hollowness in a farmer’s gut. It doesn’t. You can’t insure pride. You can’t write off legacy as a “loss.”

These are my people. Salt-of-the-earth doesn’t even cover it. They’re flint and bone and stubborn prayer. They’ll give you the shirt off their back and never tell you when they need one in return.

Witches know sacrifice. We understand offerings — true offerings — not the cute candle-and-crystal nonsense. Out here, offerings look like sweat on the field and a credit line stretched so tight it sings.

Winter is coming, and I don’t mean that in a fantasy-book way. I mean a long stretch of lean meals, broken sleep, and county gas stations hearing real conversations about “how we’re gonna make it.”

Pay attention to the fields. Don’t look away from the bales left out there like unburied dead.

This was a year of loss. Unseen, uncelebrated, unreported.

And yet — listen closely — even now, beneath the rot and the regret, the land is still whispering: Try again.

Because that’s what they do. These stubborn, suffering, beautiful people. They try again.

And I’ll stand with them. I’ll speak for them. Because witches remember what the world forgets:
the land always knows who loved it, and it always keeps count.

These are my people. And they are not done.