I have arrived.

I have arrived.

Not gracefully.

Not quietly.

And certainly not with one of those perfectly curated photographs where I’m standing beside a “Welcome to Arkansas” sign with good hair, a clean car, and a caption about exciting new beginnings.

I arrived tired. With pneumonia.

Bone-deep, soul-deep, don’t-ask-me-to-make-another-decision tired.

I arrived with boxes, cats, Mom, Dakota, receipts, road grime, stories I’m not quite ready to tell, and the lingering suspicion that somewhere between Washington and Arkansas I personally offended at least three gods of travel.

But I arrived.

And those may be the two most important words I have written in a very long time.

I arrived.

Leaving Wasn't the Hard Part

People like to romanticize leaving.

They talk about closing doors, starting new chapters, following your heart, and taking leaps of faith.

That shit looks fantastic embroidered on a throw pillow.

Actual leaving is uglier.

Sometimes leaving means looking around at a life you worked very hard to build and admitting that it doesn't fit anymore.

Sometimes a place can give you extraordinary beauty and extraordinary pain at the same time.

Washington did that for me.

There were moments there that I will carry for the rest of my life. Mountains that still don't look real even when you're standing directly in front of them. Water and forests and little pieces of wildness that reminded me exactly why humans once believed every grove, river, stone, and mountain had a spirit.

There was laughter.

There was love.

There was wonder.

There was also loss.

There was exhaustion.

There were things that changed me.

Some of them made me stronger.

Some of them simply hurt.

And eventually I had to stop asking whether I could keep pushing through and start asking the much more important question:

Why the hell am I still trying to?

There is a peculiar kind of wisdom that comes when you finally understand that endurance is not always a virtue.

Witches talk a lot about banishing.

We write spells. We sweep things out the door. We burn herbs. We cut cords. We release things under dark moons.

But sometimes the most powerful banishing spell you will ever perform involves cardboard boxes, packing tape, a loaded vehicle, and a highway disappearing beneath your tires.

Sometimes the spell is simply:

I'm leaving.

The Road Between Lives

There is something strange about crossing the country when you know you aren't coming back to the same life.

Every mile creates distance between who you were and whoever you're becoming.

At first, you still belong to the place behind you.

Then somewhere along the road, you belong nowhere.

That liminal space fascinates me.

We Pagans love thresholds. Doorways. Crossroads. Shorelines. Dawn. Dusk. Samhain. Beltane. All those places and moments that are neither entirely one thing nor another.

But we don't talk nearly enough about what it feels like to actually live inside a threshold.

For several days, that was exactly where I existed.

Washington was behind me.

Arkansas was ahead.

And my entire earthly existence was essentially reduced to whatever I could transport.

There is a lesson in that.

A brutal one.

You discover very quickly what matters when everything has to fit.

And you discover something else:

Home is not nearly as dependent upon geography as we pretend it is.

Home is people.

Home is animals complaining about the accommodations.

Home is the familiar object you unpack first because seeing it makes the room feel less strange.

Home is knowing who you can call when everything goes sideways.

Home is the place where your nervous system finally whispers:

We can stop running now.

Arkansas

And now I am here.

Arkansas.

There is something beautifully circular about it.

I left this part of the country years ago carrying one version of myself.

I have returned carrying another.

Older.

Scarred.

Much harder to impress.

Considerably less willing to tolerate bullshit.

And perhaps more myself than I have ever been.

This isn't retreat.

It isn't defeat.

And it certainly isn't me crawling backward into some earlier version of my life.

You cannot return to the person you used to be.

Thank the gods.

I don't want her life.

I want mine.

The one I am building now.

There is family closer.

There are old roots here.

There are stories buried in this soil.

There are familiar voices, familiar roads, familiar storms, and that particular Southern humidity that hits you in the face like Satan opened the dishwasher halfway through the drying cycle.

Seriously, Arkansas.

We need to discuss the weather.

But there is something else here too.

Possibility.

Not the shiny motivational-poster kind.

The quieter kind.

The kind that appears after survival.

The kind that doesn't scream, “You can do anything!”

It simply asks:

What do you want to do next?

And for the first time in quite a while, I have space to answer.

A Witch Comes Home

I have been thinking a great deal about what it means for a witch to come home.

Not to a house.

Not even necessarily to a place.

To herself.

We spend enormous portions of our lives becoming what circumstances require.

Employee.

Patient.

Caregiver.

Advocate.

Survivor.

Problem solver.

The one who handles it.

The one who figures it out.

The one who keeps moving because stopping isn't currently an available option.

Those identities can become so loud that eventually you can't hear the quieter voice underneath them.

The one asking:

Do you remember me?

I do.

She's still here.

The writer.

The teacher.

The witch.

The woman who wants to dig through history and folklore and old practices until her fingers are metaphorically filthy.

The woman who believes Paganism deserves better than becoming an endless carousel of aesthetically pleasing altars and fifteen-second spiritual revelations.

The woman who still believes mystery matters.

The woman who has books left to write.

Apparently quite a few of them.

And the woman who once had plans for Pagan world domination.

Don't worry.

Those plans survived the move.

Burnt Sage Isn't Finished

Neither am I.

If anything, I think this strange, painful, beautiful detour has sharpened what I want Burnt Sage and Blunt Truths to become.

I want to talk more about the Paganism underneath the merchandise.

The history beneath the memes.

The uncomfortable parts.

The beautiful parts.

The practices that survived because people actually practiced them rather than photographed them.

I want to talk about witchcraft that isn't sanitized for social media.

I want folklore.

History.

Ritual.

Mystery.

Scholarship.

Experience.

And occasionally I want to look directly at something ridiculous happening in modern Paganism and ask:

What in the cinnamon-scented fuck are we doing?

Balance is important.

So yes.

I have arrived in Arkansas.

The boxes are not all unpacked.

My life is not perfectly arranged.

There are still loose ends stretching halfway across the country.

There are things to heal from, things to settle, things to rebuild, and things I haven't even figured out yet.

But perfection was never a prerequisite for beginning.

That's another lie we've been sold.

Sometimes you don't begin when everything is ready.

Sometimes you plant your staff in unfamiliar ground, look around at the glorious mess surrounding you, and declare:

Here.

Here is where I begin again.

Not from scratch.

I didn't come here empty-handed.

I brought everything I learned.

Everything I survived.

Everything I loved.

Everything I lost.

Every mistake.

Every scar.

Every story.

Every bit of wisdom I had to pay entirely too fucking much to acquire.

I brought the witch with me.

I brought the writer.

I brought Burnt Sage and Blunt Truths.

And somewhere among these godforsaken boxes, I am reasonably certain I also brought the plans for Pagan world domination.

So...

Hello, Arkansas.

I'm here.

Let's see what happens next.