Witches

Author’s Note

This piece is not about reclaiming a label.

It is about reclaiming memory.

“Witch” has always been a placeholder word—

used to name people whose wisdom

could not be regulated, taxed, or erased without resistance.

I write this not to romanticize the past,

but to recognize the present:

how much ancient knowing still lives

in modern bodies

waiting to be trusted again.

Witches

They told us witches were women

who spoke too loudly to the dark,

who trusted their hands

more than permission.

They were wrong.

Witches are the ones who remember.

They remember which plants soothe a body

before medicine learned how to bill.

Which words calm a child

before lullabies had copyright.

Which silences are safe

and which ones are cages.

A witch is not a hat or a curse

or a story meant to scare children into obedience.

A witch is a woman

who noticed what worked

and refused to pretend it didn’t.

Witches listen to cycles.

To the way grief comes in waves,

to the way joy needs rest,

to the way power rots

when it forgets its source.

They were dangerous

because they did not outsource knowing.

Because they trusted intuition

before it was rebranded as instinct.

Because they gathered in circles

where no one sat above anyone else.

A witch does not ask the fire for permission.

She learns its language.

She does not worship the moon—

she times her breath with it.

They burned witches

because fire is what frightened men used

when they could not control water, earth, air,

or a woman who belonged to herself.

But witches don’t disappear.

They scatter.

They hide in grandmothers’ kitchens,

in midwives’ hands,

in artists who feel too much,

in women who trust the quiet voice

that says leave,

stay,

begin again.

A witch today might never say the word.

She might call it boundaries.

Healing.

Somatic wisdom.

Creativity.

But the knowing is the same.

Witches are not evil.

They are inconvenient.

They are what happens

when reverence survives persecution,

when memory outlives fear,

when women stop asking

whether their power is allowed

and start asking

how gently they want to use it.

And if you feel this humming in your chest—

that’s not danger.

That’s recognition.

—

Why Witches Had to Be Feared

They had to be feared

because they couldn’t be owned.

Because they spoke to pain

without routing it through authority.

Because they healed without asking

who would lose power if the body recovered.

Witches had to be feared

because they gathered knowledge

outside the sanctioned halls—

kitchens, fields, bedrooms, birth rooms,

places where life actually happened.

They understood timing.

Cycles.

That nothing blooms on command

and nothing dies just because it’s ignored.

Fear was the only story

that could justify burning wisdom alive.

So they called intuition “temptation,”

herbs “poison,”

and women who trusted themselves

a threat to order.

Witches weren’t hunted for magic.

They were hunted for autonomy.

For reminding people

that power does not descend from thrones—

it rises from relationship

with the body, the land, and each other.

You don’t fear what you understand.

You fear what you can’t control.

I vow to trust what I know

even when it has no name.

I vow to listen for the quiet yes

beneath the noise of permission.

I vow to remember

what was taught in whispers

and erased by fire.

I vow to use my power

without apology

and without harm.

I vow to gather, not dominate.

To heal, not perform.

To choose reverence over fear.

🌿 — Flower InBloom