Wielding the blade
when it's time to tell your story
Dear Wanderer,
My deepest apologies for missing my New Moon missive. A bout of family covid and a 25-page deadline plotted together to keep me from you, but I’ve returned from that underworld journey with avengence and a big knife, ready to take you on ANOTHER underworld journey!
This Full Moon I want to remind you that telling your story is an act of resistance. There is power in telling your story in your own words. Events as you experienced them. Truth as you know it. Justice as you require it.
When it is time to tell your story, helpers of all kinds will join you in the most unexpected ways in order to help you tell your story as it needs to be told. We aren’t the sole owners of our own stories. Just as we need the stories of others to feed us, heal us and help us feel seen, others need our stories to do the exact same thing. We are medicine for one another. Your life, your mistakes, the crimes you’ve comitted and had comitted against you, are someone’s medicine.
I’m in the throes of telling my own story—brutaly and completely, in all its glory and degredation. I’ve been trying to tell it for over a decade, but I had to take several underworld journeys in order to become the version of myself that has the insight, courage and skill to do it right.
Telling a story, just like living one, is so often an underworld journey. It takes a lot of strength to hold your own story. To revisit your nightmares and look them full in the face. Maybe not unflinchingly—go ahead and flinch. But bravely and imperfectly and as completely as you possibly can. This means being fair to everyone whose likeness appears in your story, yes, but your first duty is to yourself. You owe it to yourself to think and feel deeply. To process and mull and turn every harrowing moment over in your hands until you know it inch by inch. This takes work. It takes being willing to discover things you might not want to see.
The powers that be in this world work very hard to erase their crimes and the victims of those crimes. In order to fight this erasure we have to be willing to see what we are trying to show the world. It seems unfair—you already lived through it. Maybe you live it every day. Why do you then have to look at it so deeply? See it with such dazzling and painful clarity?
Because it is through your eyes that the rest of us will see it too. Because by seeing it, you can heal it. You have the power to write a new story without unconsciously carrying around the old one. To enter that underworld willingly, in your power, and confronting what awaits you there, is an act of power and transformation.
You might need tools. You might need help. When I started writing down the most painful, confusing parts of my own story, I knew I needed a BIG knife. I knew I needed to talk to my therapist and get her help to communicate with the guardian parts of me that have worked very hard to obscure the very details I was trying to uncover. And I knew I needed to hear others tell their stories, the Ones Who Have Gone Before.
In therapy I made contact with a ghostly, shadowy part of myself that guards the primeval forests and swamps of my darkest memories (and non-memories). This is the part that would send down THICK fog whenever I tried to look to closely at certain parts of my life. It turns out, this part wants to tell it’s story, but it doesn’t want to do it alone. As I reassured that I am here now, able to protect us and hold what needs to be held, it morphed into a playful black-and-white figure, like a Japanese depiction of a forest spirit. It wanted to live outside of me, in an object we would find together, and then, together, we would tell my story.
It just so happens that my favorite witch, Amanda Yates Garcia, was holding a full moon ritual the following night. The theme of the ritual for this Full Moon in Virgo was “getting unstuck.” We were to bring a magical object with us to the ritual that we want to work with, but aren’t sure how. Then, during the ritual, we would create a methodology. This would be the key to getting unstuck. Our methodology would be the path forward. The map.
I’ve had a dread curiousity about athames—ritual blades—for a long time. To me, this always seemed like SERIOUS witch biz. Sure I use incense and light little white candles, but most of my magical tools are from nature—shells and stones—or are just everyday household objects, or things I’ve picked up at thrift stores or scrounged from free piles. But a blade, a ritual blade. Now that was some serious craft.
In my heart of hearts, in my gut of guts, in my bone of bones, I knew that it was time to find a blade of my own. My little fog spirit, whom I imagine dancing along near my shoulder, seemed to agree. I decided to get one for the ritual. I went to local witch store, The Raven’s Wing, where I had seen such blades before, but there were hardly any. At first I thought there were none. But then I saw it: A beautiful, curved silver blade, like a scythe or a sickle, with vines etched into the blade and a triquetra carved into the pommel.
Not only did this blade seem too grand, too lovely, too expensive to be mine, it also just wasn’t what I was expecting. I was picturing a straight blade that came to deadly point and could fit in the palm of my hand. Wandering on, I also found of pair of selenite daggers—obviously amazing—and a little bowl of tiny switchblades, $4 each.
The witch behind the counter, who definitely recognizes me at this point, was busy helping other customers while I wandered. But eventually they asked if I needed help finding anything in particular. Yes, in fact I was.
They brought me first to the selenite daggers. But they didn’t seem quite right. For one, they weren’t sharp. Great for rituals, but I needed something that could cut through all the fog and underbrush that had grown up around my story. plus I have a lot of selenite already, and I love it, but it was time for something new.
Then they brought me to the sickle-shaped blade. It looked like crescent moon, and was serrated on the inside of the curve and deadly-sharp on the outside. It was intended, the shopkeeper told me, for harvesting herbs. I thought immediately of the tall grasses that grew unchecked around my childhood home and gave me allergies. It came with a black case you could hang on your belt if you took it out in the field.
It could be something you can carry with you, like talisman, my therapist had said when we talked about finding an object for my little guardian to live in.
It was big, about the size of my outstretched hand, definitely not something I could wear on a chain or hide up my sleeve, but the whole point of telling my story was, after all, to make it visible—to myself, and to others. Swords and blades correspond to suit of air, the element of communication, writing, thinking, freedom and truth. And what was my card for the year? Why, the Queen of Swords, of course!
“It’s $50,” said the witch as I admired the blade. I was shocked. Looking around the store at all the other beautiful items and their prices, I was expecting something that grand to be a least a couple hundred. I wasn’t really expecting to be able to afford it. But $50? With my financial aid recently in—advance payment for the act of telling my story—I could afford that.
So I did, feeling completely like a person other than myself. Since when did I become a person who bought BIG FANCY KNIVES I don’t even know the proper name of, for ritual purposes or otherwise??
Spending money usually makes me panic. This time was no different. I got a receipt in case I got it home and realized it had all been A HUGE MISTAKE. But I brought it to the ritual. I created a methodology for working with it, for cutting away the obstacles—the fog, the doubtful thoughts, the fear and gaps in my memory—that threatened to get in the way of telling my story. I invited my little fog spirit to come and live inside it. And the next day, I used it.
It still feels outsized, and a few times I’ve almost given in and taken it back. But each time, something about it calls out to me, and I remind myself that I am in the process of becoming the person who can wield that blade. Maybe next time I’ll get a cauldron…
Other lucky things happened that day too, that week. On hold at the library for who knows how long, the audiobook of Amanda Yates Garcia’s memoir showed up as ready to check out. So I did. Since I began it a few days ago, I’ve been listening voraciously, every chance I get—when I’m not feverishly writing, that is. Like a combination of underworld priestess and childhood best friend, Amanda’s already-familiar voice holds my hand through the process of plunging to my deepest depths. Sometimes it feels like we’re at a slumber party, in a tent made of sheets, holding flashlights beneath our faces as we recount our strangest stories and darkest secrets. How grateful I am for that. A witch is someone you want by your side when you need to take an underworld journey. And, it gives me hope that my story can be just as valuable to someone, someday.
That same day, before I found my athame, I had a phone call from a friend of my husband’s, an elder, an astrologer in her eighties who was kind enough to offer me a reading of my birth chart with an eye to my career. Mostly, her reading reinforced things I already knew—that I am creative, a writer, an activist, and I’m into sharing wisdom and telling truths. But I also learned that I’m a natural leader, and that my Saturn in the 4th house speaks to the probability that I will work from home. Yesss!
It was an abundant, generous reading that left me with a full heart, hope for the future and the feeling that I am on the righ track. As someone so thoroughly without parental figures of any kind, I value guidance from elders so highly.
Not only that, as I was doggedly excavating the worst parts of childhood—that which constitutes abuse—my friend texted me out of the blue and offered to pick up my kids from school and take them to the arcade for the afternoon. If that’s not divine intervention, I don’t know what is.
These are the kinds of things that happen when it’s time to tell your story. You are given tools, guidance, a methodology even. Other storytellers, guiding spirits, angels, priestesses and elders appear at your side. And you might even receive a really BIG knife!
That’s how important it is to tell your story.
Telling it like it is,
Sasha