Thinning the Veil

Witchcraft for the modern mother

Dear Reader

January’s newsletter, like the Year of the Rabbit is about the homecoming. The year to reconnect, to return, to find peace and hope. The four burrows. And most of all, to contemplate. It’s about a sense of place.

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With the Windows Open

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

- Ernest Hemingway

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Is it Middle Age or the Thinning of the Veil?

Signs that the ordinary and supernatural worlds are merging to occupy the same space that also sound a lot like middle age:

1. Insomnia

   I mean.

2. Vivid dreams

   Right?!

3. A sense that there are spirits inside your home

   Let’s just say a LOT is going on right now.

4. Your pets hearing things you cannot see

   New explanation for all that barking through your work Zoom calls.

5. Feeling run-down

   I guess not just getting older, also just being a witch.

6. Crying easily

   Everyday. As many tears of joy as those of sorrow.

7. Feeling ungrounded

   Like walking into an art gallery and finding a plaque that describes an art movement interested in ‘underworlds’ - “Advances in scientific exploration in the 19th century inspired artists to travel further, and deeper, into the world. By turning to the earth’s lower depths and subterranean zones, they mapped new emotional terrains, where space and time operated differently - slower, silent and darkly secretive compared to the world above. Caves, caverns and forest understories were a source of fascination..”..

   And, thinking doesn’t that just describe it, doesn’t that describe what you’ve been sensing around you?

8. That your intuition is strong

   Without hesitation. They say women don’t trust their intuition enough but turns out middle-aged women do.

9. Smelling of things that aren't there

   Is something on fire? Is that burning? Did you kids have candles in your room? Haven’t I told you not to risk candles in your bedrooms? Is it incense?

10. Throwing away old clothes to develop a new wardrobe

    Well, yes, obviously. For instance, who can endure really high heels anymore? (If you are still wearing them then know that you look glorious, and I have loved those shoes, myself. But, the last time I wore high heels, which was to a recent ball, I couldn’t believe I was forcing myself to intentionally feel precarious - when insecurity of any kind annoys me at this age - and that I had to then do the barefoot, limp of shame (ok, also drunk) out of there to a taxi home because my feet were too sore to walk any further in the heels. (Ok, my husband carried my shoes for me, too)).

11. Noticing symbols and recurring themes (conclusions are being drawn)

    What does it mean when the cat that left home came back for a visit and walked right back out, again? What about finding a rare Powerful Owl adolescent chick sitting above your home? How an owl also appeared when my first baby was born. I came out in the still of the night, destroyed by hours of breastfeeding and a crying baby. And I had never felt so alone as in that moment, to be standing outside in the middle of the night with perfect quiet. How I turned to look back towards the bedroom where my baby was finally sleeping, and I saw an owl perched on the window, watching her inside and me outside. What can it mean? A frog in the shower. A white feather found on your walk. Three appliances that break at once. Multiple people in a week randomly quoting from the same poem. All these coincidences you keep finding. All these omens.

12. Feeling closer to animals and/or nature

    You want to walk or swim or see a bird or listen to the rain or pat a cat. That’s a perfect afternoon, these days. Perfect.

13. Feeling of hot flashes, as the spirits move through the Veil

    Explanation accepted.

14. Pivotal moments of change

    Everything. Teenagers. Ageing parents. Promotions. Health scares. Floods. Flood damage. Separations. Repartnering. Tree changes. Cleaning out dead relatives’ homes. Downsizing and empty nesting. Upsizing and building granny flats for elderly parents. A lot is happening to you.

15. Noticing of change in the air

    So, you start a Substack newsletter?

16. Fondness for the witching hour (twilight)

    And its golden light, which is your most becoming light in photographs, by the way.

And, you thought this was perimenopause.

Advice they provide if the thinning of the Veil is becoming unmanageable for you:

1. Carry grounding stones

   Why not? You already carry a lot with you.

2. Clean your space, use some smudging sticks, and take ritual baths

   It can’t hurt. Particularly, a good clean up. No judgement, but the cleanup might be necessary before the bath can be ritually bathed in.

3. Honor the dead – important, since the bad experiences might be on account of spirits trying to reach through the Veil.

   I don’t know what is more middle aged than suddenly having a photo of a particularly loved, dead grandparent (or other long dead relative) in your home when you didn’t before. But if that is not also an altar, I don’t know what is one.

4. Experience this without numbing yourself to it.

   Explains the rise in micro dosing? Was numbing yourself so bad?

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Witches

Witches in the zeitgeist.

Witches and the dark world beneath.

Witches and resistance.

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On Young Women with Old Souls

Nikki Glaser: Leave them alone.

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Moving At This Pace

The cat asks to be let outside and then asks to be let back in and then outside, again. My husband groans. “The cat is obsessed with telling people off”.

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He told me he'd dreamt of homesickness. In the dream he cried and cried.

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I dreamed we took her to Italy with us. She moped behind us. We suggested she explore some of the side streets - and she brightened up. I returned to the table to order our meal.

When I went to see how she was getting on I found she was not in the street. She was walking through the sea in her clothes. Her dress intermittently dragging and fanning out behind her. The Italians staring at her from the beach.

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All evening I felt uneasy around her, though I like her very much and she was being affectionate to me. We were celebrating her achievements.

Sometime that night she told about a strange, localised storm that had struck her property. How it had pulled a shed from its concrete base and flung it across one of her fences. She had emerged shocked but unscathed to call for her dogs and horses. You have summoned something, I wanted to warn her.

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I keep scheming of ways to reach her down there. I still want to pull her up and out.

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After this, after all this, what pieces of my mothering identity remain?

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All that year, I want to be shocked out of shock. 

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My friend reminded me she had once run away from home to go to ‘schoolies’. Her parents were so angry that she hadn’t known if she was going to be able to return home. But still, she had had no regrets. The unstoppable spirit of adolescence, my husband noted.

It’s true, you have to admire that kind of recklessness.

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Sustained change, my husband warns me. Wait for sustained change. He catches me faltering. He catches me having too much hope.

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I've been meaning to tell you, she said. Your daughter spoke so beautifully about you the other night. About your relationship and how sweet you are. I hope my daughter feels the same about me when she's a teenager.

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My son ordering and drinking a cup of tea on the plane, reminding me that there are still little moments of perfection and innocence around me. 

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It was deeply patriarchal, what had nearly destroyed her and I. But it was men who materialised all around us to help. How strange to find men there.

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I wrote a spell into a letter but I hear you read it instead.

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The Unknowability of Your Parents

I saw The Eternal Daughter recently and loved it. Old-fashioned gothic? Divine. Highly recommended.

I adore Joanna Hogg’s whole memoir trilogy. (This wonderful interview with Hogg and one of the leads, Honor Swinton Byrne¹ is a great read!) Of the three films, I probably love The Souvenir most. If you ever need to see, with your own eyes, what it looks like when you ask so little of a man, then this is it. And then, The Souvenir Part II is her contending with that experience of denial.

(“Mummy, why are you still smoking? What does Daddy feel about it?”

“Daddy pretends he doesn’t know anything about it”.

“That’s one of my favourite qualities about him”.

“Yes, like a truly loving person”).

Finally, The Eternal Daughter is about one of my current favourite topics - our parents/ancestors as our ghosts. How we are continually revisiting and reframing our old memories and so, in that way, they act differently upon us each time. (Described so well by Sarah Polley in my newsletter, here).

But also, the film is about the ultimate unknowability of our parents. Something, the daughter struggles with accepting, though notably she is not a mother, herself, and so perhaps has not had to ‘let go’ in quite this way, as one does in the process of raising a child to adulthood.

“I just want you to be happy, I’m trying all the time,” she says to her mother. (It is not called ‘The Eternal Daughter’ for nothing).

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And Do Use the Couch for Your Feet

Hogg’s films are also a study in English wealth. (Oh, the sweetness - and privilege - of the dogs coming everywhere with them). This poem by John Betjeman, How to Get on in Society, is similarly rich with little observations of wealth. It’s a kind of structure I love - snippets that fill out a page.

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Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

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I Did All the Jobs on My List

Here’s another of those types of poems I love. This time, The Orange by Wendy Cope.

—

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I got a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

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Love or Duty

Who knew we still had the capacity to get so angry about duty? It’s an important quality, but in this age of celebrated detachment .. so odd.. this response to Prince Harry’s book. It seems to be operating as a kind of exercise in mass projection. I have mixed feelings about his book, but I always find it sad to see someone being misunderstood on such a scale, and as Antonella Gambotto-Burke notes:

His anger is not frivolous. Like William, Harry had a childhood that was contextualised by fear. With the overwhelming privilege of royalty, necessary - and incessant - paranoia, agoraphobia, terrors. Armed bodyguards have been a constant in his life.

He has never been without an electronic tracker and panic alarm: the understanding that the act of existence, in itself, places him and those he loves in danger, something few in their analyses of this family, have considered.

Sustained threat on this level can only ever desensitise or destabilise.

Gambotto-Burke’s piece is in The Weekend Australian.

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Dogshit

A nice bit of storytelling here at The Real Sarah Miller.

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And There Goes the Hat

Boxing Day walk².

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Prioritise Not Being Busy

You “tend to think that in some unspecified future, we’ll have a ‘time surplus..”.

- Dr Bob Waldinger, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of a study on happiness³.

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Someone for Your Teenage Son to Idolise

Pierre Fleury.

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Speaking of Your Teenage Son

If your son insists on following male thought influencers who aren’t quite as feminist and handsome as Fleury, then, better Scott Galloway than Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. I like this. And while he’s a lot more libertarian and cross-fit than I tend to lean, but I don’t hate his messages to young men.

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Waiting in Their Room for Them to Fall Asleep

The 15 most agonisingly boring moments of parenthood in The Daily Mash.

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Whatever

“I’ve got so many issues, but as you get older you go: “Whatever.” The curse of being young is you take your complex too seriously. Or you take your opinion of yourself too seriously. As soon as you’re a bit older, you tell the demons to shut up because they’re boring”.

- Helena Bonham-Carter

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Everything Around You

Perhaps what I mean is that, passing through, it is easy to see only what catches your attention. But when you know this is a place in which you are to live you must continually assess yourself in relation to everything around you. Further, you must test these readings against essential questions like: how does this make me feel, could I live in this place for a whole year and what might my participation in this community feel like? Who might I become?

This lovely post from Rick Morton’s newsletter, Nervous Laughter.

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Homesickness

Many years ago, when I was in analysis, my therapist used to say, “Love is homesickness.” What she meant was that you tend to fall in love with someone who reminds you of one of your parents. This, of course, is one of those things that analysts always say, even though it isn’t really true. Just about anyone on the planet is capable of reminding you of something about one of your parents, even if it’s only a dimple. But I don’t mean to digress. The point I want to make is that love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is definitely love.

My apartment in the Apthorp was really the only space that my children and I had ever lived in together. Since the day we moved in, we had never locked the door. It was the place where Max got his head stuck in a cake pan and Jacob learned to tie his shoelaces. My husband, Nick, and I were married there, in front of the nonworking living-room fireplace. It was a symbol of family. It was an emblem of the moment in my life when my luck changed. It was part of my identity—or, at least, part of my wishful thinking about my identity. Because it was on the unfashionable West Side, just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy. Because it was a rental, it made me feel unpretentious. Because it was shabby, it made me feel chic. In short, it was home in a profound, probably narcissistic, and, I suspect, all too typical way, and it seemed to me that no place on earth would ever feel the same.

Great piece, but of course because it is by Nora Ephron in The New Yorker. “Moving On, a Love Story”.

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Housing Policy Has Failed in Australia. In Truth, It Hurts Us All and We Could Fix It

We are a service economy in Australia, which means we need people being able to live together in communities and we need people and businesses being able to co-locate. Innovation and productivity benefits require affordable and available housing - simple as that.

This will mean the loss of some immediate advantages for homeowners, especially those with investment properties. (And not all those people came from generations of wealth - I get that). But the wealth being created for homeowners is the result of distortions in the economy that have also led to critical failures in housing availability and affordability. No one who owns a home is an island. Even if you ignore the unfairness of the situation for others, the impact of high housing costs on economic dynamism is going to cost us all.

This below from “The Great Australian Nightmare” by economist, Brendan Coates at the Grattan Institute is an excellent summary of what we need to do.

Let me blunt. I ask that you consider voting to support the following any chance you get, even when it is not to your immediate personal advantage:

• Increase renters’ rights

• Get rid of opportunities for bad landlords (particularly the ability to preference short term leases - and mum and dad investors make terrible landlords)

• Remove negative gearing

• Land taxes over stamp duty (allows people to leave houses more easily when they need to downsize)

• Inheritance tax (sorry, but intergenerational wealth transfer is destroying us)

• Vacant property taxes (but tighten up on AirBnB options)

• Re-design land use rules

• More medium density housing in the inner-city and middle ring (but with tighter rules around design)

• Planning laws that allow more growth in housing stock, but also, let’s never allow another major low-income, urban housing development to be built again that doesn’t include green space and community art for its residents! For fucksake.

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I’ll Give It Another Year

“When I look down in the mirror, my neck isn’t exactly what it used to be. I figure that maybe I should do something about it, but then it’s a slippery slope. Once you start on the neck you’ve got to pick up the jowls and… I’m not sure. I think I’ll give it another year and see how I feel, which is what I’ve been saying for years now! [Laughs]. Having been through a few non-elective surgeries, I hate the feeling, and I don’t like the idea of the knife – I like the country life better. I smile a lot and everyone goes, “Oh, she has such a friendly face!””

- Angelica Huston

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It is Very Important to Go Out Alone

“It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree - not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself - and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’ song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed”.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

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Finally

Happy New Year from me. This is me.. and my husband.

1. Daughter of Tilda Swinton. Also, did I tell you about how I have a friend exactly like Tilda? Looks and sounds like her!

2. I love this thing where people lovingly mimic their parents on reels. Adorable.

3. Strong relationships, more than wealth, intelligence or social class predict a fulfilled life.