My great-grandmother's name was One. AHH-nee. My dad told me she wore a coin bracelet that clinked when she walked. You could hear her coming from down the block.

I thought it was just jewelry.

Now I know it was a ward. A spell. A signal. She lived in New Orleans, walked with spirits, and knew things without being told. But her magic stayed tucked into domesticity. Never spoken of. Never passed down.

Her daughter, my Granny, was different too. Sensitive. Spirit-touched. But in her world there were no names for gifts like that, only pills. She was diagnosed with panic attacks, given Valium, and taught to fear everything she felt.

I could still sense it in her. Underneath the fear, under the tremble in her voice. She had it. She just never got to use it.

The gift moved through my father too, an ordained Baptist preacher of all things. He doesn't claim to be psychic but he calls when I'm thinking of him. Once, when I was thirteen and wanted desperately to leave somewhere I shouldn't have been, he just showed up. "I don't know," he said. "I just felt like you needed me."

Yeah. It moves through him.

And now it moves through me.

But I'm not hiding it. I'm not medicating it. I'm not praying it away.

I'm the first in my line to speak the unspeakable. To be witchy on purpose. To take what they were forced to silence and turn it into something sacred.

 

The Church Didn't Make Me Spiritual

I grew up in a Focus on the Family household. The James Dobson kind, where discipline meant obedience and respect meant silence. Pride was a sin. Wanting was selfish. Magic was dangerous, especially in the hands of a woman.

So I kept my knowing to myself. A good church girl by day, a quiet mystic who spoke to angels and other beings standing by her bed by night.

Then I converted to Catholicism. Three kids under eight, a lace veil, a diaper bag, and a rosary in my hand. I looked like the perfect devout mother.

What nobody knew was that I wasn't there for theology. I was there for protection. My husband was a drug-addicted abuser and I thought if I prayed hard enough, confessed enough, obeyed enough, God would save us.

What I didn't realize at the time was that I was already doing magic. Those whispered prayers were spells. The candles and incense were rituals. My love of mysticism wasn't about dogma. It was a breadcrumb trail back to the witch I'd always been.

Eventually I walked away. From the church. From the abuse. From the belief that suffering made me holy.

But I didn't leave empty-handed. I took the sacred with me. The fire. The knowing. The rituals that now belong to me.

The church didn't make me spiritual. It reminded me I always was.

 

What Life Looks Like Now

I don't wake up to an alarm. I wake up when my body says it's time.

I ease into the morning on my deck, mushroom coffee in hand, listening to the woods wake up. Then I get the kids started on their schoolwork and ask my soul what we're doing today. Sometimes it's YWM. Sometimes it's knitting on the couch while Outlander runs in the background. Sometimes it's the community garden, the library, or managing my dog's anxiety alongside a kid's anxiety alongside HOA paperwork nobody asked for but somebody has to do.

What I have now that I didn't before is hard to put in one word. Peace comes closest. But it's a specific kind of peace. The kind that comes from not having to run anything by anyone. From buying what I want without bracing for consequences. From sleeping in a bed nobody violated. From cooking whatever I feel like without someone making it weird.

There's no angry man in this house. No predator hiding in plain sight. No performance required.

Sovereignty, for me, isn't a concept. It's waking up and doing whatever I want with my one life. It's the most ordinary magic I know.

 

What I Do Now

I make spell jars.

Four of them, depending on your need: money, love, family, and career. Corked glass, salt, herbs from my garden, a crystal, a candle, and matches. I make them by hand at my kitchen table in small batches, each batch on a day picked for what it's for, and I ship them charged with a petition slip and the entire ritual. You write what you want on the petition slip, light the candle, seal it with the was, and place it in your home.

The women who buy these are usually a lot like me. Left a church or a marriage or a family that ran on obedience. Did the therapy. Can name every pattern they've got. And there's still one thing the body hasn't caught up on, no matter how well the mind understands it.

You don't need me to know what it is, you already know. You need something to do with your hands that says "this...I want this." Out loud, in a jar, on the windowsill.

That's the whole thing. I make it, you cast it.

Pick a jar or start with the free Grimoire if you want to try a spell before you buy one.