Heather Stewart Poetry

I’ve been making my way down the road of the witch or bruja lately. It started with a desire to connect with nature and the thought that the people who do it best are not my people. I started off reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is definitely an expert in connecting with nature and doing it in a way that isn’t sterile or too scientific. She seems to connect with it, not just learn about it. I wanted that, but I couldn’t do it her way. It doesn’t belong to me. It wouldn’t feel right to try.

Not only could I never catch up to her breadth of knowledge, but I don’t live in her climate and I don’t have her heritage. She does mention the concept of becoming indigenous to place in her book and has a bit of a map on how to do that. That was the road I wanted to get on to connect with nature, which led me here.

Well, it had been my son’s idea to move near New Orleans, but it was New Orleans that reminded me of the witch. I’m also Hispanic and though a bruja is technically a witch, there is a cultural difference that lends to some other differences as well. I’m just here in the middle, a little European, a little Hispanic, completely the kind of person who always wanted to live by the ocean or through the woods, down a path where no one goes and few know about it.

I began searching books on witches and brujas, looking for how I can connect with nature, for how my ancestors did, and how I can have a symbiotic relationship with the place where I live, to become indigenous to place by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s definition.

That path has me trying some things out. I’m tinkering, crafting, working on growing tomatoes, basil, mint, citrus, and other foods I know I’ll consume or that is helpful to other life here. I look out for my pond and the little creatures I see around my home. Life is starting to look like the garden witch of some fairy tales, surrounded by animals and plants that I talk to, making little concoctions to relieve the ailments, caring for and feeding every living creature in my surroundings. I love that part of it.

So I search for the witch and the bruja in my heritage, those who understand how to make magic out of ordinary things. I search for them in the same place I’ve found everything else that was inside of me.

I search in my craft, through writing. I’ll share what I find.