Episodes
Together with Asha Frost, Christopher Marmolejo, AND Granddaughter Crow we discuss the cultivation and embodiment of Radical Hope, Liberation, Self-Determination and Collective Healing, and acknowledge that it's good to fail at empire. We spin the wool of connection and weave a multi-coloured tapestry of possibility, and in doing so, this conversation becomes a blanket of comfort and protection over the seven generations ahead and behind. Asha Frost is a mentor and mama, a Medicine Woman...
Published 05/16/24
This week, as the moon begins to return from behind its monthly shadow rest, we're feeling into our creaky, leaky, magical old bodies. Do you struggle to be in your body? To feel it all? Us too, but from within our individual experiences of pain and pleasure we can root into deeper empathy and weave stronger circles of care. So here we go. Risa brings the rain on the lake, the image of each drop sending out its circle to resonate and concatenate with all the others. She's calling up the...
Published 05/13/24
We come to you this week buoyed by love! We've launched our annual Reparations Season and it's such a joy to feel our community together, reaching out with love to return resources to indigenous communities and - this year - to extend our embrace to displaced people in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, Ukraine and beyond. We invite you to check out our Reparations Fundraiser and all the delicious prizes! Consider making a donation, or sharing the project wherever you can. And listen, no...
Published 05/06/24
All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads - toads belong to the frog family, but just like humans, frogs come in all different varieties. One of the most noticeable differences between frogs and toads is their skin. But they are still family. Can you sense where I’m going with this? Skin colour, and in our amphibian friends’ case also skin texture, sets these creatures apart from one another, but they are still family. And we witches can think of frogs when racism rears its ugly...
Published 05/02/24
Join Risa and Amy as we sit down once again with two of our favourite returning guests and future-crafters: artists Edgar Fabián Frías + Amanda Amour Lynx!
Published 05/01/24
Risa came to this week weepy, and Amy came with a song that pleads to an archetype of love and compassion to wipe our tears. Amy brings a song from 'Shankar Family and Friends', an album that George Harrison (the Beatle who was a follower of Hinduism) produced with songs written and performed by famed sitar player Ravi Shankar and his family. The song is I Am Missing You, a song that is a plea to Krishna the Hindu god of protection, compassion, tenderness and love. I am missing you, oh...
Published 04/29/24
Last year Copco 2 came down, the first of 4 dams along the Klamath river that will all be removed by October 2024 in the largest dam removal project in history.  Breathe in and then let out a breath that comes pushing past the things you’ve been holding in. We are undammed river kin. 
Published 04/25/24
This week the truth is coming out, water is breaching the banks, and little kid puke is everywhere. How's your April going? (Hit reply and let us know.) Risa comes to this week reallll short on sleep after a week with a sick kid up nights. In a delirium, she shares this meditation from cognitive hypnotherapist Andrew Johnson to help drop down into a lunar place, a resourced place, a source place: Meet Your Guide. For best effects, follow with a shot of Willie Nelson and his son crooning to...
Published 04/22/24
We are Witches. We are deer kin, and we make our homes in a place called The Edge. Deer live on the boundaries, the borderlands, making a home for themselves in the places between worlds - the spaces between the wilderness and the man-made. It’s the habitat known as the edge where farms meet the forest and backyards meet the backwoods. What happens, Witches, when we take the fence down? When we look at our world from the vantage point of the deer’s path? What happens when we take down...
Published 04/18/24
In this week's prescription we've got The Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, and Boygenius in our ears. The solar eclipse in Aries this past week called out to our warrior selves, and the call is still echoing. Take some time to listen to the warriors present in your own cells: the warriors of immunity and white blood cells and repair, the warrior who battles the cruel lies of the anxious mind, the warrior who gathers people on the street to look up at the sky in awe, the warrior who gets the f**k...
Published 04/15/24
Welcome back to the spring season of the Missing Witches podcast, our Kinship Season, which is dedicated to getting familiar with our familiars. This is where we take time to learn from our more than human kin. In the fall we’ll do a season dedicated to people stories again - our classic Missing Witches stories - and throughout the summer we’ll have Witches Found Interviews and episodes of the Rx, our list of people and of songs and other media to learn from about craft and magic and...
Published 04/11/24
A Black woman artist holds the top spots on country music charts and planetary bodies are coming into perfect alignment. Portals do open and things will change. After a week in the car listening to Beyonce's requiem for America, it's the song Just for Fun which sits in Risa's heart this week and offers its medicine. "'Cause time heals everything I don't need anything Hallelujah I pray to her I pray to her" You know those times when you try to do something good — like ready your garden for...
Published 04/08/24
I am a creature of the night.  The bible says I’m unclean.  I’ve been painted as evil because I’m special in ways that people could not understand.  I fly in the dark, defying the laws of what men know. Mysterious, villainous, enigmatic, suspicious, monstrous, and full of secrets. Misunderstood, yet integral to the workings of our world. I am a witch and I am bat kin. A group of bats is sometimes called a cauldron, so let’s gather in or around a cauldron and look for what we have in common,...
Published 04/04/24
This week we are listening to plants and synthesizers. And we are calling back our power. One self-prescription for this season is to luxuriate in fruit. Let yourself be seduced by colour, generous sweetness, and the way fruit makes itself desirable and delicious so that animals will seek it out and spread its seeds. Ease your beloved bones on a velvet chaise lounge (or similar) and feed yourself grapes, berries, persimmons... dare to eat a peach! Know that you are tending to your wisest...
Published 04/01/24
We want to thank Tasha Lavdovsky for allowing us to share their music in this episode, the lichens of the Sooke Hills Wilderness Park are the source of the chemical dataset that has been translated into piano music for the project, "Music for Lichens", created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Published 03/28/24
For the first day of Spring, we invite you to listen in on a meeting of the Missing Witches Coven, and maybe make some art!! How does art-making figure into your practice of the Craft?  Do you make wreaths like Bri, or trap spirits in gelatin like Jess?  Do you draw? Paint? Knit? Decorate cookies?  Do you love the undo option of digital art or a no-turning-back splash of red paint across a canvas? What role does making art or loving art play in our activism, our mental health, our identity or...
Published 03/19/24
This week we're inspred by Toth, The Indigo Girls, The Beatles and Fugazi. "I wanna be happy for no reason / Like the sun rising exactly / In every season / You've been here before‚ you opened the door / You walked straight on through, there's nothing to do / And nothing is wrong if nothing is right / We're happy now and, yes, we practice magic." "I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind." And when Fugazi sang "I'm not sticking around" what they meant and what they did was...
Published 03/18/24
"Christopher Marmolejo is a queer Indigenous teacher committed to radical community healing and building. They bring traditional teaching experience as an English teacher, intensive study as an astrologer, and their personal articulation of the tarot archetypes to their classes, workshops, and consultations as they seek to liberate through critical pedagogy and transgressive truth-telling. Marmolejo has facilitated emotional wellness programs with the Center for Community Action and...
Published 03/14/24
This week Amy offers the end of war, and the way war doesn't end for those who lived it, and the image of the Witch's castle as the place we can all come to find some meaning in the senseless and to find the medicine of care. It's a return to Funkadelic, and we invite you to join us in the March to the Witch's Castle. Risa's prescription begins with the art-Satanist lovers behind the delightful, demonic doo-wop of Twin Temple. Put this one on and imagine you are in a beautiful old theatre,...
Published 03/11/24
This week, the magic begins with the lost-but-found 70's psych rock album by Ted Lucas, recorded sometime after Motown left Detroit and he lost his job as the house 'exotic string specialist'. Lucas, who had studied with Ravi Shankar and recorded with the Temptations and The Supremes, took a multi-track recorder up to his attic and made a layered sound that feels like a premonition, now, of where weird folk would go. And let's get Spiritualized. Maybe you're crafting a liberatory magic from...
Published 03/04/24
"We are creative beings." In today's episode, Amy sits down for a reunion with one of our first ever interviewees from season ONE of the Missing Witches podcast, Anikim Lamoureux! We're getting back together, five and a half years later, to catch up and talk about the role that our bodies and voices can take in our quest for inner peace and sacred knowledge. Anikim joins us from the Sacred Valley in Peru to talk about her work in Voix Libre (Free Voice). From singing to speaking your...
Published 02/29/24
We left the woods, we went to the city, we spoke to a McGill University sociology class on social deviance about witchcraft and witch hunts, and we lugged ourselves across town till we collapsed. Amy's chronic illness took her out when we got back home, and so her prescription starts with drag artists Yvie Oddly and Willow Pill telling the truth about being all out of spoons in their hilarious and poignant song Sick Bitch. Risa got a dose of heavy kid magic this week. There's something...
Published 02/26/24
This week left us feeling so lonely, so confused by the world, dropped to the bottom of the pit of WTF. So we turn to Backxwash, CSNY and Swamp Dogg. We can't stop caring: we feel like we owe it to someone. The world can feel overrun with bad choice egregores that make no living sense, but out here in the woods and out there in the swamps, we see the lies. And we have to know that the unfolding goes on, and we are not alone. We quote our coven mate Deb: "The future told me, “We live now in...
Published 02/19/24
For this special episode, we invite you to begin by pausing the podcast to join us in premiering Witch Hunt: " In a divided America, modern witches cast spells against political leaders, redefining protest in the process."Witch Hunt" explores the intersection of politics, spirituality, and activism, spotlighting creative resistance in our digital age. It's a call to understand diverse expressions of frustration and the strength of community." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk1l5d3zyEA...
Published 02/16/24
This week the prescription is to follow bright stars, trace threads of hope to see where they lead, leave our egos at the door, and bring flowers to the feet of our crone singers, our comrades, sweethearts. Let's look at life from both sides, from win and lose, turn the tables and whisper our revolutions into the bright stars. https://www.missingwitches.com/rx-we-have-sung-in-tongues-of-angels-and-then-stumbled-on-the-pavement/
Published 02/12/24