The ancestors sometimes send me signs in dramatic ways. For instance, when they wanted me to go see The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum, they made sure I heard about it thrice in 24 hours. This, after I'd planned a visit to the museum to attend a talk by an Egyptologist that I was finally not able to attend!

There was a reason the ancestors wanted me to visit the installation. I needed to meet the ocean of memories circulating between, connecting us, contained within the radiating center of our yonis. I was filled with awe and reverence for Chicago's own reverence and adoration for these ancestresses, amazons, leaders, creatrixes from her western civilization. I realized she/they were pointing a way for me—a trail that had, with hard work and sustained love, been opened. I've set out, too, to reclaim the sea of female lineages in South Asia. My walk is my own, but these images in the collective waters of memory feed me.

Then there was the time when—moonbathing by a glinting, silvered ocean—I felt myself in complete alignment with Nature. I felt myself alive in an immense, intelligent, loving cosmos—right there with Yemaya. I let the ocean submerse my womb. Then we walked towards the embers of a dying fire on the beach: two witches gleaming in this new time, time of possibility. And an ember leapt into a small fire. The ancestors came alive for us and warmed us.​

Like in the book, Uprooted—which I first thought was about a wizard named Dragon—the story really turns out to be that of the witch learning to find her way amidst the brambles, in the forest. It does not serve her to follow rigid instructions detailing "proper" magic. She teaches the wizard how to work together, she reminds him that he can collaborate with the more "feminine" ways that are messier, synchronistic, guided, intuitive—and bring about a shift that is somehow more in touch with the whole.

There is always a way. It may take faith. It may take cunning. It nearly always takes the help of our benevolent, protective ancestors—and our own faith in ourselves when we don't hear them responding well to get us to call out to them to do their job. It takes wisdom. Wisdom is the wheel of the goddess, always turning, always in rhythm.

​Of course, finding the story(ies) of the witch, the mother(s), motherlines is just the beginning. The task of changing inner and outer structures (and flows) begins now. That we may live as the highest and most fully expressed embodiment of the values of justice, nurturing, healing, self-sovereignty, and love. She would say, I want that.