Written by I was born in South Africa. From Portuguse and Dutch descent.
I mention this sometimes and it lands differently depending on who I’m talking to. For most people it’s an interesting biographical detail. For me it’s a significant magical fact, in the sense that everything about how I came to practice, what I practice, and what I’m drawn to has been shaped by the experience of being from one place and living in another. By the particular kind of attention that displacement teaches.
When you grow up in a place and never leave it, the land is simply the land. It doesn’t require noticing because it’s always been there. You are native to it in a way that goes below consciousness. You know its rhythms and its character without ever having learned them because you absorbed them before you had language for them.
When you are not from a place, you have to learn it consciously. You have to develop a relationship with it through deliberate attention, through time, through the slow accumulation of knowing that becomes, eventually, something like belonging. But it never becomes the same as the belonging you didn’t have to earn.
This has made me a better practitioner than I might otherwise have been, and a lonelier one than I might otherwise have been, and I think those two things are related.
The lonelier thing first: there is a particular kind of rootlessness that comes from having left. Not the exciting rootlessness of the adventurer, though there’s some of that too, but the quieter, more persistent sense of being between places. Of being genuinely from somewhere that you no longer live in, and not yet truly from somewhere you’ve arrived at. Colorado was that for a long time. Washington is beginning to be that, more slowly, more genuinely than any place in between has been.
The better-practitioner thing: displacement teaches you to read. When you can’t take the land for granted, you pay attention to it. You notice when it shifts. You notice what it says. You develop the kind of relationship with non-human place that I think is actually only possible when you haven’t assumed it as background your whole life.
I notice Washington. I notice it the way you notice a person you are beginning to know. With that quality of specific attention that familiarity eventually replaces but that in the early stages produces real seeing.
Something I’ve been sitting with since the move: the question of where your magical roots are when your roots are split across continents.
My ancestral line runs through South Africa, which means it runs through the particular charged history of that place. Through both the indigenous traditions of the land and the colonial history that shaped my family’s presence there. Working with ancestors for me is complicated by this in ways that working with ancestors is not complicated for people whose lineage is straightforwardly rooted in one tradition and one place.
I don’t have easy answers to this. What I have is the practice of honest attention, to what I carry, to what the land I’m on carries, to the question of how to be in genuine relationship with the non-human world in a place I am still earning.
That question is live for me. I’m in it. I don’t have a resolved position to offer.
What I do know is that magic, for me, is inseparable from place. And changing place changes the practice in ways that only become clear over time.