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My friend and I are en route to the UK for two weeks of travel together. The pressure in our heads builds as our flight descends, and the children around me start to cry. On the screen before me the Wizard of Oz and his team have been proven powerless and dishonorable. In retaliation, they shower the citizens of Oz with propaganda that green-skinned Elphaba is evil.

Wicked.

Breaking away from the men who try to hold her down, Elphaba rises into the western sky, her broomstick, integrity and power intact. For the first time since her story began, she is defying gravity.

And it occurs to me that witches are just strong women with a PR problem.

—

My mind tracks back to long, long ago in a faraway place and a very different adventure.

I’d traveled on a lark to the rural woods of Wisconsin with a car full of friends. For $45 I booked a half hour reading with a psychic living and working at Camp Wonewoc.

Sitting before her, I quickly realize she knows things. She knows I feel my grandmother near me; that I am her namesake. She knows I have a bleeding breast I’ve been ignoring for too long after inconclusive biopsies: “It’s not cancer, but it needs to be taken care of.” I scrawl ten pages of notes on lined pink paper as she speaks.

She tells me my head and hands are surrounded by bright green light; that I am a natural healer, a gift passed on to me by women in my family and perhaps a remnant of a past life. She tells me that I may choose to take the path of a healer or not. It is, she says, always a choice.

Afterward I see my friend, The Manifestress, her face white as chalk. I have no doubt mine is too.

—

A woman lives three lives. The first she lives for the approval of her guardians. The second she lives for the wellbeing of those in her care, her family. And the third she lives for herself.

I’ve come to this conclusion after watching the trajectory of the lives of women around me. Not all of us live all three lives of course, and sometimes they run their courses concurrently. A woman might serve as caretaker of her parents, her spouse and her children all at once, or she might not have a family of her own, thus moving directly from first life to third life. Should she have no parents or guardians in childhood to speak of, and no family of her own, she might only have the life she lives for herself. But this is rarely the case. More often than not, the bulk of a woman’s life is lived in service and sacrifice for others. This can be viewed as a blessing, or a hex, or both.

To see it unfold time and again is to see the true strength and power and wisdom of women. She must first take the daunting journey into womanhood, then transform into wife and mother if she chooses, then seamlessly move into the role of caregiver for her partner or parents or both. And when those chapters have reached their conclusions, she is deposited into her third life, the denouement, where she is left to figure out exactly who she is beyond those previous incarnations, within or intentionally without the expectations of those around her. To this point she has set aside her own needs and desires and put herself last for so long it can be difficult if not impossible to answer the question, “What do I want to do with my life?” It is a confounding quest. But in her third life a woman at last becomes her most magical and powerful self. This chapter of wisdom and power is frequently diminished by those who call her a crone or hag when she is in fact a matriarch, a queen and a goddess.

My whole life I’ve been surrounded by women more powerful than the world is comfortable acknowledging. The higher she rises, the more she defies the gravity humankind places upon her, the more she is despised.

Maybe that’s why we pretend we aren’t magic.

—

My travel companion is a pagan. In her second life she accompanied her true love to the threshold of the spirit world, then paved the way for others to walk that path with their partners more easily. Like most women she does not know her own power and moves through the world as a normal human, but I can see it. She is a curandera. The Bruja.

She is now in her third life. And in this chapter of her third life she has chosen to travel with me to Scotland, Wales and London.

We are riding in a mist-cloaked coach along the lochs and glens of the Scottish Highlands. Rainbows appear throughout the countryside, often in pairs, a fairytale. Hundreds of waterfalls spill over the hills at Glencoe, The Weeping Glen. And we are transfixed, spellbound by the scenes before us.

Our guide Keith tells us the legends and folktales and heartbreaking true-life stories of these mystical lands. The shapeshifting kelpies immortalized along the M9 motorway, a legend meant to dissuade children from getting too close to the water. The Glencoe massacre in 1692, the emotional wounds still fresh, still running like waterfalls. He touches on the history of witch trials: while 200 were accused in Salem, Massachusetts, 2,500 were executed in Scotland.

He encourages us to keep watch for stags as we drive through The Highlands, male Scottish Red Deer who can be spotted during mating season in autumn.

It is my father’s birthday. He’s been gone eleven years but I still feel him. Sometimes I hear him. To be honest, I feel “my deads” as I call them, rather frequently, especially as the veil thins in autumn. Sometimes I think I feel other people’s deads too. I tell no one this for fear they’ll label me occult; not everyone is comfortable shaking hands with things they cannot explain. For me and The Bruja, it is just daily reality: an ever-present fog in the enchanting journey of life.

As our coach rolls past the grey chop of Loch Tulla and the emerald spash of Glen Orchy, our guide plays “Still,” a Beluga Lagoon song over the sound system.

“Now my oars have fallen,
my final breath I draw in
I slip away and low and behold
There’s nothing living behind the old door.”

The song drills straight my soul and I cannot breathe. I cannot explain it, I just know. Dad will apparate as a stag today. I gently rest my hand on The Bruja’s arm, and she can see my eyes are scanning the countryside of loss.

“Can you see?” She moves back ever so slightly to free my view of the loch through the raindrop-speckled window. But she knows as do I, we are among those who see clearly.

We stop in Highland towns charming as folktale villages and I buy a blue tartan scarf for my husband. He won’t have a use for it in the scorch of Arizona, but The Bruja and I both know he will need it. His heart longs for the cold as fervently as mine aches for the sun. He has set his intention: “There’s no place like home,” and she and I can feel the movement. The next stop is manifestation.

Our coach nears Fort Augustus and a green field stretched before us fills with Scottish Red Deer. The herd shapeshifts as we pass, females transforming into a dozen stags with majestic racks of ten, twelve, fourteen points, too many to count. I know they will be gone from view before I can take a photo, so I just sit in the stillness and receive the gift, mouth agape, tears coursing down my cheeks.

The Bruja and I dip our hands into Loch Ness, marveling at the mystical tone of this journey for two women who came of age in small town Minnesota. We know Nessie isn’t here, but we embrace the magic of possibility and scan the lake’s watery mirror. She never shows, so I snap photos of a single mallard in the loch with a rainbow behind him, which frankly seems even more magical than a supersized serpent.

We walk in the dreich toward the town center and slip into The Lock Inn, a pub as cozy as a fable. From a corner table we clink our glasses of Highland whisky, and toast my father’s happily ever after.

On the return trip, the stags are gone.

—

From our rooms at the Pont-y-Pair Inn in Betws-y-Coed, Wales, The Bruja and I can hear the rushing river and see the historic Pont-y-Pair bridge, which means “Bridge of the Cauldron.”

This information delights us and we take selfies on the bridge, the cauldron our backdrop. Our friends back home will love these photos; they quietly refer to themselves as The Coven, words only spoken within our circle. While the witch trials are said to be ancient history, modern-day witch trials are concealed under different names. The word witch is hardly assigned to women anymore; today’s narrative simply swaps out the first letter to steal her power.

Another member of The Coven, The Manifestress, inspired me to create a vision board 16 years ago to which I glued the intention, “It’s time to travel the world.” The vision board had been spookily effective; to be honest, sometimes our power scares us too. Back then I’d only been to a handful of countries, and Wales is the unfathomable manifestation of travel to 60 countries for me. The Bruja and I pop a bottle of our chosen potion to celebrate the moment: convenience store cava.

As we reach the bottom of the bottle, my husband’s intention (“There’s no place like home.”) manifests. He’s presented a professional quest so promising it feels unreal, too auspicious to turn down. He answers the call back to the place of his story’s origin.

I toss in bed that night with my window wide open and I spin as one does when the path we intend to take differs from the path we are meant to take. My head drowns in the rapids of change, “double, double, toil and trouble.” I cannot sleep; I can only listen to the cauldron bubbling outside.

It is not my dream, and I know that I could use my powers to cast this away. Alas, I am only in my second life. It is too soon to know whether this change is a blessing or a curse, but I surrender to the spell.

—

I believe in magic. Not the scary spells of folktales, the hideous hags with warty noses who place hexes and wreak havoc. I believe in magic because of my mother.

In her second life she used her powers for good: creating four lives and with the power of love, transforming our childhood of scarcity into riches far greater than any financial sum. We felt safe and loved and supported and empowered in ways gold treasure could never ensure. She exercised great power at the cauldron–a kitchen witch–stretching humble ingredients like a pound of hamburger into a feast for six every night, transforming potatoes into a salve that soothes the soul. I still remember the taste of a devil’s food cake she topped with real whipped cream and fresh raspberries picked from the backyard bushes. Her hot bread poultice sucked out the poison of countless ouches, her touch healed a congested chest and the many mysterious bloody noses and broken hearts I suffered. These simple spells that women cast every day would have been enough to have her condemned for witchcraft historically, but her magic was even more powerful than that.

As Samhain approached, she created costumes, casting spells upon scraps of fabric and paper so that I could feel what it was like to be a princess–and I always wanted to be a princess. Her divination was her art, her potions: paints, and she created beauty on the walls and canvases of our childhood. Even today she never stops creating and learning, always seeking knowledge, valuing wisdom. In the face of any challenge she is fiercely optimistic, a rare gift even among those with superpowers and one with which she has helped change my perspective for the better. She is the most generous person I know, a power she never speaks aloud and often practices in secret. In her second life she accompanied her parents to the threshold of the spirit world. She walked the same path alongside her husband, then carried him as his power waned. And now she is in her third life, watching as the children she created, her grandchildren, and her single great granddaughter grow into their own power.

She might not consider herself a witch, and yet the evidence is overwhelming. If there is any magic in me, it came from her.

—

There’s a storm brewing in Betws-y-Coed and the forecast calls for torrential rain. But The Bruja and I are intrepid travelers: water does not make us melt. So we fearlessly don our rain parkas and board the Sherpa bus to the top of Mount Snowdon, Yr Wyddfa, the highest peak in all of Wales. We are the only passengers as we splash through puddles and swerve around the winding road to the sky, steep drop offs to our left and a sinister fog concealing the mountains.

The driver prompts us to jump off at the Pen y Pass stop. We disembark and snap photos, scaring a regal Welsh Mountain Goat with giant arching horns off the trail. He looks wise and magical and turns his dark eyes upon us as if we are diabolical before he disappears into the mist.

We realize too late we are at the wrong stop. We ask the woman in the gift shop for guidance; she is small and smiling and goes by the whimsical name Lliwen, after a sweet white lily. The bus may or may not come, she explains, either quickly or later, or not at all. It may go up the mountain or down or to another village where a man wrongly shot his dog and mourns the creature, haunted by this evil twist of fate for all eternity. We inquire about hot soup to warm our pruny fingers, and she tells us there used to be a restaurant but now there is none but sometimes the parking attendant brings her a tea and she brings him a pie. But there is no sign of tea and no sign of pie, and we cannot discern what is truth and what is a lie. Her advice is a riddle we cannot decode. And so we wait for an eon in the tiny gift shop listening to her stories of people getting stuck on the mountain or leaving their loved ones here, and still no bus appears. Lliwen suggests there may be flooding at the base of Mount Snowdon, it has happened before, she adds ominously.

We know we must abandon our mission on the mountain. The rain falls harder and the time ticks by and we realize with growing horror that we could wait for all eternity. But we have a train to catch the next day, the final leg of our journey, and we cannot spend the night or the rest of our lives on the mountain. The Bruja tries to call a taxi, but the calls break up or don’t go through at all or the person who answers is speaking in tongues. I click my ruby slippers to order an Uber but the app cannot find a single driver.

We resort to the time-honored tradition of hitchhiking: standing in the rain, our plastic parkas flying like fine ball gowns, our thumbs extended into the ether. Few cars drive by as the hours pass. Not one stops. Two other desperate hitchhikers appear, hoping the wizard will help them. Their umbrellas fill with wind and pop inside out.

I suggest we should hike the 12 miles of winding road down the mountain to our inn, but The Bruja’s crystal ball predicts peril. Our desperation peaks; our powers have reached their limits and we can taste the bitterness of our demise.

Then The Bruja sees him. He is tall and handsome, cloaked in royal blue, with silver hair and crystalline cobalt eyes like Prince Charming.

And The Bruja does what every ingénue must on the rare occasion she needs a bit of help to save herself. She shapeshifts into a damsel in distress, her lips plump and pouting, her eyes wide and sparkling, her hair long and golden, weaving poems on the wind. She is in her third life, and at her most powerful.

His smile is so bright it clears the clouds. And we are saved.

---

Once upon a time, I feared witches. But the magic of travel and life is that they give us the power to reshape our beliefs. Now older and wiser I can see there are countless reasons women are miscast as wicked, and there are many wizards hiding behind the curtains who know exactly how to put on a show to sway public opinion against us. This is fact, not fairytale. It isn’t just Glinda who is good.

Nearly every woman I’ve known (aside from the rare hags I’d like to banish with a bucket of water) is a benevolent being who aims to use her substantial, undeniable powers for good. A woman is the ultimate shapeshifter throughout her story as she helps others achieve their happily ever afters. In her three lives, she celebrates and suffers a thousand psychological births, deaths and reincarnations. She is a Dreamer. Enchantress. Incubator. Intuitive. Creator. Empath. Intellectual and social laborer. Homemaker. Healer. Changemaker. Diviner. Matriarch. Sorceress. We live in a world where we are often told women are wicked, weak and powerless, and sometimes it’s easier to believe that’s true. But when I look around at the women I know….when I look at my sisters of every background and color and country and culture, all I see are warriors.

It is a crisp fall morning as The Bruja and I walk toward the London Underground Pimlico Station to begin our journey home. I loop my arm through hers. We’ve traveled many roads together through countless incarnations of womanhood, some of them yellow brick roads, others rockier. This trip has been especially charmed.

Unprompted, she starts to sing, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

And I can’t help but smile. Because in the end, we saved ourselves. The curtain is drawn back and the wizard has been exposed as dishonorable, while the propaganda that claims we’re wicked is losing its grip. The coven of womankind is reaching her third incarnation. And I know The Bruja and I and all the wonderful witches of the world, whether we know the true breadth of our power or not, are on our way to defying gravity.

And we all have the power to fly.

Blessed Be.

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