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![]() ![]() Herbalist Jess Turner, founder of Olamina Botanicals in Brooklyn, reported her highest-ever sales numbers of plant-based tonics, salves, and formulas in the first quarter of 2021. Practitioners, who tend to be small-scale and hyper-local, can’t keep up with the demand for goods, services, and information. A search on Amazon for “witchcraft books” released within the past 90 days yields more than 2,000 results. On TikTok, #witchtok returns 20.5 billion views. There are now nearly eight million #witchesofinstagram posts. As the pandemic raged on, I was open to trying new practices that might help me cope. It was more about slowing down and noticing the natural world, especially the shifts that happen over the course of a day, a month, or a season. But the way Rousseau presented witchcraft didn’t seem to require engaging with anything paranormal-or even a belief in a higher power. The tagline on Rousseau’s elegant website appealed to me: “Earth-based wisdom, embodied practice, & everyday magic.” I have zero experience with the occult, unless you count having my fortune read at a local fair as a teenager growing up in Ohio. I’d discarded the Catholicism of my youth long ago, and while I’d read books on Buddhism and gleaned some helpful practices from yoga classes and mindfulness apps like Headspace, I didn’t have anything solid enough to stand up to the uncertainty of a long-term global pandemic. Spirituality-or my lack thereof-was heavy on my mind. Meanwhile, Canada’s infection rates were starting to climb again in a deadly second wave. But that trip, along with all of my travel-writing assignments for the year, was a casualty of COVID-19. When I registered for the program in the fall of 2020, I was supposed to have been bikepacking across the outback of South Australia. But the course has also encouraged me to reconsider my relationship with nature, both in how I regard and move through it. As a recreational mountain athlete, what I’m learning overlaps surprisingly with many of the ways I already relate to the outdoors. I’m currently enrolled in her 12-month online course “The Witches Year,” an introduction for anyone curious about incorporating elements of witchcraft into their daily lives. That’s the way my teacher, Natalie Rousseau, a 45-year-old hedge witch-a woman who practices outside the confines of Wicca or other pagan religions-from Pemberton, British Columbia, describes it. I’m talking about real-life, modern-day witches: people who study nature, its cycles, and the way it influences our lives in order to generate positive changes in ourselves and in the world. Not the kind of unfortunate soul that Christian zealots executed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the pointy-hat-wearing, spell-casting witch from fairy tales and movies. Except that I was doing it as a ritual, as a fledgling witch. In many ways, my walk was no different than any walk I’d taken on a chilly day in the mountains. And I walked in silence, because I was alone, and because I wanted to move in step with the stillness of my environment. I noticed the iridescent quality of the waning light. I breathed in the icy air, wiggling my ungloved fingers in my pockets to keep them warm. I observed the snow, light and fluffy from a fresh storm cycle. She immediately promises to help bring the mostly abandoned village back to life, an impulsive decision that seems more like it's based on distaste for academia than any kind of emotional bond with these characters she just met.On December 30, 2020, the date of the Cold Moon, I took a late afternoon walk through the cedar forest at the edge of my neighborhood in Nelson, British Columbia. Why is Ellie looking up recipes and such? After arriving at the village, Ellie decides that she wants to stay at the witch's house to complete her apprenticeship rather than go to school. Little Witch in the Woods lacks that motive. ![]() In many of these games, marriage is an end goal alongside the success of the farm. Harvest Moon and similar games break up the progression of gathering recipes, growing crops, and exploring dungeons with charming conversations. "I forgot," he replies.Ĭharacters really do feel like a missing ingredient here. ![]() Many of them have bland dialogues too, like the local dragon who is also a chef. Most of them seem purely functional, like a bartender who exist to suggest Ellie goes to the village and a fox cub who is there to get stuck in a spiderweb. It's a slow start, partly because of the characters. That's the best Little Witch in the Woods has to offer right now, though. ![]()
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