Vermont Witchcamp 2024
Paths and Teachers Announcement
Dear Vermont WitchCamp Community;
We are excited to announce the following Paths and Teachers for:
Rekindling Community as, from the Ashes, the Pheonix Rises,
Through Music, Song and Story
with Taica Patience and Leigh Seeleman
Once upon a time, very long ago right now, the people rekindled their long-missed and beloved community, which had laid these five years past as a small ember in the ashes. Like the phoenix, they rose once again to circle and sing and tell stories together as they always have…. Come, may we rise again together.
We come together once again around the hearth fires, allowing our connection to Earth, Spirit, and each other to flow through us as we play, listen, and create. Joining together to express our souls and rebirth ourselves from the ashes, with music, song, and story, we will strengthen the threads, rekindling our beloved community. Since the days of old, music has brought people together in sacred circles of joy, grieving, magic-making, and celebration. Sacred music is for every one of us, from complete beginners to seasoned musicians - there are no wrong notes, harmony is anything your neighbor isn’t singing. Our focus will not be performance, but rather soul expression and the allowing of spirit to express in song and story through us, to bless and be blessed. This will be a healing space for all including those with past musical wounds. We invite you to join us with your voices and instruments!
Pixie Path
with co-teachers Rosemary Moser and Madrone Phoenix
Each day Rosemary and Madrone will lead the children on an exploration of our themes of the Myth of the Phoenix and Being in Community through story, song, and creativity. Rosemary and Madrone will use stories as the foundations for diverse, creative experiences that engage the children in embodied learning. They see Pixie Path as an opportunity to bring the Elements of Magic to a developmentally appropriate level for young children to begin to grasp concepts and foundations of how we practice the Craft. Their hope is that this helps them to feel a more integral part of our community and practice as they grow. Rosemary and Madrone look forward to the opportunity to bring Pixies into community rituals with creativity and joy. We might sing, perform a skit, tell a story, share visual art, prepare food… Our participation will be inspired by what is happening both within our Path and within the greater camp community.
Rites of Passage: From Ashes to Embers
with Marrow Nocturne and Glimmer
There are moments in our lives that are essential to our evolution-- that are pivotal-- so pivotal that we often emerge on the other side feeling changed. Sometimes they're so intense that we emerge completely transformed, body and soul. We know something inside, some part of us, has died, and made room for something new. These transformative moments demand our attention; and if we ignore their call, it only makes the process more destructive. These moments are an initiation, ones that we must guide ourselves through in order to ensure our own growth. But when we take the time to honor these experiences we, like the Phoenix, arise transformed, and reborn, into a brand new way of being.
Maybe you already know what that feels like. Perhaps you've felt the call of Change and have struggled with how to answer. Or maybe you've felt yourself crumbling, bit by bit, knowing your current state no longer serves you, yet mired in the terror of not knowing what will be left in its wake. If so, "Rites of Passage: From Ashes to Embers" is for you.
In this path we face ourselves as we are, honor what we must release, and explore where we are going-- knowing we can't go back. We will take time to honor what no longer serves us, and learn to become the midwives of what is birthed in its place. Through the use of many methods (including but not limited to: trance, dream magic, story, song, medicinal self-expression, elemental magic, journaling, movement, ritual energetics, and meditation, etc.) we will make sacred whatever initiation you may be facing, and share the skills to manage future moments of transformation.
Should you join us on this path, you will have both the opportunity to magically engage with your current transition, and build the skills that will allow you to initiate yourself through future moments of pivotal change. You will be able to craft your own rites of Passage. We ask that those who attend this path have a solid grounding in Reclaiming Ritual, Tools and Traditions. You should have taken the core class, Elements of Magic, or have equivalent life experience. We also ask that folks who join us have good self-care skills, and approach this work with a sense of curiosity and adventure.
If you're struggling with big changes in your life, this path is for you. If you want to learn to honor and grieve the pieces of you that no longer serve, this path is for you. And if you're looking for ways to create more space in your life for Joy, Authenticity, and Magic, then this path is most definitely for you.
Join us! We can't wait to see you rise from the ashes, and ignite.
Elements of Magic: How to Make Magic as a Community
with Zay Eleanor Watersong and Spark
Embodied. Inspired. Ecstatic. Improvisational. Ensemble. Organic. What makes Reclaiming magic special? Why does it work so well for large groups? Guided by the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit we will practice the skills that grow us from solitary practitioners (for whether we’ve wanted it to be that way or not, we’ve all been doing a lot of solitary magic in the past few years) to ritual priestesses (this is a gender-neutral term) holding small or large roles. This path is the foundation to leveling up to the other Reclaiming core courses, great for first time campers but also for those wanting to dust off the cobwebs, get back to basics, and rekindle and feed the energy of transformational magic.
Elements has been a constant in the Reclaiming Tradition for over 40 years and yet, like the Tradition, continues to ever evolve. We offer our thanks to all the teachers in the lineage, especially our beloved Rose May Dance who, now among the Mighty Dead of the Craft, continues to influence with her mischief and magic through her legacy of the first syllabus.
If you have never been to camp before this is the path for you.
Bios
Taica:
I had a quasi-nomadic upbringing with a mostly single mother, peppered with difficulty and dusted with magic. My life has been colored by the lens of living in the liminal spaces between race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, physical ability, neuro variance, and culture. I have lived a life of using experiences, boldly cracking them open like an egg, to seek the gold hidden within as nourishment for healing and growth on the journey of a modern-day mystic. I have been a Life Coach, Spiritual Guide, Healer, Ordained New Thought Minister, and Artist. In them all, my deep intent is to call in growth, healing, connection, and ultimately Joy. I live a joyful yet rooted life of deep meaning in nature; pulling back the layers to reveal the utter beauty and real magic of being alive.
Leigh:
I am devoted to mystery, the wild beings of this beautiful earth, liberation, and social & environmental justice. My magical focus includes dream magic, plant magic, thresholds & guiding, divination, trance journeying & nature as a mirror to the soul. My path has been guided primarily by direct experience in the wild and open-hearted conversation with the land.
Zay Eleanor Watersong (she/they):
Zay is a Reclaiming witch deeply rooted in the wilds and waters of the Northeast. They love the magic of green and growing things and of people lending their energies together to create change in the world, from activism to radical magic. They have been facilitating Reclaiming Tradition rituals since 2003 and teaching the core courses since 2006, and practicing that magic to support their work in the muggle world in their intentional community and career as a water, indigenous rights, and green energy community organizer. Zay is delighted to be coming home to the spirits of place at VWC to rekindle this magic and share and practice the core skills of the tradition. She believes Reclaiming’s strength as a tradition is in the deep embodied and ecstatic magic we create together.
Glimmer (she/her/they):
Glimmer’s home camp is Winter Witchcamp. Her ancestors came to Minnesota a little over 100 years ago, hopeful settlers, on a ship. And, also, her ancestors came from Africa, on ships filled with pain, suffering and horrible grief. Glimmer’s magic is rooted in connection to both of these branches of ancestry. She honors everyday the survival, hope, and resilience of these ancestors. Along with connection to ancestors, Glimmer’s magic flows from connections to the natural world, her sacred body, erotic aliveness, and the elements of life. As a child, she first became acquainted with the unseen world and her connection to plant and animal allies. Glimmer works with energy and flow, in ecstatic ritual and in collaboration with others. She loves to play and is a student of Yang style Tai Chi Ch’uan and energy healing. Having attended her first Reclaiming Witchcamp in 2007, she has been organizing, teaching and attending witchcamp ever since.
Land Acknowledgement: I live in a place where glaciers receded 13,000 years ago, when people whose names I do not know first began to call this land home. I feel the spirit of those glaciers everywhere on this land, and the people too if I listen and pay attention, especially when I am close to the waters of this place. In recent history, as of 1000 years ago, we know that the Dakota people lived here, and then the Anishinaabe people moved here around 300 years ago after their original homelands were taken over by white settlers.
Rosemary Moser:
Rosemary has been living as both a witch and an early educator for four decades. Her teaching is infused with the magic of story and the cycles of life, and inspires creativity and discovery of the natural world and its mysteries. Rosemary is blessed to live in a small, wonderful community in southwestern Vermont surrounded by gardens of wild and cultivated edibles, medicinals, and florals.
VWC is an experience and a community that I have been passionate about for nearly 3 decades, and has been an integral part of the development of how I view the world and envision community. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help welcome us back to the land where we have done Magic together for so many years by welcoming the young children who will be new to our community, infusing our work with their joy, creativity, and playfulness.
Madrone Phoenix (she/they):
I am a queer-identified, multiethnic, Licensed Clinical Social Worker with advanced training in trauma (C.G.S. in Trauma Studies, Level II EMDR, Level I IFS, and Level 1 AEDP), including training in child and adolescent trauma. I am the founder of a mental health social enterprise called the Phoenix Rising Centers, a national mental health collective aimed at providing inclusive and outstanding clinical services to LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPoC communities across the US. I am certified in kundalini yoga, am an avid gardener and lover of all things wild.
I have been involved with reclaiming since 2005, when I attended my first Vermont witch camp! I have attended several throughout the US since and love Starhawk work (hence my chosen name is Madrone!). In my spare time, I offer pro bono forensic evaluations to asylum seekers with Physicians for Human Rights, create native wildflower gardens for pollinators, and practice meditation within the Soto Japanese Zen Buddhism lineage. I am a proud parent of two little ones and remain committed and active in doing my own work to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma from being passed down to the next generation.
Marrow Nocturne:
A musician, sex worker alumni, make-up artist, feminist, and mother, I am an anarchist witch based in New York, and walking many disparate paths. It is here, in the between, the liminal places that delineate an edge, that I believe the most potent magic lies. Medusa is my patron deity, and I am a devotee of fireside chats, the brilliance of carnivals, the silence of cemeteries, the cool clarity of starlight and the nuance of cognitive dissonance. A ritualist practicing and teaching in the Reclaiming tradition, I am most drawn to work that forces us to examine our most jagged edges. Where there’s fear, there’s power.
Favorite topics include: sacred sound and medicinal self-expression, personal and cultural shadow work, Mono No Aware*, sex work, and the juxtaposition of science and spirituality. Those interested can read more about my sex work and activism at my blog, Body of Indulgence.
*Mono No Aware: Japanese concept describing an appreciation for the impermanence of all things.
Spark:
Spark is a Reclaiming Witch from Ontario, Canada. He/They has apprenticed in the Feri and Morningstar Traditions (Ontario and California) as well as with Reclaiming Teachers in Training and Service (New Hampshire). Spark has been attending Vermont Witchcamp since 2008, and has co-facilitated a variety of paths in the past, including Elements, Sacred Sex Magic and others, and has been a ritual fire-tender since 2011.
