Let it cook

Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is nothing

Hello from the airport cafe, where I am camped out for a few hours until our son’s flight is officially in the air. I love airports, the liminal spaces they create, and the way time hovers here. It gives me a glorious opportunity to do nothing, which of course means I’m making the most of it to do a little something.

Witches, it has been a bit.

The past few months have put me through the wringer, and I have been so deep in my own head about some situations that it was hard to see anything beyond the moment. When my anxiety is screaming, I overthink everything, and it becomes a minute by minute battle of hyper analysis and impulsive action to just try to make it stop. That action comes in several forms, the most obvious being my urge to explain, to check in, to push, to prod, to explain again, in a frantic dance of wild over functioning. It’s the desperate pilot pulling all the levers at once to try and right the ship. There is no time for reflection & consideration, just a five alarm fire & zero chill.

Shockingly, this rarely makes anything better, frequently fans the flames higher, and sucks me deeper into the spiral of panic & shame.

Fortunately, I have some amazing people in my orbit who have managed to make themselves heard over my internal cacophony, and their calming presences the past few weeks have helped me to step back from the shorting-out control board enough to break that cycle of misery. The damage has been done, but I’m not adding to it anymore, which feels like a fucking triumph.

But the underlying situation still stands, as does the desire to fix it. Sitting in discomfort is, I know, an important skill, but when undercurrents of upset, blame, & power imbalance were an integral part of childhood, bearing that tension can be physically awful and mentally overwhelming. Little Me(tm) wants nothing more than to say the right thing that will make it all better so that no one is mad or disappointed and I don’t have this weight on my chest anymore. I have poured out a torrent of words in recent weeks in search of that magical combination, only for them to waterlog something already frayed & floundering.

So I did what every cell in my body was screaming against. I set down one last intent, and took my hands off the wheel. I stopped. I let go.

Sometimes, the very thing we should be doing is nothing. Sometimes, we need to let a situation, a relationship, a spell or a working drift for a while, to cool off, to ferment, to cook a little without our hands in the pot.

The very definition of witchcraft implies and embodies action; we’re here to effect change, subtly or overtly, of one kind or another, and it’s easy to fall into the belief that we need to be doing witchcraft in order for us to be deserving of the title. And I think there’s definitely a time & place for getting in it up to our elbows and flexing that muscle. But sometimes it’s really easy to just jam our foot on the witchy gas every time we have the urge to initiate change, and lose sight of the subtler ways transformation can happen.

So much of this, witchy or mundane, rests on our ability to set an intention without locking ourselves to how and/or if it materializes. There are certainly moments to drill down & get specific, but I think it’s a flavor of hubris for us to think that we always know exactly how things should go in order for them to turn out the best for us. Sometimes what we think is the clear and obvious path isn’t the one that will actually get us where we need to be. And sometimes the thing we wanted isn’t what we thought it was at all.

I’ve been letting my situation cook unattended for a while, and sitting with all the feelings that this inaction kicks up in my body. Part of my process during my years in therapy was to write out what was in my head in the moment, uncoupled from any sense of what I was going to do about it, and that practice has been immeasurably helpful in this season. Early on, I was the sail untethered, flapping wildly in every direction as all of my emotions came howling across the waves. My only rule was that I could not act on anything that I felt about the situation; I could feel anything I wanted, but direct action was absolutely off the table. This was observation & documentation only.

Was it excruciating? Oh god yes. There were times when it felt physically impossible to not reengage. I had a few moments of bargaining with myself: I could write it all out in my Notes app, but I couldn’t actually send it until the next day, if I still wanted to by then (spoiler: I never wanted to).

But after those first few days in the maelstrom, the magic slowly began to happen. I started having moments of heady, clear-eyed calmness, like a gull sailing high above the roiling sea. I’d frequently plummet right back into the water, into that awful and familiar tight-chested panic, and I don’t want to sugar coat things at this stage; it still fucking sucks the wind out of me sometimes, this inaction, and the old shame of not doing enough, not being enough still whispers on the wind. Every day is a little better, though, and as I cycle through my emotions, they sting a bit less, heal a bit more.

Meanwhile, a strange alchemy has begun to act on the object & outcome that’s been my focus this season. Freed of the myopia of my anxiety & in-the-moment interference, I am starting to see it from a wider vantage point, one that isn’t locked into my need for it to be or resolve any particular way. Like the hidden image posters of my youth, by easing my gaze and letting go a bit, I’m starting to see the true shape of things; not what I want them to be, but what they really are, layered and complicated and deeply human.

I’m still in it, witches; this situation has kicked up a nest of old, deep triggers that will take some time to settle, and I am trying to be very gentle and patient with myself. This particular kind of pain is a familiar ghost, and it’s so easy to imagine that the work I’ve done over the years means I could dance with this iteration unscathed. But the lingering spasm in my chest tells me otherwise, and so I am letting this specter slip loose from my fingers for a while. It may shift, it may transform, or it may boil away in the sunlight. I have done enough for now. It’s time to sit, to wait, to see.

Radical rest has been on our minds lately at the Critical Thinking Witch Collective, and I’m delighted to announce CRITWITCHCON2026:

In 2026 our overarching theme for CRITWITCHCON is “Fallow and Feral: Active Paths of Rest.” We’re talking at length this year about the importance of rest in trying times, ways to incorporate fallowness into the cycles of our practices, disconnecting productivity from worth, and straying off the path to find meaning in the messy, unstructured places outside of the lines.

If you’ve never attended CRITWITCHCON, here’s what to expect:

3 days of live (& occasionally recorded) virtual content presented from a wide variety of perspectives, centering around secular, nontheistic, agnostic, atheist, skeptical, analytical, and science-minded witchcraft.

Tickets will go on sale soon, so save the dates:

September 4-6, 2026