Chokae'

GRAM

The field is standing right now, grown to whatever height your year took it. Most walk right past it without ever stopping to read what actually came in.

40 Days of Fall runs from the autumn equinox into the warm center of the season. You gather what your year grew, you set down what you have carried too long, and you turn toward the rest the cold months are actually asking you to take.

Three phases. You gather, you release, you return. One tarot card a day, one candle, one honest page, and a group walking it beside you.

This is a real reset, the kind your body feels.

DM me the word FALL and I will send you everything.

Treat yourself to five minutes of chill.

At red lights, your thumb finds the phone before you even decide to look. Quiet shows up for half a second and something in you rushes to fill it with a scroll, a podcast, a snack you didn’t really want. That itch to reach for more, I feel it too, and I’ve spent years learning how to sit still inside it instead.

Light one candle. Give yourself five minutes where the only thing asking anything of you is a small flame. Watch the wick catch. Your breath drops low on its own. Shoulders slide down from where they’ve been living up near your ears. That jumpy creature behind your ribs finally believes nothing is chasing it, and the whole animal of you goes soft.

Repair lives here, in this small pocket of doing nothing on purpose. Rest loosens the grip of the day. Awake and alone and watching wax turn to light, you come back to being a person instead of a running list of everything left undone.

Five minutes. One candle. Staying is the only work.

love,
Papawitch

In this episode of Papawitch and Jade it’s August 1, 2020, and this old witch is making a Lammas Bread in a skillet while Jade attends up close with the patience of a cat near a can opener.
Lockdown Bali.
The dough is rising on the counter, one round is browning in the hot pan, and Jade has just torn into the first warm piece like it whispered something scandalous.

The wheel clicked over to Lughnasadh this week, the cross quarter point where summer quietly starts leaning toward fall. Way before it got the fancy name, this was the grain festival, when the first wheat came off the field and went straight into the season’s first loaf. People broke that bread and passed it around the table, thanking the dirt for coughing it up. That’s the whole spirit of the thing.

And this herbal harvest flatbread… Ridiculous. So dang tasty!

So make some bread this month. Any bread. A scrappy flatbread on the stove like this one absolutely counts. Rip off that first warm piece, taste it while it’s still steaming, and give a little nod to the ground and the fire that pulled off the whole trick. August is harvest season now. Go eat something you made.

Weather’s lying right to your face today. Long days, warm nights, the season struts around like it holds the deed. Truth is, the turn already happened. Dark’s walking back toward you as we speak. Folks who read that shift and ride it land a hell of a lot softer than the poor bastards caught flat-footed when fall boots the door open.

This is the season for honest math. Walk your own life and see it clean, the wins and the wreckage together. Gather what ripened. Sit with what rotted long enough to swallow the lesson it came to hand you. Haul both into the cold months coming.

Today: Point to one thing you fed all summer that’s standing there ready. Say it out loud and own it. Then look dead at the thing you let crumble, steady, eyes wide open, every excuse left at the door. Your life runs its own ledger while you look away.

Sharpest blade in the room belongs to you. Turn it on yourself first.

Love,
Papawitch

The dust holds the day’s heat long after the sun drops, and I feel it rise through my bare feet as I walk out. Crowdog’s Paradise, Rosebud, South Dakota. Four days of purification four days of the tree, the arbor, the singers who never tire, the dancers who go without water under a sky so big it rearranges what I thought I knew about scale… and at least four to come down.

This falls at the cross quarter, that hinge between the summer solstice and the fall equinox when the year turns its face toward harvest. The light is still generous, still warm on my skin, and already the chokecherries hang dark and heavy along the draws, ready for pounding into wasna. Sage and sweetgrass and prairie coneflower grow up through the grass where the old people have always gathered them. Cottonwoods line the water, their leaves turning silver when the wind moves through. Meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds call across the arbor all day, and three times now I have watched an eagle ride the high thermals, slow and certain, right over the ceremony ground.

I come to a place like this thinking I’m beginning to understand ceremony, and I leave understanding I am simply a guest at something older than my understanding or anyone else’s…

The six directions get named. The elements do their work, the way weather does. Reality… That is the whole point, and it takes a while to feel it settle in.
What stays with me is the ordinary miracle underneath all of it.

Air moving through cottonwood. That eagle holding its line against the blue. The quiet of people who have done a hard thing together and carry it lightly now. Gratitude that a tradition this deep keeps its shape, generation handing to generation, out here where the land insists I pay attention.

I ripen the same way the season does. The wild green rush of midsummer settles into something with more weight, and this is my moment to ask what in my own life is ready to be brought in.

Two weeks with the phone off. Turns out the world keeps its rhythm just fine, and so, mercifully, do I.

crossquarter lammas firstfruits chokecherries eagle gratitude sixdirections unplugged

You feel it and you know exactly what it is.

Pressure that’s been building since winter, sitting in your chest like something that paid rent and decided to stay. Moving through your days functional, presentable, getting things done. And underneath all of that, a hum. A restlessness following you into sleep.

Your body keeps score while your mind stays busy.

This time of year everything peaks. Light at maximum. Heat stacking up. The natural world running at full volume with zero apologies. You’re on that same current whether you’ve acknowledged it or you haven’t. All that unfinished business, those decisions rotating through your head since February, what you already know needs to move - this is when it stops waiting politely.

Most people respond by piling more on top. Staying busy enough to bury the signal.

The ones who actually shift something do the harder thing. Sitting with what they already know instead of outrunning it. Moving it with intention instead of getting dragged by it.

Today: Five minutes. Phone down. Sit with what’s been sitting with you. Let it surface fully. What comes up the moment you get quiet - that’s the work. You already knew that.

Ready to move it inside a real structure over a full cycle? Direct message me. The summer solstice reset is coming.

Love,
Papawitch

You’ve been rearranging the furniture in a burning house.

June 20. The solstice. That’s when it starts.

40 Days of Fire is a structured group reset built on 40 years of watching people make actual changes. Not inspiration. Not content. A real program with real work inside it.

You know what season you’re in. You know something needs to shift. This is the structure that makes the shift stick.

DM me.

Forty days. A container that actually holds. A group of people in it with you. Someone at the front who has been doing this for forty years.

$397. Link in bio. Or DM me

I pressed these seeds into damp paper myself not long ago, watched them split open in the dark, then carried their fragile little bodies into the soil with my own hands. i’m flooded with childhood memories. It’s personal

Damp soil under the fingernails changes a person.

Morning light hits these tiny green things and suddenly the whole machinery of existence feels wild again. A hard little seed cracks open underground, drinks water, reaches toward warmth, and pushes itself into the world carrying an ancient memory older than language.

Somewhere out there, people chase miracles across oceans, temples, gurus, algorithms, pharmaceuticals, podcasts, and self help empires while this absolute act of sorcery keeps happening quietly in a tiny paper shot glass full of dirt.

June carries that energy everywhere right now.

Humidity rising off the earth. Long evenings. Thick air. Roots gripping deeper. Life moving upward through every living thing that can still hear the season calling.

Summer Solstice arrives soon. My 40 Day Reset opens during that same current of heat and expansion, though honestly, these little seedlings already say the important part better than I ever could.

Look at ‘em
Who can stand such epic cuteness?

Tiny green mouths singing directly to the sun.

Love,
Papawitch

The link for the “40 Days Of Fire” reset
is in my bio or
just comment or direct message me the word “Fire”

This started as a note to a friend.

They asked me how to build a Samhain altar. I started writing. Then I kept writing. Then I kept writing some more… because forty years of practice has a lot to say once you get it started.

When I finally looked up, my friend said something like “…did you just write an e-book?”

Apparently I did.

So here it is.

My first.

A complete Samhain Ritual Altar Guide: materials, layout, invocations, divination, shadow work, ancestor connection, and a full 90-minute ritual… all in one place, designed for anyone who wants to honor this sacred cross-quarter time with intention and depth.

One thing worth saying: this is A way. Not THE way. It’s rooted in my tradition, my 40+ years of practice, and what genuinely works for me at this threshold time of year. Take what serves you. Adapt what doesn’t. Make it yours.

Whether Samhain is months away or freshly behind you, the work in this guide is timeless.

Love
Papawitch

Available now at papawitch.gumroad.com — screen edition and print edition both included.