mattered more than my own and that his happiness mattered more than my own.

And part of the reason I continue to tell this story is because he was really, really adamantly atheist in the way that only a former Christian turned atheist can be atheist, I think.

And so while I was with him, There was no room for any kind of exploration of magic, of spirituality, of meaning beyond the like really tangible here and now.

We can measure this with like science, which of course science has come a long way since that time.

But that was a really big turning point for me when I finally said, actually, I am going to put myself first.

I am going to choose to leave this place.

And within a few weeks of stepping out of that, the confines of that marriage, first tarot deck.

yeah it's it's love that credit where credit's like just name the source name the inspiration of the of your thought idea and then let it spread and let yours inspire someone else that's very beautiful and i i do feel like we'll come back to the decolonizing part is also part of the the witch conversation because i think they interplay in a lot of ways so if people aren't Before we read the witch definition, if people aren't as familiar with decolonizing work, do you have a few lines or a few sentences, thoughts you want to share there around what that meant for you or what that looked like?

Yeah, I'd love to share.

It was a winding path.

Yeah.

So I guess it starts, I mean, where does it start? It starts in childhood, but we'll start from when I was a midwife because that's kind of where my entry into this place of supporting women started was when I trained to be a midwife and I fell in love with walking with women through life.

Some of the most transformative moments that a woman can experience through carrying a child, childbirth, the postpartum period, whether it's a first or a fourth, it doesn't really change the... magnitude of that experience at that event and it was such an honor to be able to connect with women to walk with them to empower them to trust their bodies I think that was maybe my favorite part of the work was that ability to take so often a woman who was in fear of birth and the experience and what it was going to mean, because that's how our society programs us.

We have a lot of birth fear in this culture and medicalization of things that are just normal processes.

And to be able to help those women understand their body, understand the process, trust the process, listen to their bodies, Yeah, it still makes me tingle when I think of the women who went from being like, I need a C-section scheduled and all the way to I'm going to have a home birth.

standing in our office with