Grandmothers who love moss and birdsongs and gardens: wondering and weaving Quaker and Witchy lineages
My grandmother loved moss.
We would go on long walks together (well, long for a 9 year old), and look at the lichen and moss on oak trees in Sonoma County together with great delight. Upon a magnificent vista, a special clearing, or a Great Old Tree, she would raise both her hands to the natural world with delight, praise, and, I would now say, acknowledgement of the power and Presence before her. Upon hearing a bird in the forest, her eyes would twinkle at me before she tilted her head, then whistle its song back to it. She seemed to know all the birds songs and would whistle the bird songs back to them. She was a great whistler: she had even been a whistler in a band when she was at University.
She sometimes joked that it was attending University that turned her into a Quaker. She had entered UC Berkeley, the first person from her family to attend such a prestigious school, eager to take Mandarin language classes so she could become a Christian missionary to China. Then she took a class on Biblical history, learned that the Bible was not entirely literally true, and had a major crisis of faith. Somewhere in there she met my grandfather, himself a budding conscientious objector, and happily became a Quaker. At some point, she and her young family moved to Los Gatos hills, near the “Valley of hearts delight” before it became Silicon Valley, where she taught second grade and lived next to Hidden Villa Farm, run by another Quaker couple, Josephine and Frank Duveneck. Together, along with several other strong women and their immensely capable husbands, they founded Palo Alto Friends Meeting and, subsequently, College Park Quarterly Meeting, and played a role in what would become Ben Lomond Quaker Center. We could say they were important Quakers in the early history of northern California Quakerdom.
I have far, far more memories of our time in nature together than at Quaker Meeting.
In her, I see complex lineages: Quaker, Christian (two complex overlapping lineages in and of themselves) and this earth-orientated way of being that has within it many ways of expression.
Her hands were so often in the earth
Thirty years later, I can almost still smell the freshness of the soap she used to wash her hands after her many hours tending tulips and other blooms in her garden, which was always (always!)beautiful. It was she who first named my gifts for somatic healing (it turned out that many of her granddaughters had this gift). And it was she who, when the doctors said my grandfather had just six months to live, refused their prognosis. She turned to “alternative” healing therapies — from changing his diet to brain gym to magnets to changing narratives to massages to stress reduction to — well I don’t really know for sure, but there were a lot of things, and whatever she did, it worked, because he lived for at least 25 years longer than he was “supposed” to.
She had all these kinds of gifts: with healing, with food-as-medicine, with plants, with teaching, with music, with sensing patterns and building community and befriending strangers and cultivating powerful visions of the future.
I don’t think she would have ever used the term “witchy” or “animist” to describe herself. She was raised to become a missionary, afterall. She certainly would have labelled herself a Christian, could easily quote the psalms, and appreciated hymns. In the world she grew up in, “Christian” could not overlap with anything “witchy” or anything remotely “pagan.”
“Pagan” has come to be defined (by Christiandom) as “not Christian.” So it is not surprising that she had something of a strong dichotomy attached to them.
This dichotomy is not, I think, one that is inherent in the truth of a tradition that seeks to nurture the Inward Light.
If Quakers Were Witches…
I sometimes wonder what she would think about me offering the retreats and initiatives on, “If Quakers were Witches….” that I have recently started offering.
The phrase came to me several years ago — a play on the poem, “If Wishes were horses.” It’s an invitation to enter into a kind of poetic and even mytho-poetic play — with lineages, with definitions, with boundary lines, with experiences that don’t stay within defined boundaries, with ritual and chanting and circle casting and praying and worshipping and myths and legends and seeing our own histories differently — with that which lies betwixt and between.
Would my grandmother have recognized aspects of herself amidst the people who gathered together at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in 2024 when we offered our first workshop on the theme, “If Quakers were Witches….?” Perhaps.
I hope she would have stayed long enough to sit in the redwood circle with us, around the fire, under the full moon, in silence. How powerful that night was. For me, one of the most powerful parts of the workshop was how potent were our Meetings for Worship. “Covered meeting” doesn’t quite describe it but it, but it was close.
Often, during our worship during that precious retreat, it was as if the silence itself was pregnant. Pregnant with what? Dare I say Love?
In-corporating some decolonial queries into these curiosities about definitions and traditions
My grandmother also never discussed indigenous peoples. Or rather, only in a vague way: indigenous peoples were “wise”, and I had the sense of her admiration of them for their closeness to nature, but they were also far away. Maybe even as far away as China.
For me, two generations later, I can’t imagine loving this beautiful, generous land without asking questions about who was here before I was; about the original caretakers of this land — who they were, what they did, why they are not here now, and where are they now?
She was wrong: indigenous peoples of California continue to live, and many of them are revitalizing their cultureways. I doubt that she knew that the Pomo Indians still lived in Santa Rosa area, where she died. In the last few decades, many have been engaging in returning to their homeland.
In 1987, the Lytton Rancheria tribe filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government for wrongfully destroying their Rancheria. In 1991 a federal court concluded in “Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians of the Sugar Bowl Rancheria v. United States of America” No. C‐86‐3660 (N.D.Cal. March 22, 1991), that the termination of the Lytton Rancheria was indeed unlawful, and Lytton’s federally recognized tribal status was restored by court order. Since 2000, the tribe has been returning to the region, from buying homes to vineyards, which they have sought to manage in a sustainable way, to starting Education Centers and been finding ways to support children and fire-safety efforts in the region, tending to peoples and lands that are not only their own. It’s a remarkable story. I like to think my grandmother would have found it as inspiring as I do.
Certainly in my own life, it would take me a long time (in retrospect) to learn how to answer those questions, but the more connections I find, the more I am able to sink into the earth-human connection that is my birthright as a daughter of Earth, while also continually learning what it is to be with people who are not like me.
I have put much of my own professional energy into tracing the histories of climate change into the Doctrine of Discovery, and working on what it means to both understand and untangle from those histories. I don’t know if I have any right to be part of the bigger conversations about “rematriation” without participating in these critical historical and contemporary re-narrations. As my friends at Land Justice Futures (where I sit on their theological council for the Motherhouse Starter Series) say, you can’t get to the cool stuff about Mother Law without also engaging in #complicitnomore.
Can any earth-loving spiritual/religious practice do its work without also engaging in some form of decolonization? Not if it wants to go deeper than the concrete our society has put on top of so much fertile soil. Not if it wants to engage with the Peace that is in these lands and waters and which is possible to find within and between all beings.
Quakers are amongst those people being, well, quaked by Spirit to live and create a different set of relationships. With land. With the people of the land. With our own animism. With deep questions about what is Peace. Here, on this land: a land that has a long, long history of ways of Peace before Europeans arrived. Many of those Ways are still here.
Many of us settler folks tend to miss it. Including some witchy/pagan/animist folks who are co-creating rituals that they intend to be earth-honoring and to bring them into greater alignment. I am unaware of ANY non-native religious community that is not struggling with questions around decolonization, just as I am unaware of any religious community that is not struggling with how to be sustainable/regenerative in a non-sustainable and non-regenerative global economy. I appreciate the initiatives where these two threads — decolonization and regeneration/sustainability are historically and contemporalily linked. It remains too rare, and increasingly important. Not only for questions of historical accuracy.
But for that core spiritual question: how do we find peace?
I’ve been on a decolonial road for many years, and am only just beginning to feel this deeper Presence of Peace that is here.
I come from a tradition that used to gather — and sometimes still gathers — to sit in silence under trees. I like to think that this eco-spiritual connection and its inherent understanding of peace can help me hear and recognize the Peace that come from other peoples. But history does not always bear that out, so I need to be cautious and not over-assume my own capacity for understanding.
But looking at my grandmother, I see a woman who knew that singing me birdsongs was as important as hymns.
Weaving lineages
I often feel within myself multiple lineages.
I have witchy/earth-orientated and animist lineages, mostly from Europe.
I have a Quaker lineage, and, within that, a long Christian lineage — also substantial because before the Wolcotts (originally from England) were Quakers they were various forms of Protestants, including Puritans.
On my mother’s Dutch side, I also have a lineage of grandfathers who were Masons — which is to say, a long line of people who practiced a lot of ritual and understood the importance of symbols.
So far as I can tell, in all of these lineages were various forms of oppressors. Various ways of mis-construing peace for war and personal material profit at the expense of others. And, most likely, in all of these lineages were people who did their best to find ways of being in peace — with themselves, with one another, and with Creation.
Part of that history of Christianity was the insistance of the separation between the True Faith and the knowings and rituals and teachings of those who lived close to the Earth, and who called (or did not call) the divine by many other names.
I know too much about religious history to claim that one faith will inherently yield better relationality than another faith. That’s just not true.
The more I dwell with the memories of my grandmother, who passed when I was a teenager, the more I see some of these same animating dynamics in her. I don’t recall how my grandmother gendered God, but I do recall her strong sense that its really not about what names we put on the Mystery. In practice, the ways that her earth-connection and her Quakerism and her Christianity were fluid. Maybe even interwoven. It was all a part of how she experienced Continuing Revelations.
I wonder for how many other people — Quakers, anabaptists, and many others — that experience of fluidness between a global religious tradition such as Christianity and animist and earth-centered spiritualities would be true.
And if we didn’t have such a strong sense of separation between Christianity and Paganism (as I alluded to, this is a separation that mattered far more to the Christians evangelizing Europe in the 700s than it did for the European Pagans at the time — you might find my podcast episode with Dr Carole Cusack on this topic of interest).
And if we can deepen into those earth-centered and animist spiritualities, how much can that bring us closer to traditional ecological knowledge and to the work of, as indigenous scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, becoming indigenous to our place?
She emphasizes that this entails living as if your children’s future matters, and taking care of the land as if your lives depend on it; learning to speak the “language” of the land and understanding its rhythms.
I’ve been working on some of the practices of that with calendar systems, what I refer to as circular time, as well as other dynamics.
The more I look at the fluidness within my grandmother’s practice, though not always reflected in her speech, I recognize ways that this work is part of continuing, as well as slightly shifting, the many lineages I have inherited.
Gatherings
I write this as I prepare for my next, If Quakers were Witches workshop, happening in the Berkshires this Beltane.
Even before this one began, a woman emailed me and said, ‘I have been following your work for quite some time. This retreat speaks to me as no other retreat or workshop has for quite some time. I can’t make these dates. Can you host another one?”
Let’s see what Spirit supports…. and yes of course, we can keep exploring these various intersections. Weavings and Cauldrons and Oceans. Ancestors and Future Beings and the Wyrd. Webs and singing to the Dawn. Silence and Presence and Song.
Perhaps you don’t know if you or your children will be able to have grandchildren. What blood-lineages we might be able to be passed down to future generations in our own families is not always clear to us.
But there are many forms of lineages, and many forms of ancestors, and we, weather we do or do not currently have children or grandchildren, can still be part of the big work of becoming good ancestors ourselves.
Which is also part of this continual need to gather: to have our spiritual and mystical expressions affirmed and strengthened and substantiated and furthered.
To gather, for Life keeps calling us forth: a people to be gathered.
Sara Jolena Wolcott, M.Div, lives alongside the River that Runs Both Ways, aka the Hudson River, in what is now New York, with her partner. She founded Sequoia Samanvaya and works with leaders seeking to tend to their knowings of the movements and callings of the Spirit in the midst of shape-shifting climates. Much of her work is concerned supporting/healing our relationship with time, from returning to cyclical temporal technologies to re-originating and remembering the story of climate change into the Doctrine of Discovery. She also hosts the ReMembering and ReEnchanting podcast. She is a “scattered Berry” member of Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting, who helped to raise her, along with a herd of horses.
