season 3, episode 9 - finding ancestors with lex ritchie

our guest for episode 9 is lex ritchie! lex is a tarot reader, folk witch, spirit worker, and queer mystic. they are a guide through the misty lands of the liminal and spiritual. lex helps folks connect to their own wisdom and learn to be in conversation with the beyond so that they can set off on their own mystical adventure. they offer tarot readings and folk magical education. you can find them online at thelexritchie.com and on instagram and twitter @thelexritchie. check out their underworld playlist at https://thelexritchie.com/free-underworld-playlist/ and ancestral journaling prompts at https://artisanal-painter-6163.ck.page/6f7122cfde.

each season we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #snortandcacklebookclub, with a book review by ash and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. this season's #snortandcacklebookclub read is brujas: the magic and power of witches of color by lorraine monteagut.

take the fibre witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz. follow us on instagram @snortandcackle and be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcasting app so you don't miss an episode!

seasons 1-3 of snort & cackle are generously supported by the manitoba arts council. you can support future episodes of snort & cackle by sponsoring a full episode or transcript.

transcript

snort & cackle - season 3, episode 9 - lex ritchie

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] Hello, and welcome to the Snort and Cackle podcast. I'm your host, Ash Alberg. I'm a queer fibre witch and hedgewitch. And each week I interview a fellow boss witch to discuss how everyday magic helps them make their life and the wider world, a better place.

Expect serious discussions about intersections of privilege and oppression, big C versus small C capitalism, rituals, sustainability, astrology, ancestral work, and a whole lot of snorts and cackles. Each season, we read a new book about witchcraft practices around the world with the #SnortAndCackleBookClub with a book review by me and the occasional guest helping us close out the season. Our book this season is Brujas: The Magic and Power of Witches of Color by Lorraine Monteagut.

Whether you're an aspiring boss witch looking to start your knitwear design business, a plant witch looking to play more with your local naturally dyed color palette or a knit witch wondering just what the hell is a natural yarn and how do you use it in your favorite patterns, we've got the solution for you.

Take the free fiber witch quiz at ashalberg.com/quiz and find out which self-paced online program will help you take your dreams into reality. Visit ashalberg.com/quiz [upbeat music fades out] and then join fellow fiber witches in the Creative Coven Community at ashalberg.com/creative-coven-community for 24/7 access to Ash’s favorite resources, monthly zoom knit nights, and more. [End of intro.]

I am here today with Lex Ritchie. Lex is a tarot reader, folk witch, spirit worker and queer mystic. They are a guide through the misty lands of the liminal and spiritual. Lex helps folks connect to their own wisdom and learn to be in conversation with beyond so that they can set off on their own mystical adventure.

They offer tarot readings and folk magical education and can be found online at thelexritchie.com and on Instagram and Twitter, @thelexritchie. Hi Lex!

lex ritchie: Hii!
ash alberg: How's it going?

lex ritchie: Great. Good. I'm excited to be here.

ash alberg: I'm excited to hear you.

lex ritchie: I’m excited to be on your podcast.

ash alberg: I don't understand why it took me so long to be like, Lex, are you ... [laugh-snorts.] Do you want to be on the podcast?

lex ritchie: And also an honor of the occasion, this is from your shawl book from last year.

ash alberg: I was recognizing it. Ah, so good. [Lex giggles.] Yep. Lex also happens to be a knitter, dear listeners. Yeah, we got a good chunk of overlap. And yeah, I think you're wearing Foude, which the only reason ... I can never remember, it's terrible, but I never remember the names of my own patterns. And the only reason I remember that one is because I recently knitted one for myself. Oh yeah, that one, I was staring at it for a little while.

So tell us a bit about you and what you're doing in the world.

lex ritchie: Yeah. So I’m a folk witch and I am a tarot reader and I am an educator. I help people connect to their own wisdom so that they can find their own power and their own direction to make choices and make change in their life through tarot, so through the tarot readings that I offer, but also I want to empower people to find their own wisdom and to figure out how to navigate their own spiritual paths, because none of us needs to ... we don't need top down hierarchies in our spiritual practices.

And I think it serves us really well to learn to interrogate that and to learn to trust our own intuitions in the process of navigating the spiritual. So through what I do educationally, I want to help people connect to that inner wisdom and to figure out how to navigate their own journeys, teaching them like the spiritual equivalent of a compass and reading a map and like looking at a tree and what's the prevailing wind direction in this spiritual space?

And I have a particular affinity for ancestral work. But that's not the sole thing I do. It's a part of this work that I'm starting to lean a little bit more into.

ash alberg: Yeah, ancestral work, I find so interesting, especially as queers where there's like blood ancestral work, but I feel like also within queer community, we are much more open at a much younger age than many people

to the concept of chosen family and to being a good transcestor while we are alive, because there are others within our community who we are ... like, unfortunately, the legacies ended up happening at much younger ages, statistically, within our community as well, but that you are ... you're not only connected to blood family and to being an ancestor that is then called on or leaves a legacy behind within your bloodline. It's also within our chosen family and within our chosen community as queer folks that we are, we're doing the same thing and connecting to ancestors in that way, I think is really interesting.

It's also trickier because it's not like you're just like reading some paperwork that says you're related to this person, then this person. And it also has an extra layer of, as you're looking through the papers that you do have, if you have access to them, then being able to read between the lines and seeing who within your family line is queer because most of the time, those things aren't recorded.

And so being like, oh, that spinster aunt three generations back, what was that? Or and, the spinster aunt who dressed as a man. Okay, what does that mean? Like being able to pull those things apart, especially with how colonialism and especially like Christianity and the other monotheistic religions have like really imposed these binaries on just history and all of the things that we then look to, and also to our magical practices where within not that, not Christianity and not the monotheistic religions, but within magical practices themselves, they are frequently rooted in the binary and frequently rooted in gender and within the gender binary.

And if you are a woman, you do this. And if you are man, you do that. And for those of us that don't identify as that it’s like, okay, then what the fuck am I going to do? Or if you're trans and you do identify as that, but you're like, okay, is, like magic-wise, depending on often within these like top-down hierarchies, there are teachers now who would choose not to teach somebody if they knew that they were trans, because they'd be like, like it, there's just, the transphobia is like heavily rooted in all of it.

But I find it interesting trying to navigate that shit, even just like from a basics of herbalism and tarot, like both of those are quite broad practices and both of them are like quite heavily rooted in the gender binary when ... and also in heteronormacy when you are reading any resources for them.

So like finding that shit is hard.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And I think it's, that's one thing I actually really love about ancestor work is that it's messy, and there's this perception among white people

that like ancestor work is genealogy and it's, that's part of it, but just because of some quirks of my own ancestry, like I'm a white person who does not have access to a ton of records about certain branches of my family. And that doesn't mean that those branches of my family are not equally important to work with.

And so like you, I have to find other ways to learn about that side of my family and other ways to work with those ancestors. And as somebody who was raised in a broadly Catholic family, but is not myself Catholic, like my parents actually chose not to baptize their children. Very controversial decision.

ash alberg: I was going to say, I bet that caused some fun little discussions. lex ritchie: Yes. Yes.

It was a very controversial decision at not just at the birth of the children, but like for my entire life. [Both laugh.] But yeah, and so as somebody with this broadly Catholic background, like folk Catholic practices, folk Catholic magic is a part of my practice, even though like I'm not Catholic. And even though I find it rather icky. But it's a part of my practice that works for me.

And like a lot of ancestor work is seeking out those connections, developing them, finding what works and a lot of the time straddling the gap between what we know and what we don't know and what we would like our practice to look like and what it actually does look like because ...

ash alberg: Oo yeah, those are all so different. I also love the, like bringing up the straddling because again, liminal spaces. But especially this idea of, we, we do get to choose. Yes, there are certain things about magic that you don't get to choose. If your ancestors are like, you're going to get these prophecies through your dreams, whether you like them or not, you can't ... like you can try blocking that shit out, eventually it's going to come through no matter what.

And if you've got, like for me, I had ghosts hanging ... I've always had ghosts hanging out, but had ghosts hanging out, was aware of them as a child through until my early twenties, and then just basically got too freaked out, blocked it off. And then it came roaring through about eight years later. And I, when it came back, it was like, okay, I don't get to not engage with this because it clearly is not going away.

So like figuring out, okay, how now do I choose to re-engage with you in a way that feels safer for me and also gives me a little bit more space to determine how, what vocabulary are we using and how do we speak to each other in a way

where it's not just okay, you're going to come and freak me out every fucking time you feel like telling me something, like ...

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. like we don't get to choose the legacies that we inherit. We get to choose how we handle those legacies and what we do with them. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that.

Prophetic dreams is something that comes from like my father's side of the family. And you were talking about how so much of magic is like more coded femme-ish and it's like that and because of that, like my dad never got support or help with that or ... and chose to just shut it all down. And therefore, like when I started having certain kinds of dreams, it wasn't able to help me with that, and so not, yeah.

It's the ... the way gender plays out isn't just in the cultural aspect, right? Like of who does what kinds of divination, or who is taught to access the spiritual at all?

ash alberg: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like mine is almost like a slightly abnormal situation. Not in that my dad ever was like, “Here's what we do with ghosts,” but like his mom, my grandma was like scary good at the shit that she did. She was born in Poland, grew up with an aunt in what is now the Czech Republic, was then Czechoslovakia, spent all of her time with the Roma, much to her aunt's annoyance, and learned a lot of magic from them.

And it was beyond just okay, if somebody sees this in a dream, then it means this. Like, she had some scary fucking skills that we knew about and my mum also knew when her and my dad got together. There were certain dreams that you would ask grandma, what does this mean?

Other dreams that you did not, so it was like, it was known that grandma knew dreams. I didn't find out until I was much older just like how strong those powers were though. And so like on the one hand, there was an acknowledgement of yeah, members of the family have either this belief or like on my mom's side, there was just shit tons of superstitions that like, nobody's going to admit that they're ... the reason that there are these superstitions is because they're rooted in something.

But the things would happen. We never openly were like, this person's a witch, that person is not a witch dah dah, but my dad did give me my first tarot deck and he did tarot just for his own interests. I doubt that if I were to pull dad onto this podcast, he'd be like, yeah huh. [Both laugh.]

He supports me, but is not going to have lots of conversations about the witches in the family. But it was at least not fully stamped out. But I, yeah, I, my understanding from most people is that the folks who are not deemed femme within the family line, usually, unless there's a really strong, magical component of the family that has been brought through the line, then if it's just like these kind of like casual, oh yeah, this person has this weird ability. We don't really talk about it, but we know that they do it. Like it's like the open family secret.

Then those lines tend to be less, yeah. The masc folks aren't really provided with the tools to understand how to deal with it, which I think then also like when we look at like pop culture and you've got almost this like, there's like the men and the masc folks in pop culture and mainstream media who practice magic are either seen as the wizard, which is different from a witch because a wizard is this all powerful Gandalf blah-blah-blah figure, which is somehow different than a witch, or they are like hardcore villain.

And there's not really between any in between. And there's no space given for those who practice divination in a holistic way. There's nothing for the ones who were plant healers and folk healers. That was like only the femmes did that kind of work. And it's not only that. It, but again, we're dealing with these erasures of people through the histories of, we'll just cross that name out or that one where we just don't really have the records, and so we will, from our current place in time, fill in the gaps based on what we believe probably happened.

So that name looks like it's a boy's name, but also maybe it was close enough to a girl's name. So we'll just say it was a girl. And then also again, not giving space to the folks who were not a girl or a boy, or were both.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And I think that, yeah, that's a really, that's really interesting because so much about ... and this is my own struggle with the word “witch” is that witch describes very accurately what I do. Like I play in liminal spaces for ... in a way that in my personal practice is primarily solitary.

And that's what the witch does. The witch works at the margins, at the borders, and the in-between. And, but what we often think of as which is like the witch in a coven, then there's also like the witch as manifesting, right? There's these, this sort of like modern, new age understanding of the witch, you know, and, but the ... witch means a lot of things.

And I don't want to like, say like the origin of the term is this. It's not so authoritative. But like the witch is in my opinion, at the root of it, about the solitary liminal work. And I think that the ... it's interesting that you observed

that the masculine is given this role in magic that is very much about the material.

ash alberg: Yeah.
lex ritchie: And then all of the liminal, all of the messy, gets pushed off into the

feminine and it limits who can access what and how it can be accessed.

And yeah, I just, I ... that, as a non-binary person, like I find that really interesting, because it's particularly as like a ... I wouldn't say I'm like trans masculine, but like I'm more masculine. I'm on the more masculine side of this. But as somebody on the more masculine side of this who identifies as a witch who like, whose work is explicitly operating in liminal spaces, in transitional borderlands, yeah.

It's, it is the case that there aren't a lot of good models for that. ash alberg: Yeah!

lex ritchie: And this is, and that's kinda like why I really, the way I do my work is so important for me because we don't have, many of us don't have good models for how we feel called to make magic and where our unique gifts are in making magic.

And yeah, that's ... we need to make our own models for it. We need to follow our own paths in magic and yeah.

ash alberg: That's ... I feel like you've hit like such a key point in terms of there not being good models. And that feels so very accurate. And also this thing of the witch doing this liminal messy work also feels very much like how emotional labor just naturally gets placed on femme folks.

And masc folks are expected to not do it. It's meant to be more tangible, more material, but it also ends up fucking everybody over. Like you've got femme folks who are just like fucking exhausted because they're doing all of this emotional labor that is not seen, is not compensated, is not being met with from equal, equal effort in any other way, because it's just not being acknowledged.

And then for the masc folks, then you're dealing with people who are being cut off from like really important skills and tools. And then they, it's not as though they're not having emotional experiences that are just as nuanced and just as full as femme folks, it's that they don't have the language and the tools to then be

navigating those in a healthy way and they are only being given very few limited options for then expressing that.

And all it does is fuck everybody over because neither of those is a healthy option. I would argue that the femme folks actually have better tools. They're having to use them too frequently in order to manage other people's emotions because those other people don't have those tools, but you're still in a stronger place because you have the tools to begin with.

And so if there were more masc folks who were able to and felt comfortable, like expressing themselves and being emotional and like understanding that like, you are allowed to cry one moment and laugh the next moment. And that's a very normal part of the human experience. It's ... and could be a lot healthier.

And in the same way, when you're practicing your magic it doesn't need to be about like manifesting this one very specific end result or that it needs to be rooted in ... I feel like a lot of the like wizard examples are rooted in power and greed, which again is just like, it's just like capitalism and the patriarchy at play in ...

lex ritchie: Yeah. I don't think that witchcraft particularly isn't about power --

ash alberg: Power is not necessarily a bad thing.

lex ritchie: Yeah. Now I want to share this quote and it's totally gonna just evaporate from my brain. And I'm like even, okay. I do have the book right behind me. I can look at the book. Okay. Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici, has this quote that is along the lines of ... yes, here we go.

“Witchcraft was an illicit form of power for getting what one wanted without ...”

And yeah, so I think there's even something like, like witchcraft is about power. But it's like, how do we use that power? And towards what end is that power directed? And I think that so much of the ways that masculine power, masculine magical powers are depicted in the broader society are very much about magic directed towards power within a hierarchy, magic directed towards power within an existing structure.

In other words, like power that would support something that looks like capitalism or colonialism or those kinds of structures, whereas witchcraft at least according to Sylvia Federici, and like I'm a big fan of her book so I'm

inclined to agree. Witchcraft was dangerous because its power undermined those systems.

ash alberg: Yes. Yeah. That like ... it also just aligns with all of my like witchy femmes history and just like life experiences where, and it's where the power in queerness comes from too. Not queerness within specifically sexuality or gender, but queerness as in uprooting and upsetting the status quo and turning it on its head.

And queering your witchcraft practice, I think, is exactly that. It's uprooting the status quo and questioning it and providing a broader analysis of it that takes into account all the messiness

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. Queer is also a liminal experience.
ash alberg: Completely. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We just live in these liminal spaces

all the time. I don't know if you're familiar ...

lex ritchie: Yeah, I feel this on, in a very real way. I recently started a low dose of testosterone and so my body is a liminal experience right now. [Laughs.]

ash alberg: Right! Yes, totally, it would be. Oh my god. Yeah.

I don't know if you're familiar with I think it's Dori Midnight makes this blend. I always forget whether it's Dori or Sister Spinster, but I'm pretty sure this is Dori Midnight’s blend: witches, bitches and hoes?

lex ritchie: Mm, mhmm.

ash alberg: It is one of my favorite tinctures. It's like, it's for the edge walkers. Like it's for the folks that live in the liminal spaces, which is also why it's for sex workers. It's, you're like working in, existing in those liminal spaces. And yeah, it's one of my favorite blends.

lex ritchie: Yeah.
ash alberg: So how did you like get started with your witchcraft practice? What

... like, what's your personal journey in your magic?

lex ritchie: Yeah. I ... so some of my magical practice is things that I learned as a kid, right? Like I had this sort of, I had this sort of liminally Catholic

experience. [Ash laughs.] And I and I learned a lot of folk Catholic practices through that. And I also was taught tarot as a young kid by a friend's grandmother. And I grew up in a family where there were a lot of superstitions, a lot of folk tales, a lot of “how do you read the weather from the clouds,” that kind of folk magic.

But I kinda didn't like ... I don't know if I didn't take it seriously, but eventually, there came a time when I was like, it's time to get serious. I'm going to go to college and study science. [Ash cackles.] And so I got a degree in physics.

ash alberg: Okay. [Chuckles.]
lex ritchie: And then I got a degree in mechanical engineering ...
ash alberg: Holy shit.
lex ritchie: And then I was going to get my PhD in environmental engineering.

And somewhere in that process, like I was just, I was facing this problem of not only losing connection to my roots in so many ways, because I was living on the opposite side of the country from where I'd grown up, I was living in like a ... academia is like this social milieu that was like totally opposite of the working class, the social segment that I grew up in.

And so there was pressure to conform to that. And I didn't really want to do that. And I was also dealing with acute chronic illness at the time. And it was a whole mess. And I was like, I can't live my life like this. And, but I don't know what to do because this is what I've been working for half a decade or more, really longer than half a decade at that point.

And so like, I bought a tarot deck. It was the first time I picked up a tarot deck since I was like 13 or 14. And that, and I started to experiment with magic. Like I had never been like an atheist that was like, “None of this exists and you can't convince me otherwise.” It was like, I'm not, I'm open to evidence, and so I really went about it, like in the way of a scientist, where I was like, I'm going to try this thing and see if it improves my life.

And all of it improved my life really drastically. So I quit grad school. I moved back to the part of the country where I grew up. And I started my business and that sort of makes it sound really simple.

There were like nine months of me looking for a job here that before I started my business, because I was like I guess I can't get a job here. But yeah, that's, it was a path of finding myself in a place that was just totally wrong. Like trying to follow the path that society, like of the good smart kid from the poor town.

ash alberg: Yeah. You're going to beat the odds by joining the system in a different place.

lex ritchie: Right. Yeah. And then, and it didn't work and I was more miserable and yeah, so it was, it came down to rejecting that path and not even just like finding a new one, but like making my own, which is magical, to make your own path, to go into the unknown. It's ...

ash alberg: Yeah.
lex ritchie: Yeah
ash alberg: ... and the universe, that it's going to work.
lex ritchie: Yeah. All one big exploration, experiment in magic. Yeah.

ash alberg: It's so funny to hear your experience because it makes me reflect on my own. And at what point did I actually trust magic? And I don't remember when I started officially trusting it versus when I knew that it existed and just didn't necessarily want to engage with it openly.

Again, ghosts have just always been with me. Divination has always been ... I know not to look at mirrors after a certain point of night because there's going to be things that decide to come through. Those are just skills that I have, whether I want them or not. And currently I'm ... we're in negotiations, but the ... I think also I consider myself extremely lucky A, to have the parents that I have but B, to have gone through my schooling experience, specifically post-secondary schooling, in theater world, because it opens you much more explicitly to the things that are not so tangible.

We always joke that everybody else was going to like biochemistry labs and things, and everyone's oh yeah, that's so hard. And we're like, okay, 8:30 in the morning, we're going and excavating like childhood trauma and then going to go to dance class at 10, like that's ... so we, we did a lot more of that emotional excavation that now becomes a really big part of my magical practice and like tuning into intuition and things, like that work was not necessarily explicitly being done, but was absolutely being encouraged.

And we were being told to tune into those parts of ourselves that most folks, especially in the sciences, are being told to keep tamped down. Or if you're gonna, if you're going to listen to it, then you need to back it up with a shit ton of evidence. Whereas we were just told, just trust it. Just go and do it.

And so I don't have as clear a sign of, at what point did I start going from just like knowing those things, to realizing that there was something more, more powerful in them than just listening every once in a while and your gut would keep you safe in a moment. It was like, it's beyond that.

But ... or like listening to the crows, right? Like to me speaking to the crows was normal, but I didn't necessarily think of it as magic. It was just like yeah, the crows, you make friends with them because if you don't make friends with crows, they're gonna fuck you up. And they pass that shit down through their lineages.

So they're their grandcrow babies are gonna fuck you up. That's how they work.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And I, yeah. I don't know. I think that's like really, yeah, fascinating, like how that can just like so naturally come through and being like engaging in creative practice. And for me, it was something ... like I, I was, I originally wanted to go to school for jazz studies.

Like I [audio distorted] and I got into school for jazz studies and then I got there and I was like, I am not ready to basically be engaging in a professional program.

ash alberg: Yeah.
lex ritchie: I'm 18 years old. Like I have been poor and sick all my life and

musicians don't make that much money. I'm not really ready to commit to this.

And that was like, and so I had that like deeply intuitive experience. And then it was like, it's time to do this like deeply non-intuitive experience and do that for a while. And I really like, when I look at my, like my own natal chart and oh yeah, that makes sense that I have been like on both sides of exploring this like way of being, these different ways of being an understanding in the universe.

Yeah, just, and it's ... there's value in both of them. I don't want to sound like somebody who's ah, sciences. Like I have a lot of critiques of science and that is, I have them because I engage very deeply with science. And yet I find that

there's a lot to value in the way of understanding our universe in the way of going about, how should I act and orient to the world in an evidence-based way?

ash alberg: Yes.

lex ritchie: And then bringing those research skills to it, and that analysis.

And also what needs to underscore that, and I think especially like the two of swords and the sword suit, like the sword suit’s really analytical, but like the two of swords, it's really all about intuition.

ash alberg: Mmhmm. Yeah. Because that is part of analysis is and also honestly, it's part of science, right? Like you ultimately, at the end of the day, you just have to trust that if the evidence is stacking up for this thing, that you believe that, okay, two plus two equals four. And we don't actually like, if you want to go into like deep theory about it, there's not actually anything that proves that as being yes or no.

We just have accepted it as true. 3000 years from now, if humans still exist in some form, they may be like, what the fuck were those people thinking? Like we, we look back through history and we say, okay those people were nuts when they thought the earth was flat, but at that time, all of the evidence pointed to that for them.

And so we, that's part of scientific study is that we are constantly receiving new information and we need to adjust accordingly, which I think is also, during COVID, it's become very clear that normal people do not understand the scientific process because when you're dealing with a novel virus, then as you get more information, you're going to have to update your work accordingly.

And people don't get that because normally when we are looking at even a new pandemic, it's usually not something that moves so quickly. And so there's more time to look at okay, what is happening with this thing? How does it change? How does it move? How does it transmit between people or things?

And now once we've gathered all of this evidence, now we're going to come forward, do some peer reviewed studies, and then we'll go and tell the public, right? Like we just don't have time with that with COVID. And it has allowed those who do not believe in science to just completely poopoo all of it, because they don't understand that is how this always works.

It's just on a, it's on a drastically faster timeline than usual.

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like ... a lot of what we think of as science as like settled facts, are just like things we haven't been able to disprove yet. They are, they are models and approximations that we ... like the evidence points to it being the case. But if the evidence were to not point to it being the case, we would replace them with something else.

And I think that's, that is a wonderful viewpoint to approach anything in life with, and I have this personally and like all of my beliefs is that I hold onto my beliefs very dearly, but like, I will defend my beliefs very ardently, but I will release them willingly if I'm proven wrong or if I find a better explanation or better evidence and like in our spiritual practices, right, like it's the difference between ... it's basically avoiding dogma if we hold onto our beliefs, tenderly, with care, but also knowing that we may need to release them.

ash alberg: I think there's a lot more honesty and beauty within that too. And it's also, it's healthier. If you continue to believe them because they are proven true to you, then there's something really beautiful about that. But there's also something that is like so much. I love --

lex ritchie: It also like models reality ...
ash alberg: And like the good version of reality, right? Like it is -- lex ritchie: This is how –
[Both talking at the same time.]

ash alberg: Like it is how the world should, yeah, it should work. And we can actually like very directly link all of the times that we don't do that to then also being all the times that humans are fucking up in the world.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And it's what if we like, and this brings us back to capitalism, like what if we always clung to summer and growth in our lives? That would be really painful.

ash alberg: Yeeah! And not good. And eventually we would just, you either run out of resources or you just never get a chance to rest. And neither of those are good.

lex ritchie: And if you're a human, you eventually burn out.

ash alberg: Exactly. Exactly. I've been reading Doughnut Economics as well as Burnout. And I feel like both of them intertwined really nicely with each other because with --

lex ritchie: Thank you for saying that the name of that book, that has, I've been trying to remember the name of it for a year.

ash alberg: Which one? Burnout or ... lex ritchie: Doughnut Economics.

ash alberg: Oh, Doughnut Economics. It is such a good model. I am loving it because as small biz owners, figuring out how to like, grow our businesses to a stage that feels good and we are in growth phases where it's, we're not at ... I'm saying this as we, and I'm, I don't know I'm using the royal we, but I'm using the royal we here, but when we're not at the point yet where the business is able to sustain itself and us and what we want it to do within our communities, then there is a natural growth phase that needs to still be continuing.

It doesn't mean that it is constant growth. It means that we're just in the ebbs and flows that we are generally moving in an upward direction within those ebbs and flows. But there does come a point where you hit enough. And so once you hit enough, then now you're in maintenance phase and there's something really deeply lovely about that and it gives you stability and also space to then be doing other things. And that's fucking lovely too.

lex ritchie: Mhmm. Yeah, and there's this thing in like building your own business where the first two years, it's just, you're throwing things. You're always trying to do something because you're just trying to figure it out, and like it's a lot of work. If you're doing all the things and they're all brand new and it's all super hard and overwhelming and, and ...

I'm coming into this place now. It's like my thirdish year of business. And I have a lot of goals and I have a lot of things that I want to do and create and offer and they're all going to happen. But one of them I'm like, that might be a next year thing and it's only January.

ash alberg: Yeahh. Yes.
lex ritchie: And I'm okay with that being a next year thing.

I'm okay with spending the time building and doing other things that I love and I really want to build in my business so that I can create that foundation for that other thing, instead of rushing into this other cool thing.

ash alberg: Yeah, I ... like it's so true. And I am, it's so funny because all of my readings for this year are like, you're going to have a year where basically I'm at the point where, ‘cause I'm a triple fire, so I just want to be fucking going all the time and just start it, do it, go, move on to the next thing.

And just I, I passionately get excited about a thing and I just want to do it. And I also, at this point, have enough experience and wisdom to know that I can't just impulsively go for it. [Chuckles.]

lex ritchie: Yeah.

ash alberg: Sometimes I can, if it's something minor. Sure, go for it. Or if it's something where it's, just I can't not do it, okay. Fine. But also part of going for it means making sure that the foundations underneath that are solid enough so that if it doesn't work the way that I want it to initially, or at all, that the rest of it doesn't crumble underneath it.

And so it's, it's going to be a year of ... last year was a year of like full on like stop what the fuck you're doing and get some like major foundational stuff done. And my business was still functioning and ticking itself along and actually hit its goals anyway, whilst I was focused on this slow stuff and the foundational bit.

This year, it's okay, the foundational bits, they're there and now we're just like getting them into practice essentially and just refining and making sure that they're solid, which also it's a hard spot for me to be in at least, because I can also just see all these other things that I want to do.

And I just want to like roar towards them. And I, the rational part of my head is, “Not yet.” And so that's just going to be the energy of the year is a lot of, “Let me do it!” “Not yet.” But there's also something useful in that too, where it's we get the wisdom and we, it's like when we hit that growth phase in other parts of our lives.

You can fuck around with relationships when you're in your early twenties and then you had a certain point where you're like, okay, if I want to do these certain things in my life, and I need a partner, if I'm going to have a partner, they need

to be able to fit these certain things, then you stop fucking around quite so much.

You can fuck around in certain ways, obviously. You're just not going to put up with the same kind of shit necessarily, or waste your time on things that can take your energy away from your larger goals. Whereas when you have fewer responsibilities, or you feel like you have more time to worry about those responsibilities, then you got a little bit more free play time. [Chuckles.]

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. That's ... yeah. Last year for me and my business was really about getting structures in place and figuring out like, what are the novel tasks and what are the non-novel, like repeatable tasks? What can I schedule? What can I automate? What like, how can I let my business be like really boring so that the business is no longer like this, like big chaos monster.

ash alberg: Oo yeah. Oof.
lex ritchie: Yeah. So I can focus on my growth in other places. Not even yes,

business growth, but like, how do I -- ash alberg: Also personal life.

lex ritchie: Yeah, like how do I grow in my spiritual practice? How do I grow in my personal life? And how do I grow my business?

So it's, you need growth in all of those spaces, but I don't need it like all the time or in all the ways. And for me as a person with ADHD, like just simply being like, I need to, I'm letting this be boring and I'm letting this be non-novel and non-repeatable. That was, actually also personal growth. [Laughs.]

ash alberg: Yeeah! I, yeah. It's funny too, like the chaos monster, I just, I resonate with that so much. And it's funny because recently, like I've been building those structures for awhile now and I preschedule pretty much fucking everything. And it makes my life so much better.

It harkens me back to the days where I would be writing my papers for university like a month in advance or at least ... because I can bang out a paper in three hours, like it, writing is an easy task for me, which is convenient running the business that I do. It's also something that I enjoy, which sometimes gets me in the ... I actually enjoy content creation when I'm given enough space to enjoy it.

Which is not always necessarily the best thing for me but I've learned that the crunch mode and the anxiety that comes from crunch mode, like I used to feed off of that and now I'm like, I don't have fucking energy for that. Wipes me out so much. I don't enjoy the way that it feels in my body.

And I think part of that is because I've lowered my general, like anxiety baseline down to a stage where now the anxiety at that level feels so very far away from where I operate normally now than it does actually feel uncomfortable. Whereas before it was a lot closer to my baseline. So I was like, oh, we're just at the like slightly heightened version of where we're already operating.

But now what I find is that because I actually have built the time in for making sure that I do shit in advance and have the things in place in advance, once a thing is rolling, for example, when we're doing launches, there's a lot of pieces that flow into a launch, but once you've done a launch once, and so you can just recycle that structure and you're just filling in fresh copy. Like you, you can actually get that done well in advance.

And so once I'm actually in these launch modes or I'm in these like new focus project periods where the thing is rolling out, I find myself sitting and being like, should I be doing more? I feel like I need to be doing more. Why am I not doing more?

And it's actually just that, like I did all the things I needed to and I did them in advance. And so now I actually do get to rest a little bit and that feels really fucking weird.

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. And like I had an interesting experience last year where I was sick for a lot of the final quarter of the year. And yeah, I was sick really, basically half of the final quarter of the year. And I was like I really want to get this new offer.

Like I was going to do a class on exploring your own inner under or ancestor work and I wanted to do it in November, but I was still sick. I couldn't launch it. And so finally I was like you know what, I'm going to just send out an email and see who signs up because I want to get the ball rolling on this. And I was like, if I have five people sign up, I will run this class.

And I had six people sign up from a handful of emails, and there's knowing your body and your baseline and like launches are great. I love launches, but not refusing to do something because you can't do it in the way you've done it in the past. Like that was really important was like, no, like I can't do a launch.

I can't do this fancy, this is still going to be valuable for the people who sign up. ash alberg: Yeeahh.
lex ritchie: So I'm gonna do it anyways.

ash alberg: Yeah, the done is better than perfect motto is one that I'm like trying to really incorporate into my body and into my bones more because perfectionism is just, it's a procrastination tool. But it also stops us from showing up. And it's funny because I feel like with COVID and everybody having to move online, including all of the ... it used to be that the folks who existed online primarily, like their shit was polished and then COVID came along and we all realized ... I realized, at least I don't know that everybody has, but that actually most of the shit isn't polished.

And in fact, a last minute, like an Instagram live rather than a very long scripted, pre-recorded thing, that can be just as useful. Or hopping on zoom and like running a live class and then using that recording and selling that after the fact, like that is gonna be just as useful as again, if you like write out a script and pre-record the thing and do all, do like really high level videography and like all of these things that now most of us don't have access to those tools unless we happen to be a videographer ourselves or live with a videographer, right?

Like it's, the polish doesn't need to be quite as shiny. And really it's the core of it that is the most useful. And it's funny because now I feel like there's been enough time for everybody to realize oh shit, we need to be online, that those who do have more access to doing those higher quality things, now they're starting to play catch up.

And so now you're getting back into that like slightly fun, I dunno, it's getting a little messy again, I think.

lex ritchie: Yeah. I'm here for messy. Like I'm a messy human and I have resolved that I'm going to be showing up on social media and in my business as a messy human and giving myself the time last year to create, to do the boring things that let me be messy, instead of my business being messy ... yeah.

That was like really important. And I'm like, I'm really glad to see this like larger shift in the social media space with like things being a little bit messier because yeah, it’s ... perfect is exhausting. And it's also like a tool of white supremacy, so ...

ash alberg: And also it's this funny like, on the one hand, like more mess and on the other hand, allowing more structures so that the mess, your personal life mess, can be contained elsewhere. That's, for me, the best fucking thing I did for myself was taking Instagram off my phone.

Although now I'm on my iPad a little bit too frequently. So I'm on Instagram, not as frequently, but still more than I would like to be. But pre-scheduling my grid honestly has just changed the game because when I'm scrolling, I literally, like as soon as I open the app, I can feel my body start to be like roiling in ways that I don't love.

And so not thinking every single day, like I do my best these days to get my grid pre-scheduled like four to six weeks in advance. And sometimes it, it then gets a little bit, it's oh shit, this thing came up, now I gotta like shuffle a few things. But overall it gives me a lot more space.

And even if I need to adjust something, like I've planned something, say four weeks in advance and like week two, oh no, we need to make a couple of adjustments. That is exponentially easier to deal with. And especially with platforms where they're changing so much these days and so consistently that trying to stay on top of it is just impossible anyway.

So to be daily, trying to excuse me, trying to play catch up and trying to stay on top of things when realistically the only people who are able to do that are people who have entire teams, whose job is to do that for them.

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. I just turned off notifications for Instagram and Twitter on my phone.

ash alberg: Yes. Good life choice.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And it's I feel like, like you just summarized like my whole like Saturn return in a nut-- is like creating the structures so that I can be my messy self. And it's, that's my Saturn return in Aquarius.

ash alberg: So with your magic, you just mentioned this class and so like with your magic in your work, how do those intersect, what are you like ... what are the things that you're currently really excited about? Do you have any personal biz or personal magic practices that are specifically done for your business?

Like how does that all intersect for you?

lex ritchie: Ooh yeah. One thing that has been really big for me lately is, and this is something I've been trying to do for about a year, is treating my business as its own entity, as its own spirit, as a spirit that I can work with and trusting that it is its own entity separate from me.

And so it took me a really long time to trust that was the case and to see how that was the case. And now that I'm actually there, like now I can actually use magic in my business, whereas before, for whatever reason, it just, I felt like I needed to be in control of it. And so magic didn't feel appropriate.

Which is funny ‘cause I'm like running a magical business, but I didn't, but so like now I'm like, okay, I can set my goals and then create a spell around that. And I can write petitions for more like followers on Instagram, which has actually worked out really well for me. In case, anyone's, “How can I get more followers?” Like this, magic works really well.

And bringing more magic in, in that way, like the rosemary that I was burning before we started this call, like that's part of my getting started with work ritual now. And it's a money magic thing because rosemary does have that association. But also it is, rosemary's a really important plant for me ancestrally. And the ancestral is such an important part of what I do, and so it's this plant that really welcomes so much, so much, so many parts of my business just by burning it. Yeah.

And so but that's the kind of magic that I wasn't able to do in my business until I was like, no, my business is actually separate from me and is actually separate from my practice. So that like I can practice magic on my business.

ash alberg: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And giving it its own rituals. It's funny because I almost feel like I like end up doing the same things, but almost like backwards by ... sorry. My throat is so dry in this house right now.

lex ritchie: It's snowing. I'm sure it's very dry outside too.
ash alberg: It's, yeah. It's quite annoying actually. So much snow. I'm going to

have to shovel so much.

Like I also have incorporated a lot of burning magic and like the, I do a fair amount of tarot and things for my business, but it's because it's, I don't see it as separate entirely, but I do see it as like almost like a different limb of myself that requires its own practices

lex ritchie: Yeah. It's almost like when you, like, when authors write a book. Yes, you've created this thing, but it also has a life of its own. It also has like its own direction that it wants to go in and it's been important for me, like also like money-wise ‘cause like I'm a disabled person and ...

ash alberg: Money’s important!

lex ritchie: Yeah, and so like I need my business to be able to pay me so that I can live. And so being able to recognize my business as something that provides for me, instead of like me as something that provides for me ...

ash alberg: Ooh yeah, yeah.
lex ritchie: ... has been really important even though yes, I'm operating in my

business and I'm the only employee of my business.

But like knowing that like it's this own separate entity and its own separate structure that like, yes, I built, but it has its own functioning outside of like my ability to be on Instagram all the time.

ash alberg: Yes.
lex ritchie: That's the cool thing. Like Instagram, my, all my Instagram posts

are still up there.

Like whether or not I am actively posting, all of my blog posts are still on my website, whether or not I'm actively writing a new one. So yeah, like my business does indeed exist outside of my ability to put time and attention into it.

ash alberg: That's yeah, I feel like that's a huge one. And especially when we're dealing with chronic anything, realistically like and even if you're not, but I feel like, especially when you're dealing with chronic, either like physical illness or mental illness, like when we've got shit like that, that needs to be dealt with the, having a business that is its own container and that is able to do its shit and function like over there while we are taking care of our bodies over here is honestly one of the biggest gifts.

Especially through COVID, my brain’s capacity to deal with shit has just, I love my therapist and I feel like the, between the shadow work that I did the first year of COVID and then the therapy I've been doing the second year of COVID, I feel like a very ... a much more capable version of myself, which I am grateful for.

And also there are days where I'm just like, like I remember doing, like having planned a launch for one of my courses. It was when I was first launching natural dyeing 101, and that launch was all prescheduled, ready to go, rolling out. I did the webinar, which was the vehicle that it was starting with and then the rest of the week, everything else was just rolling out.

And my mental health that week was absolute shite. I, I don't know if Brene Brown’s tactic of what percentage capacity are you functioning at today? Where you're like, I'm at 40%, I'm at 80%, dah, and you like, check in with the family household to see how the family is functioning.

And I really love that tool, but I was functioning at like a 15% that week. Like I was not good. And my business was, meanwhile ... and it was the start of a month too. And I was able through that launch to bring in enough money that it released a lot of my anxieties about okay, what are we going to do this month?

And also, I was making money while I was like very not okay. And this like, the way that, that was able to support me and take that like financial stress off, because when you live under capitalism, the financial stress is absolutely part of it. And it's like getting to a stage ... this is also where enough is going to be different for everybody because enough equals like you being able to support yourself and anybody else that you are supporting.

And then also having that like buffer for emergencies and then buffer to be able to be reinvesting in your community in whatever way. For me, that is enough. It's a very broad, there's like many factors that go into it, but it's also a place where there's this like really beautiful sense of calm and agency.

And when you're below that threshold and you're not at enough, then it's incredibly fucking stressful because it's directly related to your ability to care for yourself and then nevermind yourself, also any others or do mind yourself and also any others. Yeah, there's something that's like really fucking beautiful about having a business that can do that for you while you are then tending to your own needs.

lex ritchie: Yeah.

ash alberg: It's, yeah. And even on my therapy days, I can't imagine ... I also worked in non-profit and arts world prior to running my business. So like the money that I made there was never even living wage. So nevermind having like full emergencies, I just can't even imagine like the days now where I'm like, okay, I'm having therapy first thing in the morning.

And then the rest of the day is a fucking write off ‘cause I am processing all the things. So I'm going to eat some food. I'm going to have a nap. Willow and I are going to go on a two-hour walk. Like it's just, I'm going to do all these things that have absolutely nothing to do with business. And tomorrow when I'm feeling better, we'll go back.

And I try to think of even just when I had good bosses being like, I have to go to the doctor and get like a basic checkup and the waiting line, like you leave during your lunch hour and you're like, okay, I have an hour. And then if you're waiting half an hour and so you show up back at work even 15 minutes late and just the amount of stress that was.

And that's within the container of a workplace that, that does allow you that bit of flexibility. And I'm just like, fuck that. I never want to do that again. I never want my employees, when I hire employees, to ever feel like that's a thing either.

lex ritchie: Yeah.
ash alberg: That's, it's just, yeah. There's something lovely about being your

own boss. [Chuckles.]

lex ritchie: Yeah, very true. Yeah. Like I, I'm going to start experimenting with taking a four-day weekend every three weeks

ash alberg: Ooh. Yeah. Yeah.
lex ritchie: And I'm gonna ... and I'm like, I get to do that. Like I just get to set

my schedule and make it happen. And it's, that's so wild.

ash alberg: Yes. And especially where, like you do a lot of like readings and one-on-one work and then class work as well. And so literally being able to just set here's my Zoom availability. This is when you can book classes with me. This is when you can book work with me. This is when the classes are being offered.

And on these other days, you don't get to talk to me unless I want to show up.

lex ritchie: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, something like, I've been giving myself more grace too after tarot readings. I had a tarot reading yesterday and afterwards I was like, I'm going to go take a shower. I really need a shower. And

it was like, I'd already taken a shower that day, but you know what? My body needed a shower. So I went and I took a shower. [Chuckles.]

ash alberg: Yeah, magic water magic is ... I dunno if it's because I'm so much fire in my chart, but and like literally any, like if you look at any like birth thing around the world, I consistently come back, no matter what the practice is, as fire.

So I dunno what it is about water, but like water is my like settling place. If I'm about to have a panic attack, I go and have a shower. If I need to resettle, I go for a bath. Like I need to be near a large body of water all the time.

Like I deeply miss the ocean and the fact that I live along massive river systems and in a province where we also have the most lakes per capita or however they manage like measurement, that's like how I semi-make up for the fact that I am not next to the ocean.

lex ritchie: That sounds amazing. I grew up, like Lake Erie was how I knew where like north was. Like everything was oriented around the lake. And then I went to college in a place ... it was like just, it was in the middle of nowhere, just in the middle of corn fields.

ash alberg: Oh god.

lex ritchie: And ah, yeah, I missed the water so much. And then I moved to the coast, to Southern California, and I was 10 miles from the ocean, but 10 miles is a lot of miles when you grew up less than a mile from Lake Erie.

ash alberg: Yes. Yeah. And the Pacific Ocean is also like a very different beast, right? Like I, when I think of, my body is itching for the ocean, it's specifically the Atlantic that I’m itching for. And there's, it's a different beast.

lex ritchie: Okay, so before we move on though, I want to say one more thing about magic and my business. The only other thing that I want to say, and I want to make sure I share this, because this is really actually important to me and my business and how like it all functions together, is that actually my personal practice and my like the magical practice that I share and what I share in my business, like while what I share with my business is deeply informed by my personal practice, like they are not the same.

And this is something I struggled with for a really long time was figuring out like where the boundaries are between what I share in my business and my own

personal magical practice. And that it's okay that they're not the same. And that not everything I do privately needs to be shared publicly.

That's been huge for me. So I just wanted to make sure to share that as well.

ash alberg: Yeah. Those boundaries, like all the boundaries. I love all of the boundaries, especially ... it's so funny because I enjoy sharing things on social media. I also, historically I have been an over-sharer. I still overshare to a fair extent or ... I don't think that I overshare. I think I just I make a point of keeping things personal.

But there's also like fair amount that I keep to myself. And the ... considering the number of times that I just in my city run into people who recognize me and/or Willow because of social media, and even pre-COVID when I was traveling, like people would recognize me. And that was at a point where I didn't have the same kind of reach, but often I was traveling for work anyway.

And so I ended up running into people where, it wasn't ... it's one thing if it's like somebody that I'm actively collaborating with and so I'm like going to work with colleagues. That's okay, we're going to share more probably anyway. But especially then when you're dealing with folks who are then coming to a class or who are coming to a pop-up shop or things like that, like those boundaries become a lot more important because I, like I've got some really amazing friends who started out as customers, and also I just I don't have that much space to be friends with absolutely everybody nor do I actually want to be slash honestly, a lot of those people wouldn't like me as a person or like they would like me, but we would not be best buddies.

And I think especially with social media, there can be this sense of an intimacy that is felt often on one side, more so than on others. And I'm absolutely guilty of this as well, where it's you build a bigger relationship and then ... but I think there, there needs, there is an awareness that needs to stay at play of, you might have built this relationship in your head. If you ever have the opportunity to meet in real life or to connect further by having like personal interactions via the internet, then there needs to be an awareness of the first times that you're meeting, whatever you've built in your head is not necessarily the full reality.

That's your experience. They also have their experience and both can be true at the same time. And there needs to be a space for compromising of that. If you've built this really intimate relationship with that person, and they just consider you an acquaintance, like that means that there is a boundary point, there is a stop point for the intimacy that you have built up for yourself.

They are not responsible for meeting you all the way over there. There's like a, you find your middle ground if there is a middle ground and then you build from there. But yeah, there's yeah, there's just stuff that people don't need to know. I think the thing that I got the best at building a structure around that was with my love life because I've just always had ... not necessarily a messy love life, it's just that I historically, I'm an Aries, so I don't, long-term is not always my best thing.

And I also don't ... like even the shitty experiences, I don't regret them. More often than not it's just that it's, okay, we didn't work. But I, if meanwhile, I was like, okay, I'm going to build this thing ‘cause I have really big feels and I value the relationships that I have had. And just because one doesn't work out long-term doesn't mean that I don't still value it. It's just that it changed.

And so I'm like, I don't need to be dragging that through my like public persona for everybody to see and then be making their judgements on and making their comments about, and because also I may have signed up for that, but the other person didn't necessarily sign up for that. So yeah. I don't know. So I think that's where I started learning to have my boundaries and then I've built them out.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And for me I've got my sun in the 12th house. It's not surprising to me that I have really clear boundaries around like my magical practice, and my personal magical practice being like different and having like distinct features from my public magical practice, yeah.

ash alberg: So what's something that you wish you'd been told about magic or ritual or witchcraft when you were younger?

lex ritchie: That is a really interesting question. I think for me, because I did have these kinds of like younger introductions to certain magical rituals and things like tarot, like one of the big reasons I set tarot aside was because of the ways it was ... it reified the gender binary and it was like really not representative of my lived experience and it's, and the interpretations weren't either, so it's not, it wasn't just the art on the cards, but like the way this particular individual like taught me to read was not reflective of my lived experience either.

And yeah, knowing that magic is a personal path and that it isn't simply like, these are the rules, that it can reflect your lived experience. That would have been like really important for me to hear ‘cause yeah, I did set it aside for many years, almost a decade because I didn't see myself reflected in that. I didn't see a way for me to actually like experience what I wanted to experience through it.

And that's not like I wasn't through all that time, yes, I was like studying science and everything, but like I was also minoring in philosophy. Like I was trying to find an understanding of the world and how I should live in it, yeah.

And I also think about like some of the like domestic magic. I sometimes I say like I failed Italian American housewife school. And it's true because I wasn't, I hated being like, pushed into that like gender category and that set of roles.

But like now I'm --

ash alberg: It’s also just super fucking witchy.

lex ritchie: Yeah. I'm also, yeah. I'm really proud of the way I take care of my home now. And it's really important to me. So yeah, it's ... those are the things that I wish I had known, had learned as a kid.

ash alberg: So I've, I'm still thinking about the kitchen, ‘cause to me, like Italian witchcraft and in the same way, honestly, I think like basically any Catholic like witchcraft that like also has folk Catholicism just embedded in it, there is so much kitchen witching happening.

lex ritchie: Oh, yeah, I have had my, like the best spells I've ever found anywhere have been given to me while I'm in the kitchen making limoncello and I happen to light a candle for my ancestors.

ash alberg: Yeah. Family like food rituals, I feel like that's, maybe that's part of it too. Like a lot of the magic that I now very specifically attribute to being magic is stuff that has always been very natural in my household and was just not necessarily spoken of as being magic. It just is like part of what we do.

lex ritchie: Folk magic.

ash alberg: So ... yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of power in reclaiming that as being magic and in reclaiming that magic as having power and as having value, I think that's really fucking important too. Yeah.

Especially with the more domestic stuff of caring for your home and making food and things like that. Like I think it's stuff that, again, is often not valued as highly as it should be in our society. And where, if that is your role or a large portion of your role within a family unit then there can be this sense of this isn't, why am I doing this? Yes, we need it, but also it doesn't have that much value.

And it's no, this is actually like a really powerful way for you to be caring for your home and your household.

lex ritchie: Absolutely. Like sometimes I call like the chores that I do, like they're actually the stuff of living. This is actually the stuff that matters in life. This is actually the thing that continues and reproduces life itself.

ash alberg: Yes. Yes. Yeah. And that when you don't do it, like there's a very immediate impact on your body and on your mental health too.

lex ritchie: Mhmm. Yeah.

ash alberg: So what's next for you?

lex ritchie: Yeah. So more underworld explorations, diving deeply into sharing the tools for doing ancestor work in the way that you need to. Not in a way that is fixed or like step-by-step because no one's ancestry is step-by-step and everyone's process, everyone's access to family information, everyone's like predilection to work with whether it's your lineage, your blood ancestors, your queer ancestors, your ... the ancestors, your found family, like these are all different paths into ancestor work.

So I teach a course called Underworld. That's the name I'm going with tentatively. It's subject to change.

But yeah, and it'll be, by the time this comes out, it'll be ... I'll probably be promoting it.

ash alberg: Okay.

lex ritchie: Maybe, or about to be promoting it. If folks are interested in learning to navigate their own underworlds, to contact their ancestors, to learn to develop their own ancestor work practice in a way that is authentic to them, that is sustainable for them, that doesn't simply like honor one single ancestor or holiday, like we're going to be doing this from April to the end of May. So Beltane is like that answer to Samhain and I love the idea of focusing on the roots in the spring when things are springing forward and thinking about how do we navigate the soil, the roots of our lives, in times of growing and how do we use that to draw sustenance?

‘Cause ancestors, at least in my experience, like that's an all year-round practice. My ancestors are not content with a single day of the year. [Ash chuckles.] And

so creating a practice that I can navigate throughout the year has been an essential part of learning to work with my ancestors and developing that connection.

So I want to equip other folks with the tools to navigate their own ancestor, work practices.

ash alberg: That sounds fantastic. And people may just find me in class. [Both laugh.] That's cool.

lex ritchie: Love, I’d love to have you as a student. That would be amazing.

ash alberg: Yeah, that, that sounds like a lot of fun. And I've got some, I've got some plans in the like further future, but that are ... involve ancestral work and part of why I have put them so far into the future is because I need time to be able to dig a little deeper into things and to get some direction in how to do that and that will involve asking my ancestors for a little bit more direction.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And that's the thing for me is like I, when I first offered this last November, I was like, I knew it was the time. I’d been putting so much work in with my ancestors because I knew this was the direction I was going to eventually go but I didn't, like ensuring that like I had my ancestors like blessing before I started to share so much of what I've learned from them was really important.

And then finally last November it was ready to go and yeah, I've run it through once. It was amazing. And I'm excited to offer it again in April.

ash alberg: Cool. That sounds amazing. I'm very excited. [Lex giggles.] Anything else that you're working on that we should know about before ... and I'll obviously people will be able to find things in the show notes and links and things. Willow is just tip-tapping right beside me.

lex ritchie: [Laughs.] I, yeah, I'm process of really digging into this underworld aspect of things. So I'm also collaborating on a series of workshops with Emily Prentice, where we explore different aspects of the underworld.

Yeah, the first one will have already happened and that one's about the underworld and the home, but the second one is going to be happening in May and that is going to be about, it's going to be about specifically like ephemeral flowers, those first flowers that blossom in the spring.

But just flowers as our roots and growth and yeah, it'll, it's, it'll be interesting. And it'll be a fun time because yeah, exploring the underworld through different lenses and topics.

ash alberg: That's super cool. And gets my herbalist brain going “Ooh, I wonder what's going on there?” My plant witchy brain is going, “Hello!”

lex ritchie: It's not going to be herbalism. It's going to be more about like the energetics of it and what ... the way these plants, what these plants can teach us about the underworld. Yeah.

ash alberg: That sounds like fun.
lex ritchie: Yeah. I'm really excited about it.

ash alberg: Delightful. Okay. We'll make sure that there are links so that people can find things and if they can sign up by the time that the episode comes out, then they'll sign up. And if they can't, then that at least they know where to be looking so that when they can sign up and then they can do it.

lex ritchie: Yeah. And also, yeah, so I have freebies that will get them signed up for my newsletter. So yeah one is your ancestor journaling prompts. So they're journal prompts to help you get started on navigating your ancestral journey. And I also have an underworld-inspired playlist to help folks get vibing with the underworld.

So I'll make sure that you have the links for those.

ash alberg: Perfect. And then yeah, the newsletters. I'm telling you people, please sign up for the newsletters of all your favorite humans and businesses because fuck the social media apps. Yes, they're useful for a lot of things, but honestly, you never see shit.

And even if you only open one in a million, please open slightly more than that, but even if you don't open them regularly, at least that is a way where if something important is coming up, the newsletters will have it and it won't get missed in your feed unless your spam filters are doing shitty things in which case, check your spam every once in a while.

lex ritchie: Yeah. That's like the thing, I sign up for a lot of newsletters because I know I want to hear from these people and I know that this is like a way, my

email inbox is a way that I have control over what I see and what I open. Whereas, in a social media app, it's the algorithms in control of it.

ash alberg: Exactly.
lex ritchie: So yeah. If you definitely want to hear from somebody like sign up

for their newsletter, that's the way to do it.

ash alberg: Yeah, it's truly the best method. Sweet. Okay. Thank you, Lex. This has been delightful. Apologies for my internet being the one ... I'm literally sitting on top of my modem. My modem is at my toes and we still have fucking winter internet. [Lex giggles.]

lex ritchie: No worries.
ash alberg: But this has been absolutely delightful. And I'm excited for people

to hear this episode when it comes out.

Hopefully by the time this episode comes out, snow will be less of a thing, but also it'll be mid-March. So here it is entirely possible that I will be in another snow storm when this comes out.

lex ritchie: Oh yeah. We've had snow into April the last two years, so yeah.

ash alberg: I, yeah. I remember as a child, I like, I would differentiate my birthdays, which is mid-April with either snow storms, so we did not do an Easter egg hunt as part of my birthday party or no snow and so we did do an Easter egg hunt. That was how I differentiate my, my childhood birthday parties.

lex ritchie: Yeah, no, I remember my very first Easter that I remember it was pouring down snow. [Ash giggles.] It was so much snow.

ash alberg: Hopefully by then it'll melt quickly, but yeah, it'll be holy shit. There's a lot of it. Anyway. [Laughs.] I'll stop talking about the weather magic.

lex ritchie: Now you've got to get out there and shovel it.

ash alberg: Oh, goddamnit. Yeah, you're right. All right. That's my exercise for the day. Thank you so much, Lex. This has been absolutely delightful.

lex ritchie: Yeah. This was wonderful. Thank you.

ash alberg: [Upbeat music plays.] You can find full episode recordings and transcripts at snortandcackle.com. Just click on podcast in the main menu. Follow Snort and Cackle on Instagram @snortandcackle and join our seasonal book club with @SnortandCackleBookClub. Don't forget to subscribe and review the podcast by your favorite podcasting platform.

Editing provided by Noah Gilroy, recording and mixing by Ash Alberg, music by Yesable.