“We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power… Someplace where we can be free."
~ Starhawk
Ritual Facilitation Team
Introducing this year’s Merry Pranksters, also known as the Ritual Facilitation Team:
Meadowlark, Avian, Silen, Leigh and Chelidon!
Bios:
Meadowlark is a quiet little witch who lives on a quiet little island where she loves to work with children and play and tell stories all day long. She has been a long-time organizer/teacher at VWC and loves the community and the land with all her heart. Each year she tells herself, “This is the year I will go to camp and be *just* a camper,” and each year she finds herself called to participate in new ways. This year she was drawn to the theatrical nature of the theme, and decided to try her hand at ritual facilitation for the first time. Having learned all she knows from the great Casendra, she hopes to help bring the story to life and to help witches connect to it in meaningful ways.
Avian has been a witch her whole life. She found her heartfelt community in 1999, the first year she went to Vermont Witch Camp. Since then, she has been rejuvenated almost every summer at a camp. She has been with Spiralheart since 2011 and has taught Ritual Energetics, Elements of Magic and other classes. She has been an organizer and a treasurer for Spiralheart, believing that everyone’s spark combines to create the blaze that is our innate magic. Magic is everywhere in Avian’s life. She writes climate fiction for witches and imagines communities where we grow old in grace, dignity and nature. She also counsels individuals and works to elect politicians that will respect the planet and the people. With a background in theater, Avian is awed by the power of ritual and can feel the world changing a bit at a time with every chant, every healing step, every embrace of the Goddess. Avian is excited to be back in Vermont after so many years.
Silen (they/he) is a sculptor of sound, artist of people, storyteller, genderqueer shapeshifter, Wildwood witch, mercurial name collector, and lover, among other things. Silen has been practicing in the Reclaiming Tradition since 2015, and has been remembering witchcraft their entire life. Silen practices witchcraft to deepen communion with Mystery to to show up and be fully present in the world. For Silen, the heartbeat of Reclaiming witchcraft is community and they love the mess and challenge of community, whether they’re weaving magic with their covenmates where they live in Colorado, or with globally through their connections with Reclaiming witches around the world. They were a founding organizer of WorldWide WitchCamp in 2023 and have felt so blessed to commune with myriad expressions of our Tradition around the world. In addition to witchcraft, Silen is a composer, poet, writer, performance artist, and mentor. Practicing in the Intentional Peer Support and Alternatives to Suicide frameworks from the psychiatric survivor and Mad Pride lineages, Silen supports folks in exploring the intersections of spirituality and mental health, to make meaning of their struggles, madness, voices, or other experiences. You can find out more about Silen at their website: silenwellington.com or follow them on Instagram: @silen_creature.
Leigh is rooted in relationship with land and wild ones, and woven into community who lives in relationship with Wabanaki land. She began practicing earth-based ritual with community in West Philadelphia in 2007, and has practiced in both Reclaiming and non-Reclaiming contexts since then. Her roles in activism include care work, mutual aid, healing justice and culture work. Her work includes bodywork and healing arts, teaching nature connection and hosting restorative circles. She loves the land, green ones, and web-that-is-us-all fiercely and is devoted to planting and tending seeds of a culture that lives in reciprocity, care and justice.
Chelidon is a passionate lover of the bardic arts, including the skills of word, rhythm, story and song, and he holds deeply sacred the creation of time and space for the infinite diversity of truths to be shared. He believes that we each carry and live unique tales -- in sharing our stories through drum, voice, ritual, music, or other Art, we listen and learn from our ancestors, and add our delicious richness to the Great Tale of which we are all a part. There is no audience in life... He is a sometime heretical trickster, and an acolyte of the power of paradox and the wisdom of cunning foolishness, and his other loves include history and mythology, herbalism, brewing and alchemy, and art crafted with trees, cameras, metal, stone, words, chocolate or pixels. He will often be found geeking enthusiastically about most anything across the range of myth and magic, science and technology. Much of his creative inspiration comes from the ferocious, delicious and lascivious beauty of nature, especially the wild woods of New Hampshire, where he lives in intentional community with much-beloved family, on deeply magical land they delight in sharing with others for workshops, classes and camps. Chelidon has been teaching magic in the Reclaiming tradition at Witchcamps and many other events for more than twenty years, and pulls his own spiritual and magical craft from a long living chain of heritage, study and practice. Among his personal truths are that it’s all made of love (and crafted in Art), there is plenty of time, this is not a metaphor, and we are never alone in this mirthfully reverent seeking and yearning. God Herself invites us to "sing, feast, dance, make music and love" — and live in the ecstasy of spirit, and joy on earth. So mote it be.