Old Mountains, New Worlds
I think of myself as a forensic folklorist—a person who reads between the lines of legends to discover the truth of the myth within. A couple of years ago I was fortunate to work in the Alexander Carmichael collection at the University of Edinburgh as I continued my journey into the various roots of the Appalachian folk magic that is both my practice and my study. My heart is in the hollows and on the ridges of my native land—I stand on the stooped shoulders of all the yarb women and cove doctors who came before me, and I stand in solidarity with the folks who are preserving these practices in this present and challenging time.
We will explore one of the most beautiful, misunderstood, and abused regions of North America—our region, Appalachia. Myth and history, heart and hands. For this region is old and new, a renewed weaving of an old coverlet. Perhaps I can tempt you into the sheer joy that is this vibrant and misunderstood culture and engage you in a renewal of its old folkways in this new and troubled world.
I come from a land both rich and poor, beloved and despised. To be an Appalachian native is to be “othered” almost everywhere you go. There will be many opportunities to explain the stereotypes, to talk about The Beverly Hillbillies and corrupt politicians and coal mining. People like me are used to code-switching—to suppressing our accents when we feel we have to, to “pass” for something we aren’t. To be from Appalachia—and have (as some think) the bad luck to have remained here—is something beyond the understanding of many Americans outside the region. It’s acceptable to vacation here, to own a second or third home here. But to claim a deeply rooted ancestry in Appalachia is to invite scorn, mistrust, and mockery, encompassed in the phrase “Paddle faster, I hear banjos.”
On the southern horizon, ever present in my life here, rises Mt. Pisgah and the Rat. I grew up on stories of that distinctively shaped mountain and spent much of my teen years driving the curving road of Pisgah Highway, too fast, too confident. Pisgah and the Rat is part of the warp and weft of our folklore, but to dig past the story fed to tourists and other outlanders is to expose the rocky layers of Christianity and colonization that permeate the region. To understand Mt. Pisgah in western North Carolina is to bear witness to genocide and indifference, to hold a vessel that is ancient and modern. This is a microcosm of all of Appalachia but especially here where there is no coal, only jewels. Still the people are lost and hopeless, with rubies in the ground at their feet.
To understand Mt. Pisgah is to visit Deuteronomy, specifically Chapter 3. I don’t follow biblical teaching, being neither Jewish (those for whom these books of Moses were supposedly written) nor Christian. Peculiar to have been raised here and not be an adherent to one or the other popular flavors of Protestant Christianity, but there it is. I was born into a lapsed Methodist family on my mother’s side and a lapsed Baptist one on my father’s side. That unbaptized and unchurched status has afforded me many freedoms, most of which I’ve tasted, many to excess.
The children of Israel, as you may recall from Sunday school or vacation Bible school class (or from that awful Charlton Heston movie we always watched at Easter), wandered about in the desert for forty years following their freedom from bondage in Egypt, bondage not meaning then what it does now. Forty years to travel a few hundred miles, as punishment for golden calf shenanigans and the Twelve Spies lying about the land of milk and honey. Moses had led his people out of bondage in Egypt and across Sinai to the land their god had promised them.
This land was fertile and the landscape held water sources, vineyards, and pastureland. Dreaming of such a place while cursed to wander in the desert must’ve been a sort of respite along the way. Let’s focus on that land as a dream, as a vision of a hopeful future. Let’s also not forget that both lands—the mythical one in the Middle East and the one that straddles two counties in western North Carolina—had another thing in common. While undoubtedly fecund, they were also occupied.
After all that bondage-breaking and traveling, Moses was not allowed to enter this rich and promised land. My sources couldn’t quite agree on why. Possibly because he broke the original Ten Commandments, but the answer seems to lie in another Old Testament book, Numbers. In the desert of Zin, the god of Abraham specifically told him to speak to this particular rock, the Meribah, and it would give the people water. Instead, he struck it twice with his staff. The rock did produce water and the people quenched their thirsts. But because he disobeyed direct orders, Moses could only view the promised land from the top of Mt. Pisgah. (Some scholars say Mt. Pisgah is the same as Mt. Nebo. There’s a Nebo here too—southeast of our Mt. Pisgah.) Moses gazed upon that golden valley and died, probably from disappointment and annoyance.
Fast-forward to the eighteenth century and to this old, soft mountain range, with this hill with its peculiarly lumpy ridgeline. The Reverend George Newton is credited with naming the mountain because the land around it was lush and beautiful, a metaphorical land of milk and honey. This land—these southern highlands—were seen in the same abundant light, hence the renaming of the mountain and ridge. As with many naturally occurring oddities, Pisgah and the Rat lends itself to clinging shreds of folklore, looming large on the horizon and in the imagination.
The Rat creeps up the side of the mountain, like the mouse on the nursery rhyme’s clock. Consider that for a moment and imagine living in a world where a mouse running up a clock or a huge rat running up a mountain is a natural but notable occurrence. Any of us who have lived in an old house or a country house or substandard urban housing know the scrambling, scratching sound of a visiting mouse and can easily recognize the predations of its larger cousin the rat. Even as we look to renew our connection—or establish one—with these ancient mountains, we can be squeamish about sharing our living space with other animals, especially those we consider unwholesome or dangerous. Modern humankind, with its intentional quest to be separate from and superior to nature, is the real disease vector. In our sad and impossible quest to separate from land, history, and people, we lose so much that cannot easily be regained.
The Appalachian Mountains and their cultures are the constant butt of jokes throughout the rest of the country. It is one reason I don’t use words like hillbilly and backwoods in mixed company. It often sparks an odd distancing effect that horror film buffs call “urbanoia”—the paranoia of the city-dweller about rural or wild places and the people who live there. This does little to instruct outsiders about the true nature of the culture or to elevate the shame of so many of the region’s inhabitants. That self-loathing finds its historical expression in mass migration out of the region, in pained and painful memoirs, and in a lost generation of meth-addicted people.
Appalachia has long been a region of subsistence, creativity, and resilience, however. As the long-toxic extraction industry that is coal mining and its affiliates leaves the region it has despoiled for over a century, a vacuum forms. As the harsh and powerful Protestant religions loosen their grip on the people as those old-time adherents die off, it creates a space, making an opportunity for something new, and frankly healthier, to ride through this land of forest and smoke.
Many people, including those outside the region, are looking to older traditions of herbal healing, farming, and food preservation for clues about proceeding to not only live but figure out how to survive in the Appalachian Mountains’ future.
These are some of the oldest mountains in the world, and some of the oldest rivers in the world run through them. According to the Blue Ridge National Heritage organization, the New River and the French Broad River are older than the mountains themselves.1
New arrivals and visitors who come for the land (and not merely for the craft beer) are often struck with the feel of the place—hills old and low but somehow filled with a perceived power. Spurious urban myths arise with some frequency and feature a vortex here or a giant crystal buried there, but this is generally nonsense spun by profiteers or folks with agendas of their own. Some of them did feel something, though, and are looking for explanations in the iconic popular culture. The real story is much more complicated—and radically simpler.
The United States is a much-vaunted “melting pot” of cultures and ethnicities. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is also a land of nomads moving from their place of birth to various places of raising to college to jobs in various cities. The idea that several generations of the same family could or would choose to live in close proximity to one another has become an old-fashioned and unworkable notion. Employment, spouses, or toxic familial relationships take the young far from their genesis and into the wide world from whence they will only return for occasional holidays, weddings, and funerals.
This rootlessness is an interesting phenomenon, especially for those of us who were brought up in insular communities where your every move was judged and secrets could be rarely kept. In this strange land where rats climb mountains and unknowable lights skitter along ridgelines and forest floors, there still abide people who claim a long lineage in a central geographic location. This land is a holdover to another time: one of kindred bonds that are almost unbreakable, where blood feuds can transcend generations, and where old women carry secret knowledge. Here your mother’s mother might hold the mysteries of birthing, healing, and death. Here midwifery is a set of skills held with humility as well as a strange sort of pride. Here a woman can go out into the weedy edges of church parking lots, a tattoo joint, or a fast food parking lot and gather green plants for a remedy or for supper. These skills are much needed in the shifting chaos of the world, and we will go in search of some of them in these pages as it is made manifest right before our faces, hidden in plain sight.
Over a decade ago I was honored to present a paper at a colloquium at Harvard University. The gathering was called “Forging Folklore: Witches, Pagans, and Neo-Tribal Cultures” and was hosted by the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. I presented a paper called “Hillfolks’ Hoodoo and the Question of Cultural Strip-Mining.” It was a heady weekend and I met a handful of colleagues there who have become lifelong friends. It was a significant turning point in my outlook and my work.
The phrase cultural strip-mining was coined by traditional mountain storyteller Marilyn McMinn-McCredie, with whom I worked some years back. Cultural strip-mining is the act of extracting folkways from a culture while returning little or nothing to it. People from outside the culture suck up what they find appealing or can monetize and let the rest fall away or die beneath the wheels of progress. The culture gains little from the exchange and gives up precious materials that leave it weakened in some ineffable way.
When I teach classes in Appalachian folkways—including healing and magic—I am always careful to speak at length about the diversity and richness of the various cultures that make up Appalachia. Cultures. Plural. Many cultures. All those people who think the mountains are full of Beverly Hillbillies characters need to think again. I remember the delight I felt when artist and priestess Valeria Watson introduced me to the concept of “Affrilachia.” There have been people of African descent here for a very long time. Obviously, the Native Americans were here and the beauty and remoteness of the region have attracted many others. Some were brought here as enslaved or indentured people. Many sought out the mountain fastnesses because they wanted solitude for reasons of their own. Some were running from misdeeds elsewhere. Each group brings a different thread into the weaving that is Appalachia.
The outside world—the citizens of which I grew up calling “outlanders” and “flatlanders”—finds much here to delight in. The views from Parkway to Skyway will take your breath away, especially in autumn. Warming air after rain or a damp night brings wisps of mist that rise to become clouds. Predicted snowstorms may miss us entirely, and storms that were predicted to go north will happily dump a foot of snow, effectively shutting us down for twenty-four hours. Weather can’t be scheduled, as we have discovered in this time of shifting climate norms.
There is one thing all mountain people know about this land. Old as it is, the weather upon it is changeable and impactful. In this temperate rain forest, with its crags, hollows, and coves, predicting the weather is challenging as the weather is fickle. Working with the land and the weather patterns that affect it requires attention, experience, and luck, and that is reflected in folkways centering on weather.
This is my Appalachia, and I will take your hand, guide you through, and show you some treasures. But I must warn you that I am a generations-long denizen of this place and there will be stories and songs along the way. For now we will take the poorly maintained trail to the top of Mt. Pisgah.
Not as high as Mt. Mitchell nor as picturesque a walk as the one to Craggy Gardens, this trail has felt the tread of so many feet, human and otherwise. From here we can observe the changes in the landscape for quite a long way. Rippling like waves, the blue ridges go on and on, blocking our road to the horizon but not our view.
Driving into my part of the southern highlands from either east or west, there are places on the highway where the first real view of the mountains happens. That glimpse of that blue ridge makes my heart jerk a little bit, every time. I am of this place and that is often in sharp contrast to those who have come here in more recent times. My work is about these mountains and of these mountains, and these pages will turn on those traditions. The love of this place is wide as well as deep, and new people who understand this land have come to gradually absorb the energy of the region. Some of us are choosing to teach and write about this place in order to mitigate any cultural strip-mining and disrespect that may be a temptation. To look down your nose on a place where so much is willingly shared is to show yourself ill-mannered, greedy, and small.
In the 1960s, a school project in north Georgia turned into an encyclopedic collection of Appalachian history and folk skills that came to be called the Foxfire books. Badly behaved and willful students were sent back to their family elders to learn everything they could about their family histories and their grandparents’ lives. Those elders were happy to talk about their hard lives and the small beauties that made those lives bearable. The students began to get a sense of the value of their place in the world.2 It was an excellent idea and the result is a set of books that is still eagerly collected and pored over.
There is a center there now, in Mountain City, Georgia, where artists and scholars come to learn these old ways. The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center continues the work of those students, giving modern generations of Appalachian students a chance to understand the importance of the region and their place in it.
At the turn of the last century, before those unruly students badgered their grandmas about canning and their great-uncles about smithcraft, visitors to the Smoky Mountains were charmed by the old-fashioned way the people talked and were taken by the handicrafts their clever hands produced. They were also surprised and delighted to discover that many of the popular ballads could be traced back directly to Britain and Francis Child’s splendid collection. The songs had been passed down mouth to ear since the earliest migrations from that land to this.
These people came to be called “songcatchers.” John C. Campbell was one of several “reformers” who came into the southern highlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Concerned with the lack of education and the level of perceived poverty, these missionaries toured the area, talking to farmers about their farming methods and their lives. Campbell was recently married to Olive Dame, a folklorist, and they traveled together—he interviewing, she listening to ballads and tales. Campbell died in 1919, and Olive and her companion Marguerite Butler spent months visiting the folk high schools that flourished in Scandinavia. They returned to Brasstown, North Carolina, where they established a folk school, which they named after Campbell. The John C. Campbell Folk School survives to this day and does a brisk summer program of handicraft classes and arts programming.
The Campbells’ missionary zeal to better the lives of mountain people was clear, but some of the people who came into the region—before and after—cared only about what could be carried away. The Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to dam rivers to create lakes for recreation and tourism and for hydroelectric power for what’s called “rural electrification.” This began opening up the region to the scrutiny of a largely judgmental wider community.
When I spoke at that Harvard colloquium all those years ago, I quipped that I was everyone’s worst fear: an educated redneck. I was the first in my family to graduate from high school, went on to university, and, ultimately, achieved the highest degree then available in my field. That means I walk in several worlds and code-switch when I need to. I am a liminal woman who has got above her raising, neither the one thing nor the other but both and neither. I attend festivals and conferences hundreds of miles from home and talk endlessly about my beautiful broken culture. And I stay here, a few miles from the cove where I grew up, living in the same neighborhood near the old river that my great-grandparents moved into at the end of the nineteenth century. This old mill village has seen worse days, for now it is gentrified and in-filled, with the original mill housing tarted up and selling for shocking amounts of money.
One midsummer day I sat with two women from West Virginia, and we talked through some of these hard issues. Remember when mountain people prided themselves on their self-sufficiency? mused one. On their independence? When we had gumption, the other one said. Gumption, we repeat, nodding. Yes.
The old witches had gathered in the shade. We had finished a corn dolly class that included an informative talk about corn and all it does and is. We had a quick supper and soon settled into some good talk about balm of Gilead, goose grease, and the present status of Appalachia.
These two women are beautiful in a peculiarly mountain way. Clear skin, strong features, a deliberate eye. Their hands told of lives of work, but the nails were manicured and perfect. The smiles of Appalachian women are like a light coming on in the darkness, and you are fortunate to have one bestowed upon you.
What is wrong here, with our people? With us? I’ve written elsewhere about the ragged wound that plagues so much of the region and seems to fester more day by sad day. It’s economic, to be sure. No good jobs—not many jobs at all. People are scared and angry. Mining was good money at its peak, union labor in a lot of places. A man could do for his family, even if he ended his days too soon, with ruined lungs. The company took care of widows and orphans, and sons proudly followed their daddies underground. Every little company-owned house had a garden and the children had new shoes and good clothes. Money could be put back for a rainy day or a sick child or a ruined alcoholic relative.
Oxy. Meth. Heroin. Heroin laced with fentanyl. That’s the sequence of the drug invasions, according to the sisters. We recalled the 2013 documentary Oxyana and laughed bitterly to remember the days when we only worried about oxycodone. Now, of course, we know that oxycodone was an intentional scourge on people deemed unimportant, smallpox blankets for poor white people.
The deeper we dig into the various cause-and-effect streams that are modern Appalachia, the more likely we are to find an obvious point that is as true now as it was in the time of the Native removals. No group outside the region is likely to have the people and the land here as their first priority. As federal- and state-sanctioned pipelines burst through homesteads and forests, the people who live in those places have little or no agency as the wreckage breaks all around them. Companies set to frack a potentially gas-rich region are impervious to culture or land ownership. Eminent domain has always been an implacable process, rarely fought successfully, often bankrupting the property owners with lawyer and court fees long before a trial can run its course. And even when it doesn’t fall short, the damage is inflicted elsewhere—upon neighbors and forests and townships. When yet another mining company declares bankruptcy as the seams run out, to avoid pension and medical care payments, we must learn once again to rely on each other, to learn from each other and to have each other’s backs. When disaster strikes, we all decided, it is the people on the ground—those most deeply affected—who are often the first of the first responders. Our legendary self-reliance must come out of whatever closet we’ve left it in as we deal with the realities of modern American life. Relearning old skills is on the minds—and schedules—of many worried Americans. And it hasn’t been that long since the people of Appalachia knew a thing or two about making do and surviving in hard times.
And about magic, though that word is not so often used. This area has been settled by many people over its very long history. The nomadic Woodland-era folks came and went, as did DeSoto, Juan Pardo, and the other conquistadors, questing for gold for their Catholic majesties in Spain. So many tribal people here—to-ing and fro-ing, conquering and retreating—that it’s hard to name them all. Here in my little corner of the southern highlands, the land knew the Shawnee, the Creek, and of course the Cherokee. When my ancestors came, they brought with them their strict religion along with the well of custom and folk belief that color my life down to this very day.
Protestants. No frills, Nicene Creed Protestants. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Church of God. KJV Bible believers who had a strange fatalism about life, understanding that whatever was endured in the earthly realm gave you stars on your crown in heaven. My grandfather (technically, my step-grandfather but the only grandfather I had ever known) was a Methodist lay minister and a kindhearted man. He held an old-fashioned vision of the afterlife. In his heaven, there were pearl-encrusted gates, streets paved with gold, and the longed-for ability to play the harp. He had never been musically inclined, but he loved music and looked forward to his own seat in the heavenly orchestra. I know he is there, right now, plucking strings that never have to be tuned or changed.
These European immigrants brought healing techniques with them from their country of origin, and they understood healing in a broad sense that included healing the spirit and mending broken hearts as well as broken relationships. That sort of healing is my study as well as my practice, and I apply the word healing to many kinds of work in many situations. I generally don’t refer to myself as a healer because that feels bold and forward to me, and this work must always be done with humility and a sense of gratitude to the Greater Powers from whom the ability flows. We are merely vessels and messengers. I had a great-aunt who could remove warts. She was one of my grandmother’s older sisters and was admirably humble. She died before I was born, but I understand the treatment went something like this: You and your warts came to sit beside her, and she welcomed you with her soft voice. (My mother’s family were mostly soft-spoken but I understand my father’s family—especially the women—were blessed with sharp tongues and powerful lungs.) My great-aunt would lightly touch the bewarted place, rubbing it with her thumb. The whole time she’d be looking you right in the eye and murmuring, “I don’t know why folks come to me for this. I don’t have any skill at all. How is your mama doing? You give her a big old hug from me, won’t you, sugar?” The warts would fall off about three days later. But she never took credit. She had no skill in the matter and certainly no authority over warts.
Some of these folkways seem to be passed down through families by the family members who are the keepers of the collected lore. These are the oral histories that sometimes get broken in these years of far-flung families and of children who don’t have much interest in those old superstitious ways. This happened with the father of my best friend in high school. Only a few years ago this talented musician and scalawag asked me if I could tell him something. He was, he continued, the seventh son of a seventh son. I probably gasped because that is as near Appalachian royalty as I am ever likely to get. What am I supposed to know? he asked. My heart sank. I don’t know. Didn’t your daddy tell you? He shook his shaggy old head. He tried to, he said. But all I wanted to do was drink liquor and play music. He was an accomplished musician, playing professionally for much of his adult life. And he didn’t have seven sons so that he could pass the knowledge in the traditional fashion. He did have two sons and could’ve passed it on to them, not following the exact letter of the law. But it might not have worked even with the compromise. In any case, those skills and knowledge would have passed on with him when he left us only a few years later.
Oral traditions depend on several things. They must be shared. They must be heard. And they must be remembered. All of which run in a cycle throughout generations. When the line is broken—for whatever reason—that piece of the puzzle, that strand in the weaving, is lost for all time. In the long history of humankind on the planet, it is heartbreaking to think what has been lost through inattention, migration, war, and genocide. Most of it was probably simple things that made life a little easier or helped with birth or comforted the grieving.
The Ulster-Scots
Wart removal and blood binding and whatever we’ve lost—many of these things seem to come in batches to the people here who are of Scots-Irish descent. Also called the Scotch-Irish or the Ulster-Scots, these folks have a fascinating history that begins in the borderlands between Scotland and England. I grew up assured that part of my ancestry was Scots-Irish and that’s what made us proud and fierce, though no one in my family had possessed a nice lilting brogue for centuries. It was a given for many of us and I didn’t think much about it.
The Scots-Irish have been the subject of many books and films and among their numbers are the illustrious as well as the infamous: Andrew Jackson, Bill Clinton, Davy Crockett, June Carter Cash, Johnny Cash, Carrie Fisher, Martha Graham, Anjelica Huston, Dolly Parton, Edgar Allan Poe, Neil Armstrong, Rosa Parks, and Barack Obama.
Then I was introduced (or perhaps reintroduced) to a group of people known variously as the Border Reivers, the Moss Helmets, and the Steel Bonnets. How did I ever learn about them? What books or movie highlighted their escapades, those pirates on ponies?
They lived—and some still do—on the Anglo-Scots borders. When the two kingdoms skirmished into and out of each other’s homelands, the families in the border regions were always the first line of defense. Difficult to create and sustain a regular economy or a peaceful way of life when you were never safe from attack. These families lived as many tribal people, including their Gael ancestors, had: by raiding. Riding it was and is called, and if you say the two words back-to-back several times you’ll realize it’s the same word spoken with different dialects. Much of the old Reivers culture is robust, even to this day, though the raiding parties are largely symbolic, as far as I know.
The families along the border trusted neither state nor religious authority. They looked to the clan chieftain or the head of their extended family for wisdom. They were suspicious of outsiders, passionate, and quick to anger. We have records of their heart-rending ballads, courtesy of Sir Walter Scott. All those pieces came together for me to form a portrait of family and friends here in the mountains.
When James VI of Scotland became James I of the United Kingdom, one of the first things that everyone could agree on was that someone in authority needed to clear the lawless northern marches. (A march, by the way, is a border between realms, governed by a marquess or marquise.) With the union of the two kingdoms the word itself had to go and those areas became “shires.” The other thing that had to go were the Border Reivers. Some were rounded up and killed outright. Others became mercenaries on the continent. Some hid out in the rough country and lived to fight another day.
And a great chunk of them were picked up by their scruffy necks and transported into Ulster. In their excellent book From Ulster to Carolina: The Migration of the Scotch-Irish to Southwestern North Carolina, H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr. recount the rest of the story.3 The migration from Ulster through the Port of Philadelphia and down into the southern highlands of this old mountain chain is one of the foundation stones of the Appalachian story. But only one. I must reiterate that this is a region of many different cultures that have sometimes coexisted peacefully and sometimes not. To impose on it a sort of monolithic wash is to deny the various flavors a chance to be tasted on their own.
In their wonderful book Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr trace the journey of my people through the music that survives on both sides of the Atlantic. Early in the twentieth century, missionaries to the region (like the Campbells) were charmed by the music here, which seemed eerily familiar. These songcatchers tracked many of these old ballads back to the British Isles and Ireland. These ragged immigrants carried a remarkable cache of folkways with them to their new home—music, medicine, magic—that are still a vital part of Appalachian life.4 These aren’t the only influences, of course. But they are the ones that we will explore in the coming pages since they are the ones I know best.
For my purposes—and the purposes of this book—I will focus on my own flavor of this Appalachian buffet, the piece of it that claims me (at least partially) and the piece I know best. But I will happily sprinkle what I know of all the other flavors so you can have a taste of them.
I have a confession to make. It is one I have made before, so don’t clutch your pearls just yet. When I first started writing about and teaching these folkways, I was holding on to a fear that the modern world would soon smother these strange old ways. My work seemed to be to record them before they were lost. But I soon discovered these folkways are still being practiced by folks who learned them from family members or neighbors. Any time I get down to talking about this with people like me, whose families have lived in the region for many generations, I discover a new story or a new cure or a variation on something I already know. Like our Border Reiver ancestors, we have learned to be closed-mouthed with strangers until we feel safe.
Several years ago, I spoke at a small Baptist college about twenty minutes north of me. It was a women in religion class, and I was speaking about the resurgence of goddess worship, especially among feminists. I spoke my piece to a quiet group that took a few notes. The professor then asked me a question about my folk magic practice.
Now there was a group of stern young men seated on my left down the long table. They neither looked at me nor spoke to me until I began talking about cures, interesting and useful native plants, and my kinfolk. Those young men perked right up then and sat up. The allotted class time came to an end and the right-hand side of the table quickly decamped, checking their phones. The young silent fellows jumped up and surrounded me as I rose to leave. They told me about their grandmas and aunties and all the things they did that was exactly as I described. We talked there for about twenty minutes and as they left several of them shook my hand. Though I don’t know it for sure, I suspect some of them went home to tell their grandma or auntie about the woman from Asheville that talked in their class. And I fancy a couple of them were the first college students in their families, as I was.
As I ramble around the Appalachian hills and wander farther afield in my work as teacher and preacher, I marvel at all the pieces of history and culture that weave together to form this place. With new influences coming in all the time, the southern highlands are a place where there are many flavors, flavors that somehow blend together to enhance the whole.
Some Witchery: Appalachian Meditation
Stilling the noise all around us so that we may rest or think deeply is a common problem in our over-caffeinated world. Many of us have tried Eastern styles of meditation and found them difficult to master to the point of being useable. A walking meditation is a good way to clear your head and get some gentle exercise. This only requires that you walk in a place where you don’t have to be mindful of traffic, where you can let your mind wander.
On those days when walking isn’t possible, consider a candle meditation. Make yourself a cup of whatever warming beverage you prefer. Take your drink to a quiet place, whether porch or kitchen or backyard. Light a candle of any size and color and sit in front of it. Take time drinking your drink and as you sip it, simply look at the candle. That’s all. And here’s what is likely to happen: I recommend you do this for seven days in a row to master the technique. For the first few days, your thoughts will jump around, and it will be difficult to look at the little flame. After that, you’ll find that the thoughts that are jumbling your mind will fall to the bottom and the things you want to consider (whether it’s solving a problem or coming up with a new idea) will stay present in the front of your mind. A couple more days of this practice will focus those present and helpful thoughts and the time will seem to pass much more quickly.
This is a good way to start your day or something to consider adding to your bedtime routine, especially if you are looking to practice more lucid dreaming. It is also a way to settle your nerves after a shock and to bring your mind and your body into better communication.
11. “French Broad River,” Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, accessed June 23, 2020, https://www.blueridgeheritage.com/destinations/french-broad-river/.
2. Eliot Wigginton, ed., Foxfire, 12 vols. (New York: Anchor Books, 1972–2004).
3. H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, From Ulster to Carolina: The Migration of the Scotch-Irish to Southwestern North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1998).
4. Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).