Witchy Nyx

Aussie witch // Queer // Disabled // she/they 💜 Original Writings // Website 💜 Follows from @chaos-of-nyx

[witchynyx]

Hi, I'm Nyx (she/they)

By kinda-day-but-mostly-night* I help small businesses navigate the chaotic world of websites and branding [x], and when I'm not doing that, I'm working on my lil herbal/handmade/witchy biz (Nyx Apothecary) or my upcoming edition of Culpeper's Complete Herbal 🖤🌿✨

* I share a name with a goddess of night, I'm not a morning person.

I'm an AuDHD/disabled, mostly-housebound little weirdo, based in an inner-city apartment in Boorloo (so-called Perth, Western Australia) on Wadjuk Noongar boodjar.

My practice/path is a medly of green/kitchen/hearth witchery with a generous dash of druidry, and a side of spending way too much time reading weird old books.

I'm obsessed with wildcrafting/localising practices, decolonising, personalising, and understanding the why behind things (especially herb lore!).

I believe there is no line between what is mundane or magical, that science is merely magic we can measure, and that there are few things less satisfying to study than our local weeds!

My mundane and magical world-view was largely shaped by Sir Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld characters and stories kept me company growing up 💜

Age disclaimer: 30s. I don't share anything explicit.

[disabled-bug]

I’m so proud of people living with chronic health conditions. That shit is HARD. Idk who needs to hear this, but if no one else has said it: I’m proud of you. You’re sticking it out through so much pain and grief. That’s no small feat.

Every small thing you do for yourself health adds up. The grief is heavy and it comes from a place of love. The grief knows the pain is wronging you.

I’m proud of you. I hope on the good days you can be proud of yourself.

Keep going.

[chryza]

Me when I see the word beaʃte

In my head: ah! The archaic form of the letter s! Being a casual scholar of linguistics myself I am well aware that though it resembles the letter f in modern typography in fact it is phonetically identical to s! How foolish it would be to stumble into such a simple lexiconical pitfall!

Me aloud to myself every time: beeft

[homoquartz]

humans are born with a drive to appreciate art. we love color, we love music, we love dance, even as infants. we have an instinct to sculpt in clay and draw on walls, even to fix blocks into expressive shapes, or tell stories with our toys. these things are universal, all cultures have stories and songs and dances and textiles and pottery and beauty. art is something we all have in us.

[redstonedust]

its good to acknoweldge the hollowness of revenge but sometimes you really do just need a story about someone who gets hurt and then kills and kills and kills and kills their enemies. its cathartic, babey.

[awesome-chameleon]

"there's nothing that can bring my loved one back, so there's no point in killing you" and "there's nothing that can bring my loved one back, so there's nothing that can save you" are two themes that can and should co-exist

[breelandwalker]

"nothing will ever undo what you did to me, so killing you solves nothing" and "nothing will ever undo what you did to me, but at least i can make sure you won't do it to anyone else" are also themes that can and should co-exist

[witchynyx]

"person with nothing left to lose is pushed past the brink (and you'll wish you hadn't done the pushing)" is honestly one of my favourite genres (which often, but doesn't always overlap with at least one of the above)

[contemptible-scoundrel]

fuuuck I could use a mysterious benefactor right now

[pathandpractice]

Another Path & Practice Ask Game

Some tag users were saying they wish people would ask them about their practice, and we could use a little spring joy. So here's a little ask game for all of the tag members and all of the other witches out there. Send emojis to ask questions, or send a question of your own. Remember to keep the game going by sending asks to the person you reblogged from.

🌿 What is your "witchcraft origin story"? 🍃 What were your first magical influences vs your influences now? 🧭 If your personal practice had its own unique craft/tradition name, what would it be? 🪶 What specific tradition(s) (if any) do you follow? If you're more eclectic, explain how you put it all together, 🕯️ What does a day-in-the-life look like in your practice? 🧰 What type of workings do you do most frequently? 🌙 What tools do you use the most? 🕊️ What animals and land features do you most often use in your practice and how? 🧠 Do you prefer to do divination with tools or with the inner sense? What are your preferred methods? 🔄 What’s something you believe about magic that’s changed over time? ✨Are you a mundane before magic, mundane beside magic, or magic first type of practitioner? 🌧️ What has been your greatest challenge within your practice? 📚 What magical books are you currently reading / did you last read? 🌱 What is something you are learning, exploring or improving in your magical craft? 💖 What about your practice brings you the most joy?

Bonus:

Send 🔮 for a simple divination reading

Send ❓ along with a custom question not included here

[sagittariuswitchery]

when i first began working with herbs, i thought rosemary was overrated. it’s not native to my ancestral lands or where i now live, nor had i used it much in the kitchen…

it wasn’t until years ago when my mother introduced me to her own rosemary plant. she also hadn’t had much of a relationship with it (she’s caribbean) until she bought her own and began caring for it, but wow did that relationship grow fast and strong!!

i watched how my mother talked to it. she’d compliment her plant, tell it about her day, and ask it how it’s doing. she’d touch the rosemary, brushing it so its scent would release and fill the room. i could feel how deeply her rosemary plant loved her, and since we’re family, i felt the rosemary begin to love me too.

this is what witches mean when they tell beginners working with herbal magic to build relationships with their herbs.

i shrug at the idea of any herb being “universal,” but because of the relationship i’ve built with the plant, those “universal” qualities feel unlocked for me. the rosemary spirit protects me and my family, and i can sense when it wants to be included in my spellwork, which happens to be most of the time. this can be true with any herb or any spell ingredient. i believe your relationship determines its strength and how versatile it can be. 🌿

[searedwithwitchyscars]

if i pull out my jar of salt, open it and start throwing it at you, it means you need to get your ass the fuck out of my space

[creature-wizard]

Strongly recommend Braiding Sweetgrass if you want to develop a well-rounded ethical framework for interacting with nature. Some of you are kinda puritanical in your thinking and it's helping neither you nor nature.

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[reading-writing-revolution]

[lgbtqiatext]

[depsidase]

[amazon-me-bitches]

LEAVE THE LEAVES, IT DOES NOT HURT YOUR GRASS GROWTH AT ALL BTW. anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something, LEAVES HELP THE SOIL AND ARE BIODEGRADABLE. STOP THE BIG LAWN GOLF COURSE BULLSHIT.

also if you rake up your lawn the very second a single leaf falls on it I kind of never want to hear you on about how you "LOVE FALL SO MUCH" again. bitch no you don't or you would like it to LOOK like fall too. every single excuse I have heard for keeping your creepy sodded weed free/life free lawn has been stupid as all get out. -Leaves are good for soil -"weeds" are not a real thing and your yard should have diversity and natural growth in it, especially clovers!! -you want butterflies and bees to thrive don't mow your yard in the fall/winter they hibernate in the tall grass also birds need seeds from it sometimes. -it should be illegal to not have a tree in your yard, at your first chance please try to plant some trees, they have endless benefits. -stfu about 'ew but bugs!' please get off the internet and go touch grass, I am actually worried for you. -Don't over till your soil, once topsoil is gone its pretty much gone, it takes YEARS to rebuild it. THIS IS HOW THE DUSTBOWL HAPPENED AND IT CAN AND WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. treat the land with respect.

[plantnerderyallday]

It not hurting grass growth is entirely dependent on species of tree and climate. Here, oaks and big leaf maples will 100% kill off patches of grass.

The solution to this, of course, is to leave the leaves, note how far out from the trunk(s) they kill grass, and declare that area a garden bed and plant it with understory plants/plants that can handle getting a bunch of leaves dumped on them. Ideally with plants native to your area and that naturally grow under that species of tree or similar. But you can also throw in some helebores and bleeding hearts to appease HOAs/neighbors with opinions.

Also, do keep an eye out for non-native weeds that like to create monocultures. Everyone should be familiar with noxious weeds and invasive species and know how to deal with them. They can and will crowd out native species and this does have negative effects.

A lot of bees and other insects do hibernate in the hollow stems of plants and birds feed on seed heads, so it's a good idea to find out what plants native to your area provide that kind of habitat and include them in your garden. Here we have a species of golden rod, pearly everlasting, triteleia etc. I wouldn't recommend demanding on lawn gasses to provide this ecosystem niche as there's a very good chance they aren't native to your area and some insects won't use them because of that.

Another note: a lot of people are worried about bugs, and I get that. But here's the thing: in a balanced ecosystem, the predators of bugs are there as well, so you'll actually see fewer of the "pest" bugs. Pesticides are usually non-selective, meaning they kill everything. "Pest" bugs reproduce and thus recover their populations much faster than predator insects, so by spraying you end up with population explosions of whatever was bothering you in the first place. What really helps is creating habitat for predator species because they then keep those populations under control. This is one of the ways organic vegetable producers do it.

[thesophistiicate]

if you want to experience life more deeply you have to find more beauty. stop training yourself to dismiss, to mock, to assume the worst all the time — when you do this you build walls between yourself and the world. and after a while you stop feeling the warmth of it entirely.

beauty requires openness. it asks you to let things reach you, to soften enough to be moved. it’s not naive to see beauty everywhere—it’s a skill, a form of intelligence, a kind of quiet bravery. because it is so much easier to critique than to create, to detach than to engage, to dismiss than to love.

let yourself be affected. let yourself find things beautiful and let that be enough. life is not asking you to be cool, sitting on the sidelines and nitpicking everything. it’s asking you to see life and experience it fully.

[rythms-of-synthax-deactivated20]

Quote of the day

[baffledtreesquid]

I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych

[headspace-hotel]

I don't even bother hardly to orrect my typos anymore. It is just affirmation that these words were typed by the hands of human being and not extruded by a fucnking AI

[headspace-hotel]

one of my professors was like (paraphrasing) "AI makes you sound the same as everybody else. The idea of a single "correct" English is racist and flattens the diversity of people. I don't care about grammar outside of the writing being understandable. I want to hear YOUR voice, Your dialect the unique way you communicate."

I have been more appreciative of the rough edges of human communication since chatGPT came to be. The misspellings and turns of phrase that real people produce.

The inherently flawed nature of an alive thing vs. the empty perfection of something that never had life in it at all

[nemfrog]

Large toadstool. Practical Botany. 1911.

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