Crasses et Voluptés

 ‘It's like finding a flower in a dumpster,’ someone said to me, walking together after midnight.
We were talking about trauma. About the terrible things people do to one another. About the unavoidable, seemingly insurmountable legacies of trauma — that which we've endured, and that which we and/or our ancestors have perpetrated. Colonisation and land theft, slavery, rape, genocide, war, torture. Misogyny and sexism, racism, ableism and madphobia, transphobia and transmisogyny, poverty. Devastation. The scope of all this pain and the daily mundaneness of it, too. Inescapable.
We were trying to find the good in the world, the flower in the dumpster.
The conversation began when I mentioned how often men catcall me, how often men approach me on the street, hit on me, harass me, take my photo. How often they refuse to ignore me, refuse to leave me alone. How often they refuse to hear my no when they try to ask me out, try to get my number. How often they follow me, follow me home.
I was talking about how I like meeting strangers, like talking to people on the street, sometimes even — gasp! — like talking to men, but that with all the trauma they've caused me and my friends, caused so many, caused the world, everything I can't know about a stranger and their intentions makes this feel impossible.
All the devastation.
I don't think it's impossible, though. I'm a witch. I don't think anything is impossible. I've cast impossible spells and watched them come true. I've survived too much to refuse belief.
And I find signs. I find signs everywhere. I slink around the city collecting what I need from the trash. The sandwiches, the salads, the desserts, the fruits and vegetables, the flowers: they belong to me as much as they belong to the city, as much as I — with my black cat stare and crooked-body, my claws and my spells, my friends and my art — belong to the city.
As I prowl through the streets searching for food and treasure, those black cats who appear as symbols of my own strength, luck, and survival, don't just cross my path, don't just share a furtive glance and saunter away. They come right up to me, their paws tickling my toes, nose sniffing my ankles. Their tails spiral and swirl around my body and then around my cane, and I realise my cane is my own tail, too: the magical fifth limb giving me stability and presence, giving me access. Like the brazen squirrels and gutsy raccoons, those underappreciated misfit creatures that cultivate a sense of belonging wherever they go, we each have our fifth limbs holding us steady.
I've never found a single flower in a dumpster. That's true. But after that conversation with my friend, through the devastation, flowers began to appear. But not single flowers, not loner flowers.
Entire fucking bouquets.

Maranda Elizabeth - Trash-Magic: Signs & Rituals for the Unwanted

from: Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers and Magical Rebels on Summoning the Power to Resist