10/11/2026
Sunday Reflections | Who Gets to Take Up Space?
Something happened this week that I have been sitting with. A member of our community sent a letter expressing concerns about the upcoming Northumberland Witch Walk to the township and municipal election candidates, including those running for school board trustee. There were questions about permits, road closures and logistics, all things that could easily have been answered by contacting us. But underneath those questions was something else. She expressed concern about the message the event might be sending to children and young people, and about the “values, messages and influences” being introduced into our community.
I will admit that I had a difficult time receiving that. Not simply because I am one of the organizers, but because the concern came from another woman. There was an irony in it that I could not ignore.
The Northumberland Witch Walk is not about promoting witchcraft. It isn’t a Halloween attraction and it isn’t asking anyone to adopt a particular spiritual belief. At its heart, it is about remembering what happened when the word witch became a weapon. It is about the tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, who were accused, persecuted and killed. It is about remembering what can happen when we make people frightening enough that their mistreatment becomes acceptable.
And here we were, centuries later, having a conversation about whether an event containing the word witch represents values and influences that should concern the community.
I don’t share this to condemn the woman who wrote the letter. Doing that would undermine the very point I am trying to make. I am more interested in what fear does to all of us. What happens when another person, belief or way of living feels unfamiliar? Why does unfamiliarity so easily become suspicion? Why do we sometimes move from this isn’t for me to perhaps this shouldn’t be allowed space at all?
Fear has always been extraordinarily effective at creating an “us” and a “them.” Once someone becomes them, we no longer have to be curious about who they actually are. We can fill in the blanks ourselves. We assign motives, values and intentions without ever sitting across from them and asking a question.
Perhaps what affected me most was that this came from another woman. Women have inherited a long history of being told how much space we are permitted to occupy. We have been told when we are too loud, too angry, too ambitious, too independent, too opinionated or simply too much. So there is something particularly painful about watching women participate in deciding which other women are acceptable enough to take up space.
But this reaches far beyond women. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to think of acceptance as though it were a limited resource. If your beliefs are acknowledged, mine are somehow diminished. If your culture is celebrated, mine loses importance. If you are given space, there must somehow be less space for me.
Giving another person space does not take mine away.
Someone else’s spirituality does not diminish mine. Someone else’s celebration does not erase my traditions. I can encounter an event, a church, a Pride celebration, a cultural festival or a spiritual practice that has absolutely nothing to do with me and simply allow it to belong to someone else.
I think that may be one of the harder lessons of living in community. Community cannot mean creating a place where everyone believes the same things. It means learning to live beside people whose lives and beliefs may be very different from our own. We can ask questions. We can disagree. We can decide something isn’t for us. But there is an important difference between saying, I don’t understand this and deciding, therefore it should not exist.
I wish this woman had come and spoken to us. I wish she had asked what the Witch Walk was about before deciding what message it was sending. Perhaps she still would not have agreed with it, and that’s okay. Agreement was never required.
Understanding requires conversation. And sometimes it requires allowing someone else to stand fully in their space without believing their presence somehow threatens our own.
The Witch Walk is ultimately about remembering what can happen when fear of difference becomes permission to other people.
Perhaps the fact that we are still having this conversation is exactly why we need to walk. 🌿
