Which World is Real?

My Night with the Witches

This past Saturday, I found myself wandering through the Magic Market, a gathering of witches and the witchy-at-heart that transformed an ordinary space, the Orange County Heritage Museum, into something extraordinary. Eighty some vendors filled the venue with their metaphysical tools and occult books, vintage jewelry and original art, healing plants and handcrafted body care. But beyond the marketplace, there were sound baths and workshops, tarot readers and palmists, astrologers and energy healers, a whole ecosystem of alternative healing practitioners serving a surprisingly large and engaged community.

The event reminded me of Annie Finch's contribution to An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping. Finch, author of The Poetry Witch: Little Book of Spells and founder of Poetry Witch Ritual Theater, wrote an entry on witchery that felt perfectly at home in that collection of unconventional healing modalities. Walking through the Magic Market, I was grateful she'd claimed that space.

But as I took in the sights and sounds, the gentle chiming of singing bowls, the earnest conversations about crystal properties, the careful attention being paid to tarot spreads, I couldn't help but think about how my own field views all of this. How would my colleagues in psychology and psychotherapy react to this scene? Many with skepticism, certainly. Perhaps with condescension. Maybe with the kind of clinical detachment that reduces rich human experiences to pathology or delusion.

The Question of Which World We Call "Real"

This tension led me to a troubling realization about worlds, the multiple worlds we inhabit and the ones we choose to validate. My field might dismiss the Magic Market as fantasy, as people escaping into an imaginary realm of crystals and energy work and ancient wisdom. The "real world," we're told, is the one where wars rage and children starve, where violence and suffering dominate the headlines, where rational materialism reigns supreme.

But here's what struck me: somehow, that world of war and famine and murdered children, that world of constant crisis and systemic brutality, has become the normal world, the rational world, the world we're supposed to take seriously. Meanwhile, a world where people gather to heal each other, to share ancient practices of care and connection, to create beauty and meaning through ritual and art, that world gets labeled as fantasy.

What does it say about us that we've decided a world built on harm is more real than a world built on healing?

The Politics of World-Building

I'm not naive about this. Every community has its problems, its blind spots, its potential for harm. The metaphysical community isn't exempt from critique, and some aspects of these alternative healing spaces deserve thoughtful examination. But critique is easy, it's become our default mode, our intellectual reflex.

What's harder is recognizing that all worlds are constructed. The "real world" of endless war and scarcity isn't more natural or inevitable than the world of the Magic Market. It's just the world that our systems of power and privilege have taught us to see as normal.

When we privilege certain ways of understanding reality while marginalizing others, we're making political choices about which kinds of knowledge matter, which forms of healing deserve respect, which communities get to define what's real.

Choosing Our Worlds

I haven't resolved the larger questions this experience raised for me. I'm still thinking about world-building and the worlds we marginalize versus the ones we privilege. I'm still wondering what it means to practice psychology in a field that might pathologize the very communities offering some of the most genuine care I've witnessed.

But I know this much: given the choice between the world that's supposedly "real" with its emphasis on scarcity, competition, and inevitable suffering, and the world I encountered at the Magic Market, with its focus on healing, connection, and ancient wisdom, I know which one feels more alive to me.

At the end of the day, I would rather be with the witches.

Peace.

*Writing process note: I recorded my initial thoughts about this experience as a voice memo, then worked with AI to help structure and refine those reflections into this essay. The ideas and perspectives are entirely my own.*