The quiet before you begin again.
A waning moon ritual for releasing what the next cycle doesn't need.
We're in the dark part of the lunar cycle: the waning crescent, the thinnest sliver, the moon disappearing just before it vanishes completely.
This is not a week for starting things. It's a week for finishing them. For letting the last of what doesn't belong in the next chapter fall away quietly, without ceremony, without a fight.
In four days, the New Moon arrives in Cancer (home, safety, emotional truth). But you don't arrive at a New Moon empty-handed. You arrive having released what you were carrying that didn't belong to the next version of you.
This week is that release.
✨ SPELL
This ritual isn’t about belief. It’s about repair.
Capitalism has broken your relationship to time—flattened your rhythms, punished your rest, and convinced you every moment must be productive.
The moon disagrees.
Each new and full moon, I’ll hand you a small ritual. Not to “manifest” or optimize, but to reattune your body to a different pace. One that honors cycles, not calendars.
Pay attention to the moon. It’s not aesthetic—it’s antidote.
The Quiet Letting Go
A waning crescent ritual for clearing space before the new cycle begins.
Supplies:
A small bowl of water
A pinch of salt
Steps:
Stir the salt into the water.
Name, silently or aloud, one thing you're ready to stop carrying into the next cycle.
Say: "I release this quietly. I don't need a reason. I just need the space."
Pour the water out. Outside, if you can; down the drain if you can't.
This isn't a dramatic letting go. It's the quiet kind. The kind that doesn't need witnesses.
✊ HEX
You don’t need a rundown of the headlines. You’re living them. Whether you’re in the U.S. or just suffering under its ripple effects, the harm is real—and relentless.
This isn’t catharsis. It’s counter-spell.
Each HEX is a ritual of refusal—a channel for holy rage, spiritual disruption, and deliberate, directed dissent.
Here’s who we’re targeting. And what to do about it.
We Already Knew
*sigh* Let's talk about Graham Platner.
For those catching up: Platner was the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. A combat veteran, an oyster farmer, a populist progressive who won his primary by a wide margin and was supposed to be the person who finally unseated Susan Collins.
He dropped out this week after a former girlfriend accused him of raping her in 2021.
But here's what I need to name before we get to the hex:
He was asked. Repeatedly. By multiple people. Before the primary. After the primary. By journalists, by party officials, by allies who had heard things and needed to know: is there anything else? Is there anything we should know?
Every time, he said no.
And every woman I know who had been paying attention; every woman who had read between the lines, who had clocked the tattoo and the Reddit posts and the history of "disturbing behavior toward past romantic partners" that was right there in public reporting — already knew.
Not the specific allegation. Not the name. Not the date.
But the shape of it. The feeling of it. The particular texture of a man who has been allowed to believe that the rules don't apply to him, who has learned that charm and credentials and the right politics can paper over almost anything, who has practiced the performance of accountability without ever actually being accountable.
We knew.
Not because we're clairvoyant. Because we've met him before. In a different body, with a different name, in a different context. The specific details change. The shape doesn't.
This is not just a Maine problem. It is not just a Democratic Party problem, though it is absolutely that, too. It is the problem of a world that has organized itself around protecting men like this; that creates the conditions in which a man can do what he allegedly did and then run for Senate and say no when asked if there's anything else and be believed.
The audacity is not incidental. The audacity is the point. The audacity is what happens when a system teaches men that their comfort matters more than women's safety, that their political utility matters more than the truth, that they can ask to be trusted and be trusted, again and again, until the moment they can't.
And here's what I want to say about that audacity, because it connects to something much larger than one man in Maine:
Nolan Wells was 18 years old. He went to Horn Island with a group of white friends on the Fourth of July. They left without him. His body was found three days later. His family has retained Ben Crump. They are demanding transparency, an independent autopsy, and answers.
The sheriff said they're investigating it just like any other case.
I want you to sit with that phrase. Just like any other case. In Mississippi. On the Fourth of July. A Black 18-year-old was left alone on an island by his white friends.
I am not going to speak to what happened to Nolan Wells. That is not my story to tell and the investigation is ongoing and his mother deserves to be the one who carries his name. What I will say is this: his mother knew something was wrong the moment her son didn't come home. She knew in her body before she knew in words.
This knowing — this body-level, pre-verbal, dismissed-as-hysteria knowing — is a thread that runs through every story I've been sitting with this week.
Tamla Horsford was 40 years old. She was found dead in the backyard of a home in Cumming, Georgia, in 2018, after a slumber party with white football moms. The county ruled it an accident. A second autopsy told a different story. No one was ever prosecuted.
Since 2000, at least eight Black men have been found hanging from trees in Mississippi alone. All ruled suicides. Trey Reed, 21, found hanging on the campus of Delta State University in 2025 with reported injuries that his family said made a self-inflicted hanging physically impossible. Tory Medley, found hanging from a tree at a Wisconsin golf course. Kyle Bassinga, 21, found hanging in a Cobb County park in February 2026. Ruled a suicide before the investigation was complete. But we all know Black people don’t hang themselves from trees, right?
Right?
A 2026 report by the civil rights organization JULIAN, inspired by Ida B. Wells' "A Red Record," documented more than 70 suspected modern-day lynchings in the Deep South since 2000.
And then there's this: Trump called FIFA to overturn a red card for Folarin Balogun, a decision FIFA has not reversed in over 60 years of World Cup play. He called. The suspension was lifted. Trump then noted, proudly, that he "didn't know what the hell a red card was."
Julia Ioffe noted the irony: Balogun only qualifies for the US team because of birthright citizenship, which Trump just tried to eliminate.
The audacity, again. Everywhere. Consistent.
Here is the throughline:
A man who allegedly raped a woman was asked if there was anything else and said no and was believed.
A Black teenager was left on an island and the investigation proceeds just like any other case.
A Black woman was found dead after a slumber party and no one was ever prosecuted.
More than 70 suspected lynchings in 25 years, all ruled suicides.
A president called an international governing body to overturn a rule for a player who only exists on his team because of a right he tried to destroy.
This is not a series of unrelated incidents. This is a system. A system that decides whose word gets believed. Whose death gets investigated. Whose body gets protected. Whose audacity gets rewarded.
And the answer to that system is not white feminism. I want to be precise about that, because white feminism is the same shit with different aesthetics. The same hierarchy. The same centering of the comfortable. The same willingness to throw the most vulnerable under the bus when solidarity gets inconvenient.
The answer is what Ida B. Wells knew. What indigenous governance has practiced for centuries. What Black women have been saying, loudly and specifically and at great personal cost, for as long as this country has existed.
Landback. Reparations. Listen to Black women. Center the most vulnerable. Not as charity, not as optics, but as the actual organizing principle of how power works.
Matriarchal governance doesn't mean women in charge of the same hierarchy. It means the hierarchy dissolved. It means decisions made by asking: who is most harmed? What do they need? How do we organize ourselves so that the most vulnerable are protected first?
It means a world in which a man cannot ask, "Is there anything else?" and be believed on the sheer force of his own credibility.
It means a world in which a Black mother's knowing — before the words, before the evidence, before Ben Crump — is treated as information rather than hysteria.
It means a world in which Tamla Horsford's injuries tell a story that gets heard.
It means a world in which 70 hangings don't get ruled as suicides.
It means a world in which power cannot call a governing body and overturn a rule it didn't know existed five minutes ago.
That world requires us to dismantle this one.
So today we hex the audacity.
We hex the men who say "no, nothing else" and are believed.
We hex the investigations that proceed just like any other case when they are not like any other case.
We hex the rulings that close before the evidence is examined.
We hex the 70 suspected lynchings that were called suicides.
We hex the phone call that overturned 60 years of precedent because the president wanted it to.
We hex the white feminism that mistakes representation for liberation.
We hex the hierarchy in all its forms. The one that decides whose body is credible, whose death is investigated, whose knowing is trusted.
And we bless the knowing itself.
The body-level, pre-verbal, can't-quite-name-it-yet knowing that women carry.
That Black mothers carry.
That indigenous communities have carried and named and organized around for generations.
That knowing is not hysteria.
It is the most accurate instrument available to us.
And the world we are building, the one worth building, is organized around it.
🔥 On The Knowing
We already knew. We have always known. The question was never our perception. It was whether the system would believe us.
Hex the system. Build the one that does.
📞 Action
If you want to support the work of organizations centered on the knowing that this hex names:
Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting at idabwellssociety.org — journalism that centers the stories that don't get told.
The National Indigenous Women's Resource Center at niwrc.org — indigenous women-led work on safety, sovereignty, and governance.
The African American Policy Forum at aapf.org — founded by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the work of intersectionality made policy.
And if you are in Maine, the Democratic Party has a July 27 deadline to name a new nominee. Pay attention to who they choose and whether the women who knew are part of that conversation.
In the quiet and the clearing,
Keli Lyn Jewel
PS: If you got an email from me earlier today, you already know what I've been building toward. I'm not going to repeat myself here. That email said what it needed to say. But if you're holding something heavier than a ritual can lift while you sit with it, maybe open that email.
