This time in the Magick Kitchen podcast, we're talking weather magic. I'm Leandra Witchwood and I'm Elyse Wells. And welcome to the Magick Kitchen Podcast, where we talk about Magick Kitchen, witchcraft, herbs, and everything in between.

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The biggest question I think people have about weather magic is: How do you think you—little human, little puny you—have a right to change the weather? Have an ability to affect the weather? How dare you! That was my inner voice when I first started with witchcraft.

Because actually, that was your inner mean girl.

Yeah, like when I first started with weather—because as a kid, and we always go back to this, but it really is true—as a kid, we really trust ourselves so much more. And it's the world that makes us not trust ourselves.

But I really had such a deep connection with land and weather as a kid. I would be able to just wish for more clouds and they'd come in, or wish for rain and it would fall. And I never really questioned it. I just thought they understood what I wanted. And it wasn't a lot to ask. Like, I was never like, "Oh, it's hot summer—I want it to be snowing." That's—I guess maybe the other question is people think that’s what we’re saying. You know?

You can't do that.

No. No. And that’s not in the interest of the Earth either. It’s not in alignment with—we’ll talk about the ethics of weather magic too.

But no, I mean, it was a day that was normal and there were some clouds, and I just wanted a few more so that I wouldn't get sunburned, you know, playing kickball with my friends. Little things like that. That was where I was coming from with it, and it almost always worked.

And then I moved to the Middle East, and we got rain maybe two days a year. A year—like in a 12-month calendar year. And I could not. That was where I learned that there must be more to it, because I could not just get any weather I wanted. But I would be able to pull in the clouds, or if rain was forecasted and I did want it that day, I could make it happen a little bit.

You know, it was like small stuff that I wanted, but it still felt good to have that connection. And I think that's where weather magic is strongest—when it's done with the intent and the intention. Like, I wanted to grow my relationship with the weather spirits. That's where I came from with it.

And I think the important part of that—that you're not directly emphasizing but emphasizing—is that it's not coming from a place of entitlement. It's not coming from a place of demand. I don't demand the weather to do what I wish.

Actually, I can give you a really good example, because it just came this month when I was at the Faerie Festival. It was forecasted to pour 100% all weekend. It was supposed to be muddy and gross, and we’re right on a peninsula, basically. We're on a point—a rocky point. It's literally the name of the park. And so the wind can get really, really brutal because we're jetting out into the ocean a little bit.

So, looking at the weather forecast and knowing that this is like death for outdoor festivals—weather like that—I started the weather magic then. I started it like Wednesday before. And it wasn't a demand that the storm move on or miss us. It was a request. And of course, I petitioned deities—the weather deities that I work with.

But it was more of: I placed myself in the center of that festival, and I made myself the brightest shining star I could. So this visualization of: I am the warmth that’s pushing the weather outward and requesting of the weather to just wait. Just—you can, Monday, Tuesday, do whatever you’re going to do. But just kind of give us a break, give us some reprieve. Like, just asking nicely, but also in that moment standing in my own power, creating this sense of sunshine that kind of pushes those clouds out a little bit, creating that bubble around the festival so that it wasn’t so bad.

And guess what? It wasn’t.

Yeah, we had some rain. It was cold the first day. But when the weather needed to pull back, it did.

An example of that is when we were packing up—we had no rain while we were packing up. And that is the worst time—to be in the middle of a downpour and to have wind and anything like that. Like, we were supposed to have winds of 5 to 10 miles an hour. We did not really have that. We were supposed to have torrential downpours the entire weekend. We did not have that.

And, you know, I'm not going to pat myself on the back saying, “Oh, look at what I did. I did a good thing for the festival. Hehe, me me me.” You know, this was—it was a partnership. It was a request. And my husband and my son kept teasing me because they didn't know what I was doing, because I didn't voice it to them.

But I had a jar—a spell jar—in my pocket that I would shake every time the wind would start to pick up a little bit, every time the weather would start to downpour, whenever it would get a little heavy. I would start shaking it and I would start talking to the weather. And almost immediately—it would stop.

And that's the relationship. Like, “Hey, I'm still here. I'm still requesting. Could you just hold off? Hold off a little bit?” I'm not asking you to be 90 degrees. I'm not asking you to disrupt your weather pattern. I'm asking you just to ease up a bit. Just ease up. Yeah. So it's pleasurable.

And when we're working with weather spirits, we have to consider the ethical place that we need to come from. I think if you listen to our show, you know that we believe that witchcraft needs to have a moral stance. Like, you have to have your boundaries of what's right and wrong—not necessarily in a black-and-white sense, but your comfort levels have to be something you consider with your work.

But more than that, our effect on what's around has to be a factor. And for me, it’s nature that is my foundational principle. I don’t know—I don’t like the word “worship,” but if there’s something that I hold most sacred, it’s nature. And if that’s true, how could anything I wish for—anything I try to manifest—how can I try to manifest something that’s against what’s in the best interest of nature? It just—it doesn’t compute.

So when I work with weather spirits, that’s my first thought: What time of year is it? What needs to be happening? What’s the ecosystem of this time like? Is there something off? You know, something human-designed? Something—it’s just, you know, maybe it’s just a fluke, but there’s a drought, you know, and there should be rain. Or in those instances, I might say, “Okay, let’s get some rain moving.” But if it is the height of summer in Greece, it is dry as a bone out there. It’s horribly dry.

And you might think, if you didn’t know the ecosystem, you might say, “Oh my gosh, let’s do a rain dance. Let’s get some rain going here.” But last September—perfect example—September 2023, we had early rains. Rain here really doesn’t start until October or November—really November. And then it kind of ends by end of June. So that’s quite a dry spell, but it’s the way it is, you know. July, August, September—dry as a bone.

And it's not about control. It’s about communication.

It’s not like I’m putting a leash on a storm and saying, “Do what I say.” It’s not control. It’s connection.

Yes. Yes. That’s exactly it. It’s not manipulation. It’s not demand. It’s not expectation. It is respect. It is reverence. It is asking politely and with proper motivation.

Like, I’m not asking because I want my margarita party to not get rained on.
I’m asking because there’s people suffering. I’m asking because this is not natural.

Yeah. I think of it as like a tea with spirits. Like, I want to have tea with them. I want to have a relationship with them.
I want to be able to ask and get to know them and give them something and maybe they give me something.

But it’s not a business transaction. It’s not a vending machine.
I don’t put in two quarters and get rain.

And it’s also not, “Hey, I need this now. You need to do it.”

Right? It’s more like, “Hey, what’s going on here? Can we talk?”

So what are ways you build that connection?

Number one: Go outside.

Yes!

Go outside and be still.

Weather doesn’t have an on-demand button.
And most of us experience the weather as an inconvenience.
You know, we see it in passing, we experience it in transition.
You’re running to your car. You’re running to the store. You’re trying not to get rained on. You’re trying not to sweat.
You’re not really feeling the weather.
You’re not really observing the weather.

So one of the things that helped me early on was sitting outside when the weather changed.
So if it was warm and now it’s cold, if it was sunny and now it’s cloudy—go outside.
What’s the wind doing? What’s the birds doing? What’s the plants doing?
How do you feel?

And I do recommend being tech-free in those moments.

Yes.

Because even if it’s not on, your phone emits so much energy.
There’s something about a walk without your phone.
There’s something about sitting without a screen.

Yeah. And well—and think about the resonance.
Resonant frequencies that come off of electric items.
You know, computers, televisions—even when they’re turned off—they still have this magnetic frequency that comes off of them.

Refrigerators—all these electronic devices, even the devices we’re using right now to record this—
we’re being bombarded by invisible waves.

And once that’s gone—like, I wonder if sometimes we become so adapted to it,
when that’s gone, that’s the panic. Like, “Oh no, the familiarity is gone.”

Yeah. Which for you and I, we’re like, “Oh! Relief.” Like, “Ah, that feels good.”
You know, I can think. I can—I can...

Yeah. And maybe a lot of sensitive people are that way and they’ve never, never connected that dot.
Like, “Oh, maybe I do need to go on that electronic detox.”

Yeah. Because overstimulation is a huge problem in our environment today.

Like, I never considered myself somebody who was easily overstimulated until I started—I don’t really know.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I noticed it.

And we got a really huge thunderstorm in early September. It might have even been late August into September, but I know it was early September because I was away. And it was—it washed people away. It was huge floods. Torrential rains on dry, dry land like that is going to cause mudslides. It’s going to cause flooding. And it did. It displaced thousands of animals—which was who I—we volunteered and helped get animals where they needed to go to shelters that were not flooded out.

But that is a prime example. Like, if somebody was like, “Oh, it’s so dry and hot, let me just get some rain going,” you can cause so much more destruction than just going indoors or putting on the AC or, you know, sprinkling some water over your head.

And last year—now wildfires are a perfect example of this. Ritual is a perfect example of ethical weather magic.

We have wildfires in Greece as a natural phenomenon. But the rate of them and the magnitude of them is 120% escalated by humans.

In fact, they estimate that 80% of the wildfires are arson. And “arson”—I don’t love that word because it implies intent. Most of it's negligence, like people setting bonfires on the beach or, you know, throwing cigarette butts out windows in rural areas, things like that. But it is humans causing this fire.

And we had a day last year where we had over 400 fires in a single day. And the fires got so bad that there are entire swaths of islands—you know, most of the islands, the bigger ones, are quite rural and not lived in. So the fire brigades, the aid possible there, is just not what it needs to be. And they are permanently damaged. People have had to abandon villages that they’ve lived in for thousands of years because of these wildfires.

Like, that’s not normal.

So I wanted to do a ritual to help the spread—to pull that back.

And keep your eyes peeled, because I will do it again this summer. I know that I’ll need to—probably in July or August. It’s going to be based on the need. But it was an online ritual, and it was a cycle spell designed to—we’ll start it all together, do it all together, and then there was a part that took less than a minute.

It was a short, three-line inscription that I wrote—an invocation to the weather spirits that they would read aloud, light a candle, and then douse that candle in water as a sympathetic magic for the fire spirits calming down.

And that’s what we did. We asked the weather spirits to speak with the fire and communicate with that fire.

It sounds—it sounds like, oh, strange. No. It worked.

This is the way to do it. And just calm it down.

Because fire is—we use it as an analogy for anger, for love, for lust, for fear. Why? Because it spreads quickly. It doesn’t think. It just moves.

So if you can get somebody who can reach into that same dimension and proverbially tap the fire on the shoulder and say, “Hey, hey, hey. Calm down. Chill out. Chill out a little bit. Take a break. Do you need a sip of water? Here, have a sip.” Literally—that’s, you know, that’s really what firefighters are doing. They’re cooling it down. They’re calming it down. That’s why we use those analogies for emotions too.

So that’s what we did. We appealed to the weather spirits. And then every day, each individual person had their candle in their bowl of water, and we grounded the candle in earth from outside. And there were actually a few people who joined who were in Greece. So of course, that’s much better too—we’re getting that local land. And there was even one girl who joined who—if you’re listening, hey!—who had sand from her trip to Greece, and she’s like, “Can I use that?” I said, “Please. That’s perfect.” So she actually combined it with some dirt from her home, and it was perfect. And it really worked.

Like I said, I’m not—like Leandra said, we’re not patting ourselves on the back like, “Woohoo! Look at us.” But within a week—it was actually six days later—they finally got the fire out on Rhodes, which was good. You can still see the scar across her body. It was—that, when I saw that image, that was—I made the ritual event that night.

And this is a free event, guys. Like, if I do it again, I promise—it’s always going to be free. Because I just want—if anything, I’m asking you to give energy. Like, how could I ask you? You know, we’re giving energy to a common cause there.

Yes. So, so all that to say: what did we do? We didn’t ask for rain. We asked for the weather spirits to just have a chat with the fire spirits.

Yes.

And the weather spirits were at the core of that. Because there is something to the transient nature of weather spirits that separates them from land spirits. Land spirits can be—they are your greatest ally for protection, for your own goals, for your own grounding. They’re the best. They’re great. But if you ask your land spirit in Michigan to help talk to the land spirits in Rhodes in Greece—that’s not their specialty. You know, nothing against them. Nothing. It just isn’t what they do.

But weather spirits are transient. Weather spirits can be reached across the globe energetically and worked with and built relationships with—even people. I’ve seen people do hurricane magic to deflect hurricanes from places that they’re not living in. You know, they’re in New York, but New Orleans is getting the shit of it. So yeah, they do a ritual—and it works. It works.

But like, I can’t even watch reels with the sound on.
Because sometimes, video to video, it gets so loud it like—it will overstimulate me.
And I can’t exist on social media for more than—like, my timers for most apps are at 10 minutes.

Yeah.

Because even when I don’t know I’m being overstimulated, it’ll do that.
And then I just don’t have the energy for things for a little while.

Yeah. And I think that’s a core thing with our energy—and we’re bringing it back to weather, I swear.

But we were—

Yeah, we got off a little bit, but yeah, we’re bringing it back.

The energy that we can feel in the air around us, in the weather that is happening, is subtle
compared to the energy of our phones in our pockets, and the computer that I’m recording with, and the mic that’s in our faces.

And that stuff is stronger. It’s closer. It’s on our dimension. It’s much easier to feel.
And it is a barrier between us and those other elements.

So if you do want to work with weather spirits, with land spirits, with the Fae—
like unfortunately, it’s that observer effect too, maybe.

But when you have your phone with you—even with you—like, I will put my phone on airplane mode when I’m hiking.
I’ll bring it because I’m hiking, but it’ll be on airplane mode.

But if I go for a walk in my neighborhood, I don’t bring it at all.

And that can be hard because I’m like, “Oh no, I should’ve recorded that for social media or something.”

Yeah. I do—I hate that feeling of like, “Oh, that would’ve been beautiful B-roll.” And I’m like, “Damn it. Enjoy the moment.”

And I’m getting better with it.

I’m getting better with it. Like, now I almost feel rebellious when I don’t record something. Like, “Ha! No one gets to see this but me.”

Yes! And that’s a really important moment because that’s the moment when you connect to nature. That’s the moment when you feel like, “Okay, I get it.” And the next time you want to ask for something—because weather magic is an ask—it is a request. The next time you want to ask, they know who you are.

They remember.

They remember. They go, “Oh, you’re that one who sat in the rain with us and just said thank you.”

That’s something that I think is missing from a lot of people's practices. I think we get into this because we want something.

I want a spell. I want a jar. I want a candle. I want incense. I want tools. I want, I want, I want. I want a result. I want to feel better.

And that’s okay. That’s a doorway. But the real path is relationship. It's longevity. And it’s not just the witchy aesthetic. It is the work. And part of the work is that grateful moment of sitting in silence and just saying, “Thank you.” Or listening.

Sometimes all it takes is you being still and you listen—and they tell you things. And they tell you their name. And they tell you what they want to be called. And they tell you how to communicate. And they’ll tell you how to listen.

And sometimes, like, it’s very personal how they appear. Like for me, a weather spirit is a feeling in my chest. And I’ve shared this before—but like, there are certain spirits that I’ve worked with long enough that I don’t see, I don’t hear. They’re not a clairvoyant vision. But it’s like a pressing on my chest.

And that can be the same for weather, or sometimes even a specific plant or tree. Like, when I come up to it, I feel this like pulsing. And it’s a very deep internal sense. And that’s how I know something's there.

And I think we’re taught that if we don’t see it, it’s not real. But actually, I think the sixth sense is the first sense. It’s just that we’ve been taught it’s the last. It’s the weakest.

Yes. I love that. Yes. It’s our primary form of perception before language.

Exactly. And it’s how animals communicate. They pick up on subtle cues, electromagnetic fields, you know, changes in temperature—things that our logical brain has been taught to suppress.

But your body knows. Like, the hair on your arm knows. Your feet know. Your chest knows. Your heart knows.

So when you’re working with weather spirits, if all you do for a few months is just go out and sit and say thank you—amazing. You’re doing it.

That’s enough. That’s a relationship. You’re doing it. Because when you need to ask, they’ll already know your voice.

You won’t need to beg.

And you won’t need to prove yourself. Because that’s another thing. It’s like, “Oh, well, you’ve never worked with us before, and now you’re coming in asking for something?”

Right.

You know?

But if you’ve already been with them and shown up with gratitude and reverence and just been open to that communication and that experience, then they know who you are. You’ve already put your offering in.

Exactly. It’s not a bribe. You’re not showing up to say, “Here’s a cookie. Do something for me.” You’re showing up and saying, “Here’s a cookie, because I thought of you. Because I like you. Because this smells like the storm that came through last week, and I thought you’d like it too.”

And then when you ask for something, it’s not transactional—it’s relational.

Yes. And I think when people hear “weather magic,” they think it’s this huge, intense thing. But it can be so subtle.

It can be a whisper.

It can be just placing your hand on the earth and listening.

It can be lighting a candle and asking the flame to show you what’s to come.

It can be sitting in the sun and saying, “Thank you for this warmth. Thank you for this moment.”

That’s all part of it.

And when you build that into your everyday life, then you can start to do the bigger rituals and feel like they have meaning. Because otherwise, you’re just going through motions. You’re just copying something from a book. And that’s not bad—that can get you started—but you want more. You want that connection.

And that connection—like you said—it’s not going to happen on demand. It’s not going to happen if you’re only showing up when you need something.

It’s like any relationship. You show up again and again with presence, with authenticity, with gratitude—and eventually, they open up to you. And they show you the beauty that’s possible.

And when they do—it’s magic. That’s the magic. That’s real weather magic. It’s not forcing—it’s flowing. It’s co-creating. It’s respecting.

Yes.

And when the clouds roll in or the sun comes out or the wind changes—and you feel that shift, and you know they heard you? That’s it. That’s everything.