After the reckoning of the last few years, the current moment could use a little magic.

Conjuring that hope is the Port Townsend Grief Circus with their new storytelling workshop “Spells for Change: Seeding the Future one Word at a Time.”

Hosted by Swerv Wizely and Grace Bryant, the six-week program will include five Saturday workshops from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Feb. 4 through March 11.

Workshops might not be the right phrase, though.

“I relate to them as play-shops, not workshops. I think that we learn better through play. We can literally change our brain’s elasticity through playfulness,” Wizely said.

The series is described as “an inter-generational play space for anyone who wants to imagine the future through oral or written storytelling and myth making in the community.”

It will be the first offering of its kind from the Grief Circus.

“It’s not a mistake that this is the initial outward offering through Grief Circus because spells that have been cast here on this earth about endless growth, and domination, and extraction, and powerlessness, these are spells of an old paradigm, and we’re living in this phenomenal time where those seem to be dissolving right before our eyes,” Wizely said.

Spells for Change will help divine what comes next.

“What seems clear is we don’t yet have something else to replace them, and we don’t really have a consensus reality on what we’re doing here, and why, and how we can be well while we do these things,” they added.

Wizely, who uses they/them pronouns, first began clowning around with the idea for the Grief Circus after a period of turmoil in 2017.

“I was doing my own grief work. My life just started crumbling to pieces. I no longer recognized who my partner was, my parents, the so-called career I had built for myself … Everything was dissolving,” they said.

Wizely made their way to grief rituals, finding a lineage of facilitators from Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa.

“They were tasked with bringing grief work to the Western world, and they saved my life in many ways,” Wizely said.

The rituals would involve hours and days of wailing, crying, dancing, feasting, resting, and walking in the woods.

“You’re basically in an altered state of mind without using any substances,” Wizely said.

These experiences combined with further tragedies and ecstasies while the phrase “Grief Circus” kept repeating itself to Wizely.

“There’s something about the marriage of those two things that seems to hold a spell that even I can’t and won’t try to figure out in this lifetime,” they said.

Swerv Wizely and Grace Bryant consider themselves master detanglers — working out the most intense knots in normative culture.

Finally, in October 2021, after working at a Climate Change Haunted House, Wizely announced the Grief Circus and began putting together a team.

“We’re here now, and I have assembled a group of people who were practicing similar somatic exercises, and were practicing ways of relating to ourselves and both the seen and unseen worlds through an animist perspective,” Wizely said.

Those somatic practices can include breath work and physical acts like rubbing the tops of the thighs to bring awareness into the lower body.

“Just inviting that part of my body to be in relationship to this sensation that’s moving through,” Wizely said.

These different ways of playing with the body and mind offer a chance to not only pause and feel, but open.

“It brings this elasticity into realizing that everything that occurs in the body is literally just a sensation. We we have assigned values; good, bad, I like it, I don’t like it … We’ve assigned value judgements essentially to a phenomena of sensations that naturally occur in our body and are meant to occur in our body all the time,” Wizely said.

Rather than good or bad, there is an invitation to remove those judgements.

“Instead, we move into something a little deeper, and something a little more personal, and something a little less scripted by the masses. And something that might be hard for you to go and teach other people about because it’s so specific to your system,” Wizely said.

Wizely will be joined by Bryant, a meditation teacher who has run silent retreats in Port Townsend, and together the two will work with attendees to specifically pinpoint what they want to alchemize through prompts and embodiment practices.

“I really have a lot of faith that we could just get up to some good trouble imagining some spells for the future based on who’s actually with us and what is actually moving in that room when we gather,” Wizely said.

The course is offered on a sliding scale and the organizers ask that people consider the cost based on their current relationship with finances. Scholarships, payment plans, and other exchanges of energy are available.

Ages 14 and older can sign up at griefcircus.com/offerings.