The One Who Knows Things

You've always been the one people call.

The friend who shows up when someone is dying. The one who knows what to say when there is nothing to say. The one who notices the cardinal at the window, the smell of lavender for no reason, the song that plays at exactly the wrong, exactly right moment.

You've felt this pull your whole life, long before you had a name for it.

There's an old word for this kind of knowing. In my tradition, it's Strega: the one who knows things. Not because she studied for it in any formal sense. Because she paid attention. She lived in the kitchen, the garden, and the deathbed, and treated all three the same way: as places where the ordinary and the sacred sat at the same table.

Every culture seems to carry some version of this calling, even when the word for it changes shape depending on where you stand. The Völva of Norse tradition was the seeress who traveled from house to house, sitting with what could not be seen and tending the thresholds of both birth and death.

Among many Filipino communities, the Babaylan held a similar place: healer, midwife, and the one who walked beside the dying, trusted to carry messages between the visible and the invisible. In the British Isles, the Cunning Folk did this work quietly in their own villages, mixing remedies, finding what was lost, easing a passing, without ever calling it anything more dramatic than help. Across parts of Latin America, the Curandera and Curandero still hold this role today, treating illness and grief with the same hands, the same plants, the same prayers.

None of these traditions agreed on a name for it. They simply agreed on a function.

 Someone in the village had to be the one who paid attention closely enough to know what a room needed. Someone always was.

The thread underneath it all was never a credential. It was a posture. The willingness to stay in the room when everyone else leaves.

Stay in a room long enough, a dying room, a grieving house, a garden in late summer, and it starts telling you things.

The body softens before the mind understands why.
The air shifts the moment someone takes their last breath.
You learn which plant calms a room and which one helps a person let go, not from a textbook, but from being present often enough that the pattern reveals itself.

I come to this work through an Italian lineage and I hold that inheritance with real reverence. But the longer I do this work, the more I notice this pull doesn't belong to any one kind of person. I've sat at deathbeds beside all kinds of people who carry the same quiet knowing, the same instinct to stay, the same ear for what a room needs. The work has always called whoever was willing to listen.

So if you've spent your life feeling like the one who knows things, and quietly wondering if that feeling means something: it does. You were never imagining it. You were noticing something real, long before anyone gave you permission to call it what it is.