Intuitional Homesteading

[This piece was put together in two major chunks. My 12 year old dog and most loyal friend Maggie, who had helped me through my divorce over ten years ago as a puppy had been ill but seemed to be on the rebound as I mentioned a bit further down. She relapsed severely and I helped her along myself, just over a week ago as of this publishing. I’ve been pretty depressed and haven’t worked on this much since then, partly because she was in quite a few of the pictures I took for this that weren’t published, which made finishing this very difficult. But I’m quite sure she’d want me to get it up and out, especially since a tree or bush is going to be going-in over her in the near future, so here it is! Thank you Maggie for motivating this to completion! I’ll always love you<3]

I am bad at planning. It’s not that I’m not good at coming up with plans, it’s that if I make them very specific then I have a tendency to rebel against them and go my own way. Sometimes that works well and sometimes it falls flat. However I’ve figured out over my life so far that if I define my plans in a loose, sketchy way, I’m less likely to self-sabotage but it also is much more likely to work out than no plan at all. It wouldn’t work best for most people, but it seems to usually for me. And as Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke said “No plan survives contact with the enemy”; in this case the most pernicious enemy is me.

So currently, I’m working on probably the most elaborate single project I’ve ever started: turning our 3 acres of land in rural central Missouri into a small farm using horticulture and permaculture approaches. My spouse is in it with me thankfully or frankly I’d flounder about with ideas without ever quite gaining the motivation to *do* anything! They and our kiddos are the motivation my life once lacked. I can always use more, but so far we’re making it.

Currently we’ve got a few dozen trees and shrubs coming in the next month or two[as of publishing this, some have been planted and a lot are sitting in dirt in the garage waiting for good weather] and I’ve promised a few folks on my Twitter that I’d write up a blog post detailing plans and then keep this up to date with what we’re up to. The last couple of weeks have really been emotionally rough, due to my old dog getting progressively more and more sick and my worry over the likelihood of having to help her pass along. The last few weeks I had steeled myself for doing that today, but she’s perked up quite a bit yesterday and today so I’m going to let myself bow to my perennial hope and procrastination and see if that holds. So now… this blog.

I went out and took some pictures a couple of weeks ago, and I’m going to be referring to this little piece of handiwork.

Yes, that’s right, I screen-grabbed satellite imagery of my property and then did it several injustices in MSPaint. Sorry not sorry; it was actually kind of fun being a completely inexpert person doing something like this! But clearly I’ll have to explain the color-coding and since I took a bunch of planning-pictures of the homestead the other week I’ll share those with marks on the map where the various photos were taken for perspective. I guess a virtual homestead-planning tour? Boring to most probably but then again most people don’t read my blog! (Hi to whoever you are, reading this! I love you!)

So before the tour I just want to say a bit about our overall goals and reasons for this. My spouse and I are kinda hippy-go-with-the-flow-ish but realized when we’d been married for a few minutes that we needed some kind of shared dream to follow. We each had many hopes and dreams but weren’t good at making concrete goals(sense a theme?) so we spent a couple years exploring our options via pipe-dreams and theory-planning; like-ya’-do. Our original plan was to run a craft business, touring the country in a tiny-home on a trailer, selling stuff at Ren-faires, pagan events, anime conventions and the like. We still occasionally sell nerdy-stuff like this either at the rare ‘con(My spouse has a booth at Springfield G.A.M.E this year for anyone in the area who wants to say hi!) or to friends, but having a child put that plan on indefinite hold. We’ve always loved gardening as well tho, so we’ve settled-down for a bit and plan on working with the land we managed to acquire. I’m particularly into the idea of using it as part of an interactive relationship with the spirits of the land and wild areas around us.

My spouse is a bit less into the spirit-oriented side of things(more of an energy-model of magic person), not out of disbelief, but out of a sort of respectful-fear of anything spirit-world related. Thankfully they’ve agreed to let us “haunt” a corner of it, and I’m also fairly convinced that we have some rather Good Neighbors, whom I regularly put out whiskey and water for and who leave us some rather odd presents sometimes(worms in a bowl we’d left by our backdoor ~30 feet from the edge of the concrete pad..).

So the goal of this is not to drastically change the land, but rather to help wake it back up and to help it achieve various possible potentials. So with that in mind, and the fact that our plans will almost certainly change as we go along, let the tour begin!

So this first batch is of the “front yard” in a clockwise rotation.

There are several flower-beds up here that the previous owners put in. We plan on replanting these with perennials and possibly a few pretty perennial herbs and such, as the main “decorative garden” area. I missed it but just to the left of this and kind of hanging in over the far left side of the drive, in front of the carport is a hickory-tree that we’re going to harvest the nuts from this year!

The Sweetgum that is closest and leftmost here is just a beautiful climbing-tree, which once they get big enough to follow me up, I’ll teach them to climb! The cedar and two pines are quite nice for shade and smell. The gnarly red-bud in between them is weirdly adorable and probably about to be very pretty here in the next few weeks when it flowers!

So these pictures of the front, southern bit of land among these broadly-spaced trees is what we plan on keeping as a proper “yard” for the kiddos to play in. Except for the second one in(American Elm in a bit of rough-shape I think?) they are almost all ornamentals in some sense, so they are mostly there for shade and to look nice.  I plan on building a field-stone wall along the front fenceline, probably next year, because I’ve been fascinated with the idea of dry-stone walls from old Viking-lands, particularly in Ireland and the western coastal areas of Britain. This and the general need for putting up fences and hedges for our homestead in the next year or two seems to fit rather well(and indeed in a surprisingly positive way) with some of the overall space-weather that will have influence on the next couple of years. There are also a couple of persimmon trees obscured behind the others here that fruited pretty heavily last year on the ditch-side of the fenceline, and I hope that when I build my wall there may be a few good opportunities to spread a few of the fruits right along it so from the road it will be fruit-trees in front of a wall! This year we’re going to try making jams, or pies, or something from them if they produce well!

You can’t make-out very well in this picture but inside the fence to the left of where my spouse is wrangling our 2yo is a maple-sapling and an elder that are our first two tree/shrub plantings here at the homestead!
Also for next year: once we’ve got some strongly performing Elder plants growing in our hedgerow(see below) I plan on laying a hedge down the east(center of the picture) side of the driveway. Then wood or some other kind of nice looking fencing down the woods-side so the border under the eves of the “Good Neighbor’s” wood can be used for a magical/legal-psychoactives herb-garden.

Here at the end of the drive we’re going to put a pair of gates and possibly a little stone wall or post for when we develop our magical-herb garden along the edge of the Neighbor’s woods.

For clarity, here’s a blow-up of this part of the property. I was standing by the leftmost pink dot(flowerbed) when I took these pictures. Brown is existing trees. The tree lone brown dot and purple circle in the front-corner are the sapling and elder-baby that were planted last fall and super early this spring. Hoping they do well this year.

 

So next up is the side-yard area which will primarily be garden-plot space. We don’t have worked out yet how the bulk of the land will be used, and that may very well vary from year to year depending on what we decide to plant to make sure we are treating the soil well overall.

This is going to be our main gardening area, this year at least. To the front-right of the apple/pear trees[which I just added a few new saplings in a grid to form a mini-orchard this morning], you can make-out the raised beds which was most of what we managed for gardening last year.

Depending on how some things go in the next month or two, we’re hopefully going to have a mobile chicken-coop with attached-run built, and a few chickens to drag around and fertilize a lot of this soil that we won’t necessarily be planting this year, so that next year it’ll have some nicely amended soil. I think we’ll probably try to do this with a “fallow field” area that will be the chicken-area in a new part of this every year, tho that’ll be up in the air until we figure out how many chickens and how mobile our coop-plans actually are once they are built!

You can also barely see that we are putting in a couple of long raised beds next to the house on the east side here. Those ones we’re going to make more permanent, as you can see in the next picture one I have managed to get surrounded with cinder-blocks that are painted a nice red-brick colour and have some lettuces already planted. We may have to replant it, as we’ve had one late freeze already and are about to probably have another (hopefully final!) one this week[update: there was another late-frost and we may get yet another which is just how this sort of thing often goes.] Given the space-weather late/early-frosts and difficult winters could become pretty common the next couple of years? Note to self: make sure to get a yearly copy of the Farmer’s Almanac, take notes, and compare in a couple of years!

Also next to the house, we’re set to build a rather unusual trellis immediately behind, and over-the-tops of the raised-beds, which will hopefully come together in the next couple of weeks for growing various climbing veggies and also to shade the windows on that side of the house during high-summer hopefully! Consider this a teaser for an upcoming blog-post on the implementation of this idea that my spouse came up with!

As becomes clear, the only interference with planting in this part of the yard(besides damnable lawn) is a single tree. It didn’t do well last year, shedding most of it’s leaves during the mild end-of-summer we had, before we even got to our surprisingly long and clement autumn last year. If it continues failing, I’m plotting it’s removal and use as either firewood, or run-off management. If it makes it we’ll have a mildly shady part of our main growing area from the previous picture, and can just use it with that intent.

This broad open area we’re still kinda working on what to do with it. It’s open and south-facing, with very minimal early/late shade during peak growing season. The far half by the front fence retains water pretty intensely, and I’m wanting to find out if it’s possible to put in a pond in the far left corner somehow, but that’s mostly just an idea at this point(although I included it roughly in my theory-draw on the map).

This is the open fence line(posts without wire for some reason?) that we share with the neighbors, and this picture is a bit out of date. We have the beginnings of a hedgerow [now mostly planted] that will border the open property-line and provide more privacy from them. They’re decent folk, but I’d really like to be able to lay naked in the sun on the back patio occasionally, or go out and work in practical, femme clothes without having to worry literally about “what will the neighbors think”. It should also give quite a bit of food if all goes according to plan! We’re putting it between the row of previously existing maple trees and the property-line and I planted several pairs of elder-plants to get it started(represented by the maroon dots inside the purple outline that will be the hedgerow itself. I think given everything I hear about “edge effect” and all the other cool things about hedgerows, that this is maybe the project I’m most currently excited about! I’m looking forward to putting it together like a puzzle and finding the right places for everything so it grows together in a healthy way!

I’ve left-out the bit of continuous picture here for the hedgerow that was directly between me and the neighbors house cause it was basically just a fifteen feet to the property line and a pretty boring picture. This one tho shows where we’re going to end the hedgerow)between the stump that was left to us but is apparently trying to make a comeback, and the young tree further on which I think is another black walnut, although I’m not for sure. I don’t like black walnuts much but it’s possible to sell or trade them around here by the bushel so that might be worthwhile.

Here’s the final view of the edge of the grassland that we plan on eventually using as pasturage for a couple of alpaca and goats Next Year™. That will need fenced sturdily, and we may need to get a guard-dog who can defend them against coyotes and dogs various neighbors let run-loose. Also my dear, and recently departed Maggie-dog making her first appearance here, just before the map of the area we just covered. As you can see from the map, we plan on probably dividing the main growing area with fences at some point, because rabbits rather adore our property, and while we don’t entirely mind sharing, we don’t want to be exclusively feeding them and the deer that also come by overnight sometimes! These pictures were taken from the eastern side of the central yellow field-zone.

So this next bit is where things get much wilder and more interesting; the back almost 2/3’s of the land I’ve let-go(everything behind the barn), completely untouched for a year, with the exception of a ritual-circle area that I kept mowed. The bits that I didn’t were basically reclaimed into a regionally-normal grassland area for the most part. It’s an interesting mix of tall grasses and “weeds” like Queen Anne’s Lace(a type of wild-carrot that looks like Water Hemlock), certain species of which have remained standing over winter and others have matted-down.

This part through here we plan on simply knocking-down with a brush-hog ever year and eventually fencing and making our main “pasture” for goats and a couple of Alpaca probably the season after this one. It has pretty direct side-access to the barn which we plan on doing one end up to serve as rough-weather housing for them.

This is the bottom part of the “pasture” section and while it’s not visible in this picture, a stream-bed runs left to right through the middle of this, separating one side of the land from the other. The bits near it are pretty soggy most of the year except in the driest parts of summer. I plan on planting wetland plants and trees along through here, especially as I plan a water-management system for the barn-runoff as a major project for this year which will direct more flow down this in hopefully a more consistent way, as well as making some of the area behind the barn more useable(see below).

Down the eastern fenceline from the midway point of the yard where we actually have fencing going back the rest of the way. There’s a strange ruined concrete foundation of a long-gone building here that is overgrown with brambles and honesuckle that I think of as our “devil’s acre/fairy-fort”. It’s a bit of a wade through tall grass and muddy ground that has been only awkwardly accessible for the past few months so I haven’t had much chance to try to find out more about it’s nature. It definitely has a strange feeling to it that I find quite reassuring in the sense that it’s definitely a place of some kind of strangeness and mystery. I like that but it remains to be seen how we’ll learn to interact with it over time. The stream-bed divides the property in the very middle of the fence way back behind it where those cedars and we’ll deal with that a bit later. Those three pics I took from the middle of the right hand side of the map.

As you can see from the map, the land continues to have a sort of divided-in-half topology. The big open areas in the brown are probably where we’ll run a couple of goats(maybe with access to the back areas behind the ruin/fairy-fort, since it’s the most distant part of our land that is open ground.

So these pictures are taken near the corner of the barn right by the path that leads back to our ritual-circle. This first one that currently has a brush-pile of last fall’s yard-waste is the area we’re probably going to build a few tiny-houses next year so that we can have visitors over(the house is a bit small and can only host maybe 2-3 people between a futon-foldout and the couch. Also like I said early, we’ve been fascinated with the idea of tiny-home design and using it for “guest-house” type places is perfect. Plus once we get a few places built we can always use them for kids’ “campout” spaces to help them learn independence, or places where we ourselves can spend a night or two if we just need some time alone.

This is the turn-around between the back-patio and the barn. You can see the grilling-area of the patio, unfortunately I didn’t get a direct picture of the patio, but in the next few months we’re going to dig-out around the concrete pad of the patio and square it off with a gap for soil and then cinderblocks. Then we’re going to work on a permanent herb-garden growing as a border to the patio most of the way round! Also going to put in a couple of steps off of the concrete in the middle where it’s a bit steep but is the most direct walking-route to the barn and also to the compost-heap and path down to the ritual-circle.

Here’s the current compost heap(which we want to upgrade soonish). I’ve come up with the creative use of fireplace-ash as weed-control around it. It needs stirred and to have more dry-material to it, which we are bad about, but it’s been incredibly rainy so far this spring so there hasn’t been a lot of “dry” to make happen.

Everything on the left hand side of the yard and around the barn and then down into the middle is the main water-runoff areas. The barn clearly generates a lot of runoff, and as is visible in the next few pictures the area right around it is pretty sodden due to being on a bit of a slope that descends pretty steeply behind it, and needs some channeling work.

Especially since right in the middle of everything in this central acre is our sewage-lagoon. It’s like a cesspool but in the form-factor of a pond. In this picture it’s right behind the split cedar tree. It’s an interesting and mildly difficult challenge to design around because it requires light and wind accessibility for the bacteria to function effectively, unless we want it to get really stinky. Theoretically the overrun from it in heavy rain is supposed to be relatively clean, but with things like soap and hair-dye going into it, I’m not sure how well I trust the area right bellow it as far as planting food-bearing trees or shrubs. Surprisingly it doesn’t stink for exactly the reason you’d normally think it would: Bacterial activity.

Anyway I’m wanting to design water-collection troughs and runs that will collect and divert runoff around this on both sides so it will stay more of a contained system and won’t always overflow with it’s overflow-pipe unless we have a really incredible rain.

This is the overgrown slope right behind the barn that helps funnel the runoff down into a really sodden piece of ground between it and the lagoon, which also happens to be right across a part of the path that leads back to the ritual space. I miss you Maggie-dog!<3

You can kind of vaguely make out where the grass is lower across the middle here where it gets really wet. Also the narrow muddy rut that goes down the middle of the path where it’s wet, which I think is a deer-track that will likely only get worse. My idea here is to put in a bit of a channel with mini-levies/burms fronting the path. This will make everything to the left of the path quite the mini-wetland, and then to put one gap to make the start of a stream-bed across the path and to put in a little bridge over the top. I also want to grow some kind of ground-cover along this whole path(not a paid endorsement, just a commercial site I’ve been using to get some ideas) that will be pleasant to walk down barefoot, maybe some kind of a mint or a dwarf chamomile or something that will stand-up to foot-traffic but also have a lovely fragrance. Or maybe just moss because I absolutely love moss!

Back of the barn. These trees are dead and need taken down. I’ll probably use them in my berm-construction. Which coincidentally will make a good place for growing a small batch of trees or shrubs with a Hügelkultur approach, although it would probably require a bit of reinforcing to function as an effective water-control berm.

You can see from these pictures how some of the water already flows around the western side of the lagoon and with water coming from the other side and from the overflow of the lagoon it actually starts to form a channel, which stays green year-round, probably thanks to “pollutants” acting as nutrients for some atypical-for-the-land waterplants. Effectively this is similar to a leachfield for a septic-system, which I’m remembering now is another, perhaps better comparison for how the lagoon is meant to work, bacterially, if you’re interested in such things.

In the center-left of that picture is where I want to put a small hexagonal building with windows all around and a desk with a typewriter. Possibly an easel for painting or other artistic supplies. I’ll want to run the barest bit of electrical hookup for a space-heater/freestanding AC unit. A writer’s space to get away from everything comfortably. I also plan on banning all cellular devices from this point back. The rest of the property is meant to help reconnect with the Wilds.

This is a picture from a mini-circle where the path bends towards the main ritual circle. I didn’t get a picture of this proper, but it is where I helped Maggie along to her next place, and buried her. I think of it as a staging-area for ritual purposes before you get to the main circle, and I just yesterday planted a weeping-willow there next to Maggie’s grave, so my ritual space will be guarded by a tree of the dead and a friend who is dead. She was my very own deeply cherished and missed “Black Dog” who helped me through the end of my abusive first-marriage and subsequent years of ups and downs.

I am sure some representation of her, at very least symbolically, will stay behind and helps those using this space in preparation and liminal transition into a magical-working space. She seemed to have chose the space herself, as the last several times we’d gone down this direction she’d paused here sniffing extensively around the location where later(April 2nd) I would baptize in her blood and make various offerings to her, both immediately before and after her death.

It’s probably clear that I’m hung up on this and I should probably make another post about it all at some point and how it seems vaguely connected to a possibly-self-inflicted curse due to my feelings of guilt at having not managed to help her to heal, and killing one of the closest friends I ever had in life. Such it may be.

Anyway on with the tour.

This is the Circle proper. As you can see it forms something of a circle naturally with the trees surrounding it on all sides. I mowed it down a few times last year and it seems to have changed the ground-cover a bit, but another project will be to even the ground out just a bit(there’s a few ruts from long-gone downed trees) and get probably the same groundcover we use on the path to cover this over and make it barefoot-ready. We’re also going to plant more trees to fill-out the circle, probably with a few concentric rings. We may plant an interior-ring so it’s perhaps just a bit less space. There’s a huge old oak that overhands the entire thing on the forrest-side, so it requires semi-regular care just to clear it out of fallen branches. The way the whole thing abuts the forest is a rather nice feature I think, with all kinds of rather intense noises coming out of them in the dark!

A look back up the hill from the Circle. Shows how much down-slope the land has on the whole.

This is my “haunted wood” viewed from the circle. The fenceline runs down from the left and goes all the way back to a corner back there, dimly visible as roughly where the leaf-cover meets the dark lines of the side and back fence. I’ve collected a few fresh corpses of animals that died on the rural road that we prefer to take to/from town even though there’s a highway that’s faster. It’s a lovely drive and so far I’ve collected a young grey cat and a red squirrel(which are uncommon around here). I bring them here and encourage their spirits to wake-up and interact with each other and with visitors. At night it’s very eerily… I don’t know how to describe it… blanketing with attention? It just feels incredibly aware of you, standing in it in the dark. Not in an unfriendly way, but in a curious way. I do it so that they can be given a more decent resting place than the blacktop, and I like to think it helps them adjust more quickly to their new situation in a more calm and comforting environment.

These are some pictures of the back section I’m not quite sure what to do with. Once we complete and fill-out the trees that form the ritual-space, this whole area will still be pretty open. We may use it as a back-pasture for our livestock when we get them, or possibly for something else entirely that I haven’t thought of.

The main course of the stream-bed flows down from a fork: one branch coming from the left/east side where the fairy-ruin lies and funnels it’s own stream beneath broken foundations and tangled brambles, and one from the right/west side originating at the barn where I showed originally.

Here at the bottom of the property it forms a bit of a marshy-area in a depression here that I may try to turn into a pond at some point when it’s dry. I really enjoy digging and this depression would be a pretty handy place to do something like that, but I don’t have a good plan for it. You can see it flows to the left around a little rise and out of the property.

And here is the little rise with yet another, much smaller ruined foundation of some sort, roughly marking the center of our back-fence.

Also this part of the land could I suppose be left as a natural prairie, which is one of the standard types of habitat around here historically and that things will obviously default to if left-alone entirely. You can see the fairy-ruin just behind the tree in this picture.

So there you have it! That’s almost the entire tour! Here’s the map for the back bit of property and a few bonus pictures of the “fairy fort” as well(mapped in pink-circle and red dots)! Note that the red-circles on the map are where I plan on planting a few experimental plantings of a fast-growing Chinese Redwood that we’ve obtained. One of them doesn’t seem to have made it, but the other two hopefully will. They are in buckets presently and I’m secretly hoping that since they are quite large wetland plants, that maybe in twenty years time, if we are still here, that we can perhaps build liveable treehouses or meeting-spaces in them: my very own touch of Lothlórien!

Now that I’ve got this huge post out of the way, I’m hoping it will be easier for me to knock out a few further posts in the next week or two about the planting we’ve gotten finished since I started writing this last month, further projects as they happen, and perhaps one about Maggie and her death and grave site.

Also any suggestions for further content along these lines, let me know!

And without further-ado: the Fairy-Ruin!

My Miraculous Month of Magical Mambo

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break…

May is my month. I was born in it and I think it’s maybe likely that I will die in it. And this particular May has chosen itself to be special in my life; at the end of the month I will begin hormone replacement therapy.

Lately I’ve also begun a more robust set of magical practices and we are living in a house on beautiful land that a year ago we barely dreamed might be possible. I largely attribute this to an incredibly successful sigil-working which I named “Kevin”(I don’t honestly know why). We are now in a rural enough area that part of the property is largely invisible to the only neighbors who might see it so long as it remains dark.

Not coincidentally it seems, that part of the yard had managed at some point to grow a rough ring of trees around it, so I’ve done some things in it to make it into our very own little “magical grove”. Perhaps also not coincidentally, just a day or two after I finalized my consecration of it, an acquaintance offered to send me a copy of Gordon White’s “Chaos Protocols” which, as a paying-member of his Rune Soup group, I’ve been feeling rather behind having not actually read.

Also I’ve been having various “coincidences” and other imaginary correlations pointing me in the direction of performing the “Headless Rite” for a few months now. The book arrived just a few days before the 1st of May. Just in time for Beltane or whatever else you choose to call May-day, which is commonly thought of as a time of thin borders between the spirit-world and our perceived “real” world.

Also also, I’d recently come across and been taken with the idea of trying out the idea of a month of ecstatic, meditative dance thanks to another acquaintance/connection from the same group.

In my mind these all correlated to an idea spawning and being decided fairly quickly after I received the book: I would perform a month-long fast and ritual, culminating with my beginning hormone-therapy on the 31st. A ritual and spiritual process of transformation preceding the beginning of my physical transformation. A liminal experience that would lead to a liminal physical reality.

As with many things magical, the process “began” working and building inside of me as soon as I made the decision to do it. That night I had an extremely vivid dream, which is rare in itself for me regardless; I only occasionally recall having dreamt at all during the night, maybe once every couple of weeks, and actually memorable ones only come to me a handful of times a year at best. I’ve only had dreams this vivid perhaps a dozen times in my life.

The content was also of particular note: I’ve been considering beginning a process of magical communion with my ancestors; in this dream I was spoken to by an ancestor. My mother’s father’s mother came and “woke me briefly” to speak to me at some length about her husband(my great grandfather). She told me about their relationship as well as his ancestry and revealing that he had covered up his native-heritage. According to my dream-great-grandmother, his mother had been a “Sioux-woman” taken as the wife of my twice-great-grandfather as a sort of trade or something for services rendered(she was a bit fuzzy on the circumstances) and it was tolerated in the rural southern-Iowa community they lived in because of his influence, although it was seen by most of them as somewhat beneath him. This would have been in the 1870’s probably. I’ve done some research and she would have most likely been Dakota or Yankton. Their son apparently managed through some help from his locally influential father and through intense civic-service beginning during his later school-years to avoid being labeled as “Indian” on census and other official paperwork, effectively “passing white”. In the dream I was shown several faded photographs of him and read me letters that he sent to her and to other people which she had retained, some of which mentioned this, and a few newspaper clippings related to his work in various social-clubs and playing in a community marching-band.

This was an intense beginning. I don’t think this means in any way that it would be acceptable for me to claim Native American heritage(culturally I’m definitely white) but if I am to properly honor my ancestors this information, and particularly having made contact with this woman(who’s personal history, incidentally, I know almost nothing of, other than seeing the picture of her that my mother has) is an important piece of the puzzle! Obviously I need to do a bit of genealogical work!

I continued to have semi-memorable dreams and actually have continuously since that night, which is a thankful relief to me(I’ve always felt vaguely left-out of the whole experience when people talk about them, since I have them so rarely).

On May 1st I performed the Headless Rite proper. It was chilly and I wore my spouse’s hooded-cloak, carried a purple candle, and the book for reference, and wore a headband of plain white with the words AŌTH ABRAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ written on it in black.

The ritual went as planned; I won’t go into it in depth as there’s not a lot to say: I felt remarkably disconnected through the whole process. Wearing a cloak and holding a candle between yourself an an open book tends to reduce the world down to those dimensions alone. It definitely felt as though it “worked” though, with a strong sense of connectedness to the Being in question as it’s temporary representative in that space here on earth and later as ambassador to the courts of the Four Kings.

When it was done I danced around the circle, hooded and cloaked, quite a whirlwind in black cloth, and after some minutes of spinning and jumping and becoming more and more… alive is how I guess I’ll put it, but also slightly dizzy.

In retrospect, I think I had read about doing part of the Rite blindfolded, which I hadn’t been able to find again when I’d looked for it so I hadn’t done it. But while I was dancing the voluminous hood kept slipping down over my face and so I semi-spontaneously decided to continue the dance “headless”; as the emissary of the Headless One, I myself would become headless. So I drew the hood down, engulfing my sight in warm shadow, then danced and spun, now aimlessly in the dark.

A few times I brushed up against the trees around the circle and it always felt like hands were guiding me gently to stay within it’s bounds. I also somehow never stumbled, despite the ground being muddy, rutted in places, and rather overgrown, since it had been raining extensively and I hadn’t been able to mow for quite a few days.

It may have been a bit reckless, but by the end, when I spent the last several minutes actually spinning around the circle like some kind of blind, mad dervish, I stopped and found that while I had thought I was near the bottom of the slightly sloping circle-grounds, I was actually at the top, exactly at the entrance.

Since that night, my dancing has continued unabated, despite once having my foot punctured by a stick(have been wearing shoes since then until I rake the circle) and despite rain and mud on several nights. The re-connection with my own place in nature seems to be the strongest effect, and occasional spine-tingling thrills for no apparent reason, which I assume is when spirits happen by.

On the third night it was raining and 44°F, so I went out and trugged around in the muddy grass as gracefully as possible for about fifteen minutes, touched the trees, laughed into the rain… etc, mostly trying to work through the process as quickly as possible so I could get back inside. Just a sort of spiritual check-in. One or two steps before leaving the circle, I heard a rough male-sounding laugh from somewhere off to my left. There wasn’t anyone there(I can see very well in the dark), and though it was a bit creepy and the laugh was… somehow assertive..? I still had the impression it was more a laugh at me dancing in tights and a sweater around a muddy circle in the cold rain. I must have looked ridiculous, especially since I was rushing!

Tonight will be my tenth night dancing in the circle. Each time it feels more natural but also somehow as though it is bringing more potential into the world, even on the nights that don’t seem quite as intense. So that is my experience of the Rite and my ongoing dance working so far.

If anything particularly interesting happens in the rest of the month I’ll make sure to post about it, and I’m quite sure that I’ll post about my doctor’s visit and beginning hormone therapy. I expect the rest of MY month will remain eventful.

PS: I don’t actually remember how to Mambo, tho I did learn it in a dance-class long ago; I was looking for a 5th “M-word” for the post-title since I was born on the 5th of May that would be related to dance and the translation just fit so well…

~ The Song Remains the Same ~

I had a dream. Crazy dream.
Anything I wanted to know, any place I needed to go

Hear my song. People won’t you listen now? Sing along.
You don’t know what you’re missing now.
Any little song that you know
Everything that’s small has to grow.
And it has to grow!

California sunlight, sweet Calcutta rain
Honolulu Starbright – the song remains the same.

~ Led Zeppelin ~

Magic. Magick. Magik. Majick. Whatever. Ick.

Whatever it is, it’s interesting enough for people to get in dumb-fights on the internet about how to spell it. Personally I can never decide how I want to write it, because being silly with language is kinda a thing I just do. So if I switch between spellings as this goes on, please realize that I am just messing about with thoughts and minds with some playful absurdity. And if you are one of those peoples, I will kindly thank you to maybe try to loosen up a bit eh? Sure, maybe language as it relates to mage-work should be something taken seriously, but I’ve often thought that taking anything too seriously is the most obvious sign of being out of touch with reality! Coming from me… that’s a laugh.

So. What the hell is magick anyway? There are so many attempts at answering that question and I am here to tell you: they are all Right! They are also all Wrong!

That’s because the question itself is like asking “what is the purpose of human existence?”(perhaps awkwardly similar in fact). Magik is different for each entity that uses it, and since almost all humans use magic(most unknowingly), there are at least as many answers as there are people. That’s a lot of answers.

So I’ll share my ideas of it, and my theory about why it’s so different for everyone, and as the Bard says you may “Take it in what sense thou wilt!”

Magick is the process of manifesting imagination to re-create some aspect of Reality. That’s it. Nice and stupidly simple and painfully broad. Yep.

So many people get hung up on either the complexity or the simplicity and can’t get past them. In my experience though, the reason people get hung up on both is because of a misunderstanding of the nature of reality. People feel like reality is solid and coherent because that is the way their experience, and science, and modern western culture presents it; Reality is defined and those definitions can be discerned. So people see magical acts as somehow violating or bending the rules of reality.

This is only as true as we let it be tho, because we’ve got it a bit backwards; the laws and rules of reality are actually guided by magick on their fundamental levels.  The reason that seems backwards is because our collective version of reality is the product of generations of human magick(through philosophy, linguistic subterfuge, and theoretical science) attempting and in some ways succeeding, at pressing reality into a form-factor that is comforting and comfortable. This is not the case everywhere. Anyone who has been to certain parts of the world that are largely untouched by these ways of thinking(for whatever reason) can often feel a sense of “otherness”. Specifically an idea that somehow reality is different there. That’s because it truly is! Because as I said in my previous post, reality is much more fluid and mutable than people think.

This idea is frightening to many people. In fact that standard response of probably half or more of the population is to be simultaneously creeped-out and fascinated when they are confronted with bits of reality that are different than what they are used to. This can be anything from feeling completely overwhelmed with awe in St. Peters, to stark terror after following the pull to visit a local haunted house, to finding a waterfall hidden in a patch of woods in a nearby neighborhood and feeling like you’ve stumbled into fairyland. It’s because you are in a part of reality that actually is different and often hanging onto some connection to other, less-visible parts of reality. That waterfall probably matches one at the same “point” in fairyland. St. Peters is clearly connected metaphysically to the Catholic idea of Heaven. And the haunted house has a connection to a darker part of the spirit-world. 

But we aren’t here to talk about reality specifically. We’re here to talk magic! And mage-work only connects to reality in certain ways. Currently, because of the force of generalized human will, our overall tendency worldwide is to see magic as having relatively little overt impact on physical reality. This is certainly less applicable in certain cultural areas than others, but still; in effect those of us who practice what lay-people call magick are operating in a global dampening field, created by the combined will of every single bit of doubt and skepticism generated by humans on the planet. This suits a lot of people, particularly those who have Power over their fellow humans, because historically magic has been used for two prime purposes; to oppress and to rise-up against oppression. Because of this, it’s in the interest of those in power, particularly those who are more or less aware of the interactions between magic and nature, to manipulate people into disbelieving in magic, and thereby not only handicapping themselves, but also acting as a buffer against anyone or any thing that might try to undermine that power using magical means.

So generation after generation of humans have been pushing out thoughts and theories and ideas that say that we understand and that we are in control. That someone has to be in control! And because reality responds to human thoughts and ideas(through magik, particularly language and culture), it has been shaped into this seemingly definable form where humans will “eventually” be able to “understand” the complete nature of existence; where the supernatural doesn’t exist; and where human beings do not have souls or exist outside of their internal perceptions. And also where “someone” is in control.

Some  have gone so far as to suggest and believe that our human perception of our own existence is a biologically defined imperative and that all of our thoughts and actions are the product of our genetics and personal history; that free-will is an illusion that has developed because it’s evolutionarily adaptive in some way.

And I say that is total bullshit! If you want to believe that that is true about yourself then by all means, go ahead and believe that you yourself have no ultimate purpose and that even asking that question is just the result of evolutionary programming. Just don’t assume that this is the case for everyone else around you. More than one type of reality existing simultaneously isn’t just possible, it’s a foundational premise of logic! As integral as the idea that we share a world, is the idea that we each have an fractally unique and experience of that world, which can be observed as such by any other outsider(Entium varietates non temere esse minuendas – “The variety of beings should not rashly be diminished.” p541). Therefore because of our own perspectives we each inhabit our own, fully developed and unique world, within which other people come and go. No other person experiences that same world because if they did, that person would be us. We generalize that same experience to others to a greater or lesser degree, which is where we get empathy, and also the idea that our reality is shared.

This idea of a shared-reality is a Good Thing because otherwise we would all be completely self-serving and psychopathic! However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t also still live in our own little separate universes. Effectively, the best way of dealing with this is by not only accepting the existence of “Consensual Reality” but also by recognizing that sometimes our understanding of reality may be well and truly at odds with that version of reality.

As we’ve said above, The Powers That Be have a vested interest in keeping the focus on a single consensual reality that benefits them. But many people in the world do not believe or accept this. For some it’s because they are more in touch with nature and it’s various aspects, which can be incredibly abstract, fulfilling and yes, sometimes frightening. And for some it’s because they willfully reject the overarching and oppressive reach of that reality. And for yet others, the current version of reality simply chafes them in some fundamental way that drives them slowly towards madness(in my estimation, that psychic chafing is the primary cause of most mental illness).

That being said, realizing all of this, what does it mean and why do people not think in these terms?  The main reason is fear: it means that we have both a huge amount of control we didn’t think we had, and a huge amount that cannot be easily controlled. And who could blame people for wanting to avoid living in a scary version of reality that can visit unpredictable and often uncontrollable harm on them? The thing is, we already do.

What an understanding and practice of magic does then, is give us a manner of approaching that underlying and mutable nature of reality and gaining whatever control we can wrest over reality from those around us.

Personally I find the idea that reality is at least a little pliable to human consciousness very appealing, and the idea that I have no freedom of will whatsoever to be completely unacceptable. I think many people share that assessment, despite the seeming collective will of the Masses to define our reality in ways that only benefit an oppressive elite. Maybe that’s confirmation bias, but it’s also possible that our culture itself is subject to it’s own confirmation bias that has progressively restricted it’s own freedom of thought.

But I’m getting a bit off track into speculation; my point is that currently, within areas that fall within the realms of “Science” and “Rationality” we have a pretty staunchly defined and defended set of fundamentals. People believe they can know things in an absolute sense and that that knowledge can be clearly communicated to one another. 

Unfortunately for science and rationality, human beings throw a huge wrench into this system. On a day to day basis we recognize that we can’t know for certain many things about ourselves. If you ask me if I love my mother and I tell you yes, what do you think of my answer and why? Is your knowledge complete enough to form a judgement on my own secret thoughts? Is there even a single coherent answer to that question? How the hell are we supposed to define love, and would people who speak different languages have different answers to all of these questions?

Ok, then, let’s leave out the humans and keep it basic instead – let’s talk about physics; what is light and how does it work? Does the universe have size-boundaries(biggest thing/smallest thing)? What is infinity and can it exist? How does gravity work? Can we even trust our own senses? If we can’t trust our own senses, how can we understand anything about reality?

The simple answer to all of these is that there is no coherent consensus on any of them, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to convince you to believe their perspective over  that of their rivals. It’s all well and good to practice logical argumentation and skepticism, but it’s not good to arrogantly assume that you know better than someone else how they should think, or that everyone else experiences reality in the same way you do. That’s where prejudice takes hold.

However, as overwhelming as all of this sounds, in the overall scheme, it doesn’t matter: we keep on living our lives and dying our deaths and will keep doing so on and on, just as we have since whenever we may or may not have started in this whole mess.

And we are really pretty good at it! How do we do this? Well we come up with a lot of ideas about the way reality works and we teach them to each other and our children and whatever system seems to make the most sense is what usually gets used.

Magic is the process of manipulating those fundamental ideas to affect how we and other humans interact with our reality, and also how that reality will respond for us. It encompasses basically everything humans do; building a bridge is just as much of a “spell” as taking someone else’s hair and doing an incantation and some other hinky stuff to it so the person will fall in love with you. One is just more consistent than the other in our current approach to reality. If you believe a thing it’s more likely to work on you. If everyone believes it and says you should believe it, it’s unlikely to NOT work on you!

Now what people think of as Magick is actually what happens when people manage to undermine, defy, bend, distort, or otherwise manipulate the general human consensus on how reality is supposed to work. This is a lot easier of course if people don’t particularly understand how something works or if you are working in an “artisitic” system where the sciency rules of “how things work” are suspended by general consensus. Alternately it can be done by “tricking” other people and/or reality into forgetting how things are meant to work(at least for the duration of the “spell”)so that something particularly useful or marvelous can happen. After the fact people(including the practitioner) can believe whatever they want about the “trick” of it, because if it has worked then clearly it must fit into the overall paradigm somehow right?

So to put some kind of temporary wrapper on this so that I can stop rambling(and go to bed) I will summarize:

1. Reality is really weird and squishy(duh).
2. We try to function a lot as tho it isn’t because the alternative is difficult.
3. Trying to make reality less weird than it is gives us cognitive dissonance.
4. Our ideas and perceptions have a major impact on our own realities.
5. Since our realities interact with others’, we have an impact on “shared reality”.
6. Magic is the practice of leveraging our own understandings of reality to more effectively modify everyone else’s perceptions of reality.
7. Reality changes. Possibly related to the above.
8. Abracadabra.

And thus the spell is cast. And thus(and always) The Song Remains the Same.

A Primer on (My)Reality

My perceptions about reality are constantly evolving, and I think that reflects a reality that isn’t actually static. I think a lot of what we see as static or ongoing processes in the universe are only perceived that way due to modern human expectation. In the sense of cosmic time and space, do a couple of hundred years of scientific “observations” really prove anything other than that the last few centuries have had a few fields that were relatively stable as far as certain forms of observation? And of course a certain amount of bias in inbuilt into the idea that you are measuring for certain chosen things.

I also think that maybe human thought has a larger affect on reality than “quantum” effects when taken in aggregate; I think “magic” is a manifestation of human will on reality, but that for the last few hundred years most humans have been using their wills to make the universe more predictable and observable. So basically the fact that science has seemed to work better and better, and developed better and better tools for quite a few generations in a row now is because western civilization as a whole, and some elements of human culture on a more generalized global level, have been driving a narrative of reality that reinforces itself and makes reality more coherent and “rational”.

In other words, science and rationality are basically forms of magic which attempt to reign-in chaos and make it more understandable. I think that can be healthy to some extent but has gone a bit too far. Most early founders of scientific thinking were magicians and alchemists, and I want to get back to that sort of lovely fusion of wonder, magic, skepticism, and rational-insanity that has produced some really interesting ideas in all sorts of directions besides mere rationality.

The problem with a materialist perspective to me, is that a completely “rational” universe would be really boring to me, and possibly to most people. I’m definitely biased here, but I do think we’ve gotten to a point where more and more people are beginning to WANT to believe in the irrational, because the current setup for western industrialized culture and reality leaves so much to be desired. Be it in economic or spiritual senses, people don’t really like the main options that are offered to them, at least within the geographic area of “Christendom”. Interestingly that’s the same area that has been tied to western industrialized culture and I don’t think that that alignment is an accident. Culturally in Europe and North America there seem to be two ideologies(Christianity and Materialism) which have been struggling with each other since the Enlightenment developed in response to Christian corruption.  These two forces have respectively subsumed and corrupted numerous other independent ways of thinking or spiritualistic approaches which were once thriving, creative, and diverse. In my perspective that system of thinking is beginning to fail because humans can’t really accept a completely one-dimensional version of reality, regardless of whether that singular perspective is monotheistic or atheistic. That’s not really how humans operate on a deep-level. This is a manifestation of our spiritual understanding of the universe. We’re also sick of it because the culture that has gone along with this whole situation really sucks!

Now, I recognize that I could be wrong about all of this; it could just be wishful thinking. I myself am tremendously bored and depressed by the prospect of a materialist universe and/or western-style industrial economics, and to be honest, while I appreciate a few things about Christianity I feel basically the same way about that. I’ve always tried to maintain a certain internal skepticism for my own ideas because I think that’s healthy and valuable. But at the same time, given a choice between satisfying pure rationality and it’s exponents or being labeled as various forms of outsider or “insane” I choose the later. If for no other reason than it’s more interesting to me to be a crazy wierdo than a drone. I do try to strike a balance, which I get from lots of ancient philosophical and spiritual perspectives, which I think generally have a lot to offer that modern people seem to overlook as if we’ve moved past and somehow superseded them. I particularly utilize a lot of Taoist, Stoic, Buddhist, Neoplatonic, Animist, and Hermetic ideas.

Whatever a person thinks and believes though, I think it’s long past time to disabuse ourselves of the idea that those ideas don’t matter; with the collective will and cultural power of humanity behind it, any idea can and does impact reality. We need to do a better job policing ourselves and not just cruising along in the two crappy lanes we’ve been provided with.

It’s time for spiritual off-roading.

My own worst enemy

I have been struggling to write a particular blog post. The one about magic. And I’ve basically got it all figured out but… I can’t do it. Or haven’t been able so far. Nothing is final or absolute with me. Absolutely. The sarcasm grows strong.

So here I am, I’ve decided to just get on here and write because sometimes just pouring the jug of bullshit thoughts out through the keyboard is what it takes to get to the ones that aren’t quite a much bullshit.

Can you tell I’m frustrated? Other people get frustrated with me when I get like this and it just makes it worse; seriously I am more frustrated with myself than anyone else could possibly be!

It’s a bit odd actually. We’ve been accomplishing huge amounts in life; raising a child(and pretty damn well if I do say so!), almost have secured a home-loan, exercising regularly. The Spouse figured out that if we set a specific goal for exercise it will work much much better for getting in shape. So the goal is to train hard over the next few years so that we can complete their dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Which is a tremendously difficult, yet certainly achievable goal(barring accident or injury). So we’ve been hiking a few hours each day the last several of days. Which has helped improve our self-image already, as well as leaving me physically wiped out. And we are going to keep doing it.

I’ve also been back to enjoying flirtatious back-and-forth on my Twitter and exploring the world through all of the interesting people I follow on there. Very strange sometimes how you realize you know more about what is going on in the world than people who watch 24 hour cable news regularly. And much more accurate view too; biases are much more clear when people don’t feel some professional sense of needing to hide them, so you can read between the lines and form your own opinions more effectively.

Also have been catching up on my favorite blog/podcast about magic, which is largely how I sorted my ideas about how magic actually works, even if they don’t exactly line up precisely, that’s actually part of my worldview: nobody’s ideas should exactly match up because we are all unique entities in space/time/spirit so if everything matched up for even two people it would be… disturbing.

Anyway, need to go grab my lovelies from home and go vote in local primary-elections(probably the only ones that matter and certainly the ones where our votes have the most statistical impact!) so that is all for now. Tonight is my scheduled “writing night” so maybe this will have broken something loose and I can finally knock that draft into something like publishable format so it doesn’t just seem so much like the long, arcane, and vaguely argumentative piece it currently is.

 

Ta!

~K

An Incantation

We wend our Way between the lines.
Twixt East and West we stride.
The North and South mean nothing here
All borders stand aside.

The mental map humanity
Has lain upon this Earth,
Must be surpassed and overcome
For new thought to have birth.

The frontier lands of home and hearth
Are where our quest shall start,
To venture forth through spirit-sight
And enter realms apart.

So further up and further in
Our hearts and minds must flow;
Hind curtains’ shroud the back of stage
Where watchers’ eyes shant go.

---

---

**Re-appearing Note**: When I posted this, this note was accompanying and it seems to have disappeared for some reason. Anyway, this is obviously a magickal incantation. It precedes a short series of posts that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks about my ideas about magick and the paranormal and how they should(and often do) interact with our everyday lives. It’s a bit of a teaser, a placeholder, and also a motivator to keep me moving on this blogging adventure.

A Working in Progress

I’ve probably let this sit longer than I ought.

I have several mental differences from your average person. Of those, perhaps only one of those can be clearly labeled a fault(for which I am thankful). That one fault is my fairly regular inability to do things.

It’s not depression. I do sometimes struggle with depression, and it can occasionally put me in the grips of a period of inaction. But it just as often happens independent of any other depression-related issues, and often these periods have lead me into the worst periods of depression because I become so frustrated that it makes me feel useless. Thankfully it isn’t something that is a truly constant struggle, just a very common one, that strikes particularly hard when it comes to any creative work I want to do!

I have an acquaintance who has autism and has this issue, with a few differences, most likely as part of a package deal with their autism. They gave me the term for it though: Executive Dysfunction and simply having the term has let me begin to confront and deal with it constructively.

This is a pretty good summary of how this issue often plays out in academic areas. When I was in school I dealt with a lot of those issues simply by leaning heavily on my incredible gifts when it comes to academics. Occasionally my “procrastination” would be something I couldn’t overcome with a last-minute binge of writing, but for the most part, the 6-12 hours I would spend reading a couple of hundred pages of material researching, and then writing 10-20 page research papers, would result in grades in the solid B-range.

That was in college; in High School I really never had anything to work on last-minute that would take me more than maybe 3 or 4 hours of concerted effort(also always the night before, or sometimes finishing on the bus on the way to school). And while my school-mates have historically been jealous of my ability to get by with “so little work” I have always been jealous of their ability to actually spread that work out over time, and to avoid the stress of doing everything at the last-minute!

I made it though, and successfully graduated University with an Anthropology degree a few years ago. It did, however, take 12 years altogether to get my degree, due to an unfocused class-schedule that barely followed a coherent course of study, and because of dropping many classes that just didn’t feel like classes I could bother attending. Plenty of them seemed interesting, but for whatever reason I simply couldn’t persuade myself that they were worth going to. Looking back, I think it’s practically a miracle that I was able to make it through an entire Bachelor’s degree program, and I’m pretty proud for succeeding eventually. But it also seems like I wasted a huge amount of time that could have been much better spent.

I’m not using my degree now, except as an elaborate way to build credit by giving lots of money to loan companies. I could have learned most of what I learned in University from online courses and spending time at the library! Except that without the motivation of the actual process of going to classes and being “forced” to complete assignments I’m fairly certain I would have stagnated.

I’m not in school anymore though, and this issue manifests in altogether more profoundly troublesome ways now that the guidance of a specified life-course has been removed.

I have wanted to be a writer for many years. Originally the dream was to do so professionally. But being a “writer” requires you have to write. Not just dream up stories and characters and clever dialogue. Not just come up with ideas you think people will find interesting and innovative. All that is worthless unless you actually sit down and put it onto the internet, or into a word-processor, or through a typewriter, or write it out by hand. And as much as I adore the actual process of forming words into sentences to do the very real Magick of making other people consider or perceive things that they otherwise wouldn’t… it is very hard.

Simply sitting down and putting my hands on a keyboard with the intention of doing something creative(such as writing this blog-post) is often a tremendous struggle. I want to, but I will have a block on the actual act of starting. I know how to start, but I often don’t have the capability of actually doing it. Somehow if I’ve had the ideas it seems in my brain as if they should simply exist for everyone else to be aware of. And the Will to do anything to actually birth them into reality will seem comparable to actually birthing a child; how is it even possible when you think about it?!

And sometimes it’s like when I fill-in paperwork(particularly job applications) and I’m asked to answer fundamental questions about myself. It seems actively demeaning to me to record information for others that is available in the public domain. For some reason, my brain tells me that I should not have to go through this necessary process because it is somehow beneath me. Because for some horrible irrational reason, some part of me feels that since I know what I’m thinking, then everyone else should also know the same thing.

Rationally I know these problems are absurd, to the point where it took a very long time for me to even realize that I have them. It’s not a problem “normal” people have to deal with so there isn’t a lot of language to describe it, aside from variations of “lazy” which couldn’t be more inaccurate. It often takes about the same effort for me to make a cup of tea or a sandwich as it does to go jog a mile or exercise for an hour, sometimes more, so really I work incredibly hard just to be a functional adult. I have declined to apply for jobs that I would truly love before, simply because the application was too much in some undefinable way and I was actually unable to complete it.

This has been a constant frustration, particularly in my writing. It is the creative thing which I am probably the most skilled at, and a favorite thing to do to relax… but only when I can start! And I need to do creative work because not having a creative outlet is one of the primary causes of my periods of depression!

Thankfully(getting back to the theme of the blog as a whole) I am a new parent! As part of becoming a new parent I’ve been going through my life and finding my weaknesses and things that are lacking, with the idea of changing them to be a better example for my child.

So in my mind I’ve been building a subtle sort of “spell” for myself. Now, when I do magick, that can mean many things, but in this case I mean I am reprogramming my own perception of reality. I use the energy and force for positivity and self-improvement that having a child has given me to enable me to think of these creative acts as involuntary actions required for properly living life. Specifically, I am hacking my mind to instinctively see creative expression as an integral part of proper parenting.

I do this programming every night that I sing the baby to sleep. I hack my mind every time I make funny voices, faces, and sounds at the little-one to help them gain some understanding of communication. I do magick every time I write in this blog so that my child will be able to understand what being a good parent and being a human whose soul is truly alive means in our life.

In the future this will only expand. As this nascent human grows more and more into their potential, I will finally grow into mine through using teaching and parenting to destroy my own barriers in life. Specifically because I have to be an excellent example for them to follow! I have no choice but to show them that we must express ourselves even when the deck is stacked against us. Whether that means society, economics, family, or our own minds, if we don’t struggle on for success then we’re just giving up the essence of life.

I do still have plenty of difficult days and weeks(this last week was particularly difficult creatively for some unknown reason). To make a cowboy analogy, sometimes the horse bucks you off, but you get back on the horse and keep riding, because otherwise you’re giving up on riding the open range.

And riding the frontiers of creativity, thought, and emotion is what makes us human. Without it, we are lost.