Shifting Seasons: A Few Updates

A tattoo done on myself which is at once a representation of the three Mothers of the Hebrew alphabet, the magician's dagger, and the lightning path through the Kabbalistic tree of life

As months shift, and the weather becomes increasingly unstable, the timing of our harvests and preparations for the turning over of our garden for the Summer remind me that it is quite time to once again offer a few updates from my world in order to contextualize all of the coming material I hope to publish.

While I don't really wish for this to become a "personal blog", there is a sense in which what I publish here is quite tied to what is going on in my life, and that as I share with you things that may or may not be relevant to and aid you in your own Path, I am at the same time walking my own. Therefore, there is some relevance to the context of my thoughts and actions, as it not only colors what I choose to write about but how I choose to write about it, and how my Practice and overall awareness of How Things Are evolves as well.

November was a precipice, a blade upon which the communal project stood. I do not wish to "get into" the details of what occurred yet again, but the cleaving of that project has given me a significant amount more space to focus on our family, the land, and Practice.

This does not mean, however, that things have necessarily been more free in terms of time. While psychologically I feel freed from the constraints of constant conflict resolution, I'm now giving my children the space they deserve and, now that my eldest is about the age that most children start preschool, playing the role of teacher as well as caretaker. Chores that were once split among five adults are now settled on the two of us, and we've taken on more with the Ranch. Quite honestly, it's been intense, and Practice has taken a much different form lately, though this is not necessarily my intention for it nor what I wish for it to look like forever, though I accept that I must accept trade-offs at this time.

I do not have the bandwidth at this time for daily seated meditation as I once did, but I attempt to make my morning and evening chores fill that space by being wholly present in the activities of the garden, the taking care of animals. I listen to them, and in that listening I've found that I'm actually quite good at this thing called gardening or perhaps cultivation more broadly. Furthermore, things have begun to happen. While, at first, when things were busy and I was still processing the end of relationships that I was quite invested in, it felt that for a time that bidirectional communication channel had been closed, I find that it feels open again. I walk out into the desert with Oso and the mountains expand and contract: they breathe, they speak. I have the most intense prophetic dreams when I ask for them, and have been able to answer incredibly difficult questions in my sleep that have nagged at me while waking. There is a new era of Practice I have walked into, or ushered in (or both), and I find that the things I am capable of now exceed that which I have ever found myself capable of before.

And while the new schedule and this particular season as we complete a critical project for the Ranch leaves me with little time for art, there is much going on conceptually that will be transmissible as soon as time permits. Of course, there is also the constraint of injury, though despite my necessary hiatus from much of my visual art, I am still working on my book with the spare time I can find.

The perhaps idealistic optimism of November has been permuted into something altogether different: not an optimism, but a kind of tightrope walk, the apprehension of which is the awareness that we are so close to the achievement of critical breakthroughs both materially and immaterially. The current moment is a precipice, one which seeks to define who we are and what it really is that we're doing here on this land, and we're stepping softly but confidently in the direction of Purpose.

Thank you for reading this brief but hopefully welcome update! Later this month I will be releasing a write-up on the concept of forces and balance, and how this relates to the existence of the Work of magick. My goal is to work backwards, taking what I've shared so far and stripping it back down to the fundamentals, whilst offering a perspective that is perhaps somewhat different than so many of the authors out there who've already written some variation of "the basics of magick".