On Suspension of Disbelief, and the Lengths We'll Go to Get Some

I keep starting posts and not finishing posts, attempting to edit and polish them into something beautiful, then leaving them forgotten in "drafts" for months.

This isn't even a metaphor for my life. It is just my life.

So today I sat in bed in what felt like the wee hours but was, in fact, not (thanks, blackout curtains!), attempting to summon the courage to join the world.

When Nothing is True and Nothing is Permitted (or, getting out of a nasty energetic spiral, with Parks and Rec references)

Note: This post is a month old. It's been sitting in my drafts. In the interest of posting anything, ever, I am going for it.

I gave a reading to a friend at the last Full Moon Shenanigans (a name I came up with months ago that has fortunately? unfortunately? stuck). The 10 of Wands*. The 8 of Disks. When you feel blocked, I said, slow down. Don't stop.

Wait, she responds. That's a *thing*?

I could walk instead of run?

The Card of the Day is the Priestess

The card of the day is the Priestess. It's delivered via an Android widget that automatically refreshes at midnight, forecasting new fresh hell as I stare at my phone, scrolling into the wee hours through posts I've read or ignored several times already, willing myself to put the fucking thing down and go the fuck to sleep. But sleep brings dreams, and dreams bring contemplation, and contemplation holds very. difficult. questions.

Post-Festival Rambling

Do you remember when I said I was going to update more regularly? About that.

But deferred projects aside, here I am. Writing. There's a sacred vow to uphold.

(Sacred vow? Really? About blogging? More on that later.)

Heartland Pagan Festival 2016 is over, and I think I have learned some things. Hopefully I will figure out what they are eventually, and then be able to comment on them more in depth. At the moment I am still trying to sort it out in a process strangely akin to determining the source and type of an injury. Poke, poke. It hurts there. Poke. There, too.

The problem is that none of the things I am learning from this process are glamorous or particularly interesting. They are mostly confirmations of things I've known about myself and struggled to ignore for a very long time.

Item: I don't do well when people aren't paying attention to me, when I am not the center of focus, when I am not indispensable and revered.

It's tough to admit that. Wanting is ugly. Wanting is weakness. Wanting, synonyms: deficient, inadequate, lacking, insufficient, imperfect, unacceptable, unsatisfactory, flawed, faulty, defective, unsound, substandard, inferior, second-rate, poor, shoddy.

(No, you're equivocating.)

The terrible irony of being codependent is that when I am not important to a process I despise myself and everyone, and when people do rely on me I feel trapped and powerless.

So if I had been able to contribute anything meaningful to the festival this year, if I'd had ritual roles or really anything had been required of me that put me in the center of things, I would probably be whining about that.

Is this one of those things where the final conclusion will be "I am just an unhappy person?"

Poke, poke. Yeah, that stings.

When You Mock the Void, the Void Mocks Back (Planetary Witchcraft Update)

Do you remember when I said I was going to update more regularly? About that.

But nevermind all of the recriminations.

Here's what I learned from the Sun. (Spoiler alert: a bunch of shit I should have known already.)

1) The whole Yule = return of the Sun thing has always felt really, really hypothetical to me. I mean, sure, the days are technically getting longer, but our the time we set up for our solar work was still smack dab in the middle of the darkdarkcold. And our work, when we did it, was mostly happening at night, inside. If I had been able to get outside, or even done more work during the day, I might have been more successful.

2) Getting to the Sun isn't hard. It isn't. In the one clear vision I had of the Sun, the rickety patchwork wooden ladder/staircase/boardwalk contraption I'd crossed over on was viewed with some curiousity from my guide. I don't understand why people come that way, he confided. A perusal of the perimeter of the surface of the sphere yielded infinite paths - many smooth, direct, and clear. If you want to talk to the Sun, you can, you know, just kind of talk to it.

3) Depression is not really solar. I was hoping to leverage the Sun to push through that. Again, actually spending some time outside in the sunlight might have helped. Conjuring the Sun in a dark temple? Less so.

We'll come back to the Sun. We'll work something out.

We moved on to Jupiter.

And, seriously, Jupiter.

We've done more work since Imbolc than we did in the entire six week period allegedly dedicated to the Sun.

And I will talk more about what that work has looked like. Soon. Really. Also to follow: a post about some trippy visionary experiences at a workshop this past weekend. First I need to decode my incredibly sloppy crayon notes.

Planetary Witchcraft: Overview, Part Two

I discussed the year-long overview of the Planetary Witchcraft experiment in Part One of this post. Here's a more concise version of our year-long vision:

Yule-Imbolc: Sun

Imbolc-Ostara: Jupiter

Ostara-Beltane: Mercury

Beltane-Midsummer: Venus

Midsummer-Lammas: Mars

Lammas-Mabon: Moon

Mabon-Samhaim: Saturn

Samhain-Yule: Earth

Planetary Witchcraft: Overview, Part One

I should write a "wow, I haven't blogged in a long time!" post, but I have no desire to do that.

I just want to talk about the new project I am embarking upon this year with Satyr: a sort of get-our-shit-together/unleash-high-weird/maybe-produce-usable-content project. First, some background.

Item: we have been getting Involved with Paganism, at least locally. And ideally that involvement should rest on a solid personal practice. And my personal practice has been less than solid, lately.

Item: I had a vision about 18 months ago in which a guide smiled upon all of my labors and the rituals I was leading and the paths that I was clearing for others. "That's all well and good," he said," but you still have to do your work." That vision's been haunting me.