Cussin' for College: Your Moral Compass

You're Thirteen Now!  These Margaritas Are for You, Becky! 

So, thanks to that book Mastering Witchcraft that everyone else including Jow seems to have read at a formative age but me (I was reading Spiral Dance and um Bridget Jones' Diary and here we are), everyone's talking about morals and looooooove philters which is totes exciting for me because while I have not read the book and am incredibly unlikely to, I have opinions about morality!  I've even had articles published on the subject matter! Thanks, blogosphere!  I'm socially relevant again, snowflake queens!  So, there's a story I've been meaning to tell you all that had both my Platonic Euro Husband (PEH) and Husband-to-Be laughing and telling me that I'm like the liberal parent who lets their kids drink in the house because it's better than on the streets!  Remember a while back how I foolishly agreed to teach Hoodoo 101 to the kids in the Pagan club at my alma mater?  And how I, like, promised the president that there would be absolutely no discussion on curse work whatsoever?  

About that.  So I'm droning about the history of Hoodoo and the differences between Hoodoo and Voodou and how it came to our country and frankly even boring myself as the kids all were visibly twitching to have to listen to me and not text or be boning each other out while their roommates watch rolling on E pills or whatever they're doing now but we all brighten up when I get to the practical applications that I carefully redacted to be both appropriate to college kids' needs and not discussing The Dark Arts.  We chatter about fast luck and how to do well in an interview blah de blahblah.  They get interested and ask about source books.  Of course I recommend cat yronwode's seminal work, but there's not like a redacted version of it so I say vaguely that it's not all positive work so keep that in mind and keep it moving.  Much like my lazy fat house cats they went from only vaguely aware of their surroundings to HIGH ALERT!  BUG!  BUG!  IT'S A BUG!

Them: What do you mean?
The President: (suspious side eye)
Me: Um.
Them: No, we're totes awake now and ready and willing to push back our E pill orgy and pizza dorm room party for this.
Me: The President and I spoke on this issue and it's specifically against your club's charter for me to discuss this.
The President: (approving to me, apologetic to them)
Them: You have said the words we have longed to hear!  Forbidden knowledge!  It's why we came to college!  That and getting away from our smothering parents!  (closes the door and shuts the blinds like a real sekrit society does!)
Me: (oh Lordess, I'm boned) (looks to The President)
The President: (nods)

I had a real moral quandary that I thought I had shielded myself from - do I tell them or do I let them learn about it on the streets the internet where the information will be just that - information coming from a source they've never met and has no stake in their lives or even a face to them?  They are adults but they're still young and impressionable in American society and frankly have probably hereto forth never even read a book yet that even whispers about The Dark Arts, it's most likely been mostly beginner Llewellyn stuff.

I took a deep breath and I dove in:

Okay.  This is where your moral compass that we keep talking about becomes incredibly important.  Karma doesn't work the way that most Americans think of it; it's slow, it's accumulated over lifetimes and it represents both the good and the bad.  And while the Law of Three is a nice idea that's meant to keep you from getting involved in some seriously dumb shit, it doesn't work in a way that's observable, if it works at all.  I can't tell you what the right thing to do is going to be for you.  We don't have a manual or a list of rules to follow as Pagans like a lot of religions do.  As young adult Pagans it's critical that you start figuring out what you think is right and wrong now.  What are you willing to do magically and in life?  Where is your line in the sand that goes too far?  Whenever you work magic, you're thrusting your will over something.  Do you need consent for you to do magic for another person?  You need to decide that.  You need to decide if you want to get involved with exerting your will over other people specifically.  A mentor of mine once told me that some of the worst things she's done magically have been with good intentions and some of the best things she's done have been with bad intentions.  

You also need to understand that in Hoodoo curse work is called a mess for a reason.  Do not get yourself into a mess that you can't get yourself out of because I'm sure as hell not going to rush in to help you.  Don't ever rush into curse work.  If you're angry and not being sensible, it's not a good place to do curse work, you will likely do something you regret.  Always give it at least three days to see if you want to tie yourself up further with the person you're angry with because make no mistake about it, you will be tying yourself up closer with this person.  Sometimes it will be worth it.  Sometimes it won't be.  Sometimes your magic will work in a way you won't expect it to.  Oftentimes it will in fact.  Sometimes it will work better than you wanted it to.  Love spells are all fun and games until you need to get a restraining order on someone.  You need to think about if you want someone to be with you because they feel compelled to be.  You need to make sure to do omen/divination work before you get involved with cursing.  Bottle spells can work like this.  Love spells can work like that.  Make sure you are mindful about your personal concerns.  Make sure you are mindful about others' personal concerns that may behoove you to have.  When I once asked a Witch what to do if you don't have them, she calmly remarked, 'But why wouldn't you?'  If you're not willing to do what a curse work asks, you're likely not really ready to take that step.  And that's okay.  It's okay if you never work a curse in your life.  But make sure you know if someone's been working you.

And . . .that's where I stand on the whole morality issue.  It's personal.  That's part of what's both great and terrible about being part of a group of people who don't have a list of specific rules to govern us, some of us are on board with things like love philters and some of us are appalled by it.  Some of us say, well, it depends.  But you need to know where you stand, you need to know where your conscious is and only you can really dictate that for yourself as an Occultist/Pagan.  It's thrilling, scary and uncertain for us, like Death. 

you know I live in a world full of hope
not a world full of hype
I ain't no saint
I help myself to what I need
but I help other people too
y'know I sleep soundly - Ani Difranco

I'm Not Clergy and You Can't Make Me

So, it's been super fun living with me lately as I am constantly on a verge of massive self discovery and/or a nervous breakdown. I'm either going to really build my pagan empire (which is a different story!) or make everyone else stab me to death nineteen times trying.

I'm not good with uncertainty and everything has been fraught with it since my company closed. Sometimes I can't sleep well for no real reason beside a hormone dip maybe or just general flailing.

I am trying to:
* Write my book
* Start lecturing again
* Get a stable source of income
* Work unstablely
* Have a put together life with a nice house, nice car and look like I wasn't mauled by tigers when leaving the house
* Go to the gym
* Start my crafting business

It's been difficult. Kelly Cutrone in her awesome book If You Have to Cry, Go Outside talks about how in your twenties, Durga's tiger is riding you. In your thirties, it is your job to ride that fucking tiger. And oh lordess am I trying. But the tiger is tricksy and clever and sometimes wins.

So, this leads us to today where Jow has the enviable job of attempting to talk me down from hyperventilating in a scrunched up ball about what a fucking disaster I am and what a mess my life is and I'm not a good writer and I'm not a good anything and all those hysterics that make artistes such a fucking joy to live with. He eventually gets simmered down with the promise of list writing to start my pagan empire and somehow that got us talking about the lack of laypeople in paganism and how everyone wants to be a grand high pagan priestess all Six Sigma crazylike.

I mean, as always, Gordon articulates it much better on how we all need to kind of calm the hell down and we all don't need to be the top of the heap in cultural practices not indigenous to our own but let's talk about my feelings on the matter.

See, I too wanted to be a special pony-princess-priestess at one time. Hell! Let's really get real here, I called myself a shaman for like half my twenties! But we're like suuuuuuper fixated on titles in the first world. Titles, as my panicky hamster brain reminds me, tell us who we are and what we do and what we can expect from life. I obviously like titles in much of my life, especially titles that assert prestige. I am too snotty to call myself a mere baby sitter, I'm a nanny thank you. Admin? Um, no. Executive Assistant. So *obviously* for like the first 3/4 of my Pagan life I wanted my six sigma priestess merit badge and I would be respected and revered at 25 as is the natural course of things.

Yeah. Well. Around 28ish when I started transitioning from maiden to mother, a thought became crystal clear: You don't know a goddamn thing about anything. Naturally, this was terrifying to a know-it-all like myself. But then I thought about my spiritual mentors - N. who refuses to be a teacher to anyone but wound up in clergy despite her best efforts to dodge that dodgeball hurling at her and S. who despite founding said circle has always been adamant about our circle being non hierarchical and that she is v. much *not* in charge.

When I started to wake up to the reality of what clergy really means: death rites, marriages you know aren't going to work that you need to perform anyway, being political and keeping your mouth shut, lots of unpaid labor, being forced to mediate "she's on my side of the chair" fights, I started thinking heeeeeeeeeeeeey back away slowly, you need that aggro like you need a hole in your damn head, you have enough problems.

And I do. I wonder why in paganism especially it seems that we all need to be experts, priest/esses and basically the person who knows the most. I wonder what that says about us as a people? I mean, surely we can't all be awesome people-people with seemingly never ending amounts of patience and kindness. It's not like it pays anything or even carries much prestige at the end of the day outside of the pagan/occult community. But yet . . .most of us seem to want it like a wanting thing and I wonder why that is. It took me like ten out of fourteen years of my Pagan practice to stop that. Because . . .you know what? I don't want to be held up as an infallible expert, I don't need that pressure in my life. I don't need to be the realest of the real, the family trad-ist of the family trad, the most authentic misappropriator . . .I don't. I know some stuff about some stuff. A bit of hoodoo, a bit of voodoo, a bit of shamanism, a bit of dianic wicca, a bit of ADF druidry but nothing that impressive in terms of degrees and accomplishments. And . . .that's okay. For better or worse, we're mostly a culture of dabblers as Pagans. That doesn't mean you should mash everything together whether it fits or not, but the minute that someone expects me to put on a mask and tries to make me pretend to be perfect at what I do and that my life is a Stepford bed of perfection, that's when I'm out. I don't want to be clergy and I don't want to be an expert.

Maybe this is a little kumbaya but frankly I just want to write and talk about my experiences and how I do things and teach people how to do them and get ideas circulating and make sure we all (myself included) have our critical thinking brains on at all times, *especially* when it involves ourselves. I want to be able to teach without the expectation that it means my life is perfect and I'm unaware of my flaws, I'd rather be relatable. I'd rather you say, well if this chick can do it, surely there's hope for me. It's Rachel Ray and Penelope Trunk's charm. I'd rather learn together and I'd rather someone say hey this thing you said didn't work for me and me saying okay let's try to figure out something that will. It's scary on the back side of the panel with all the expectant looks that surely you must know the answer because you are on the answer side of the panel but I'm going back out to the answer side of the panel, hot mess and all because I feel like it's where I should be and this time I'm ready for it and have the blueprint for what I can share with the world.

So, as they say, here goes everything!

On Home Ownership and Hearths

So, my PEH (platonic Euro husband for those who are new) posted about home ownership and makes a lot of good very valid points. I've been thinking a lot about home ownership as I am a fairly recent homeowner. He's right about being sold a faulty dream for a lot of people, I know people who got in at the wrong time and now are in over their heads by a lot. The fact that we're still aspiring to being a "land owner" hundreds of years later is crazy, we're still holding onto that cache that being a "land owner" (home owner) meant you were upper crust.

But.

Just to play devil's advocate, here's why I'm a home owner:

1. I'm incredibly boring. I've lived in the same area for more than half my life. I like it here, my friends are here, my family is here, good pagan groups are here, you can be a weekender in a subculture without it having to be your life, I'm an hour away from NYC, two from Philly/A.C., there's ocean within reach. As L. pointed out, I can posture all I want but the fact is I am ridiculously stupidly rooted here and unlikely to ever not be, past traveling (I love to travel but I get homesick something fierce) so may as well buy something.

2. Because NJ is so ridiculously wealthy overall, something called The Mount Laurel Project happened which basically said you can't push out working class/middle classes out of a town by only building property that rich people can buy, it's not fair. Thus every new development that's built, a certain amount of rental units, condos, etc need to be set aside so that low income and moderate income people can buy/rent a home in a good area. Jow and I qualified for a "moderate income" condo. You go to your township, show them your income info, get a letter of recommendation from a mortgage company saying they'll likely give you a mortgage and then you're entered into a lottery. You can say no to as many as you want, but it's unknown when your name will come up again. Our first one was so . . .old and run down and craptastic, we didn't even get up the nerve to go in. The second one was in the complex I grew up in (which yes, means I live v. close to my mom but luckily she's like a vampire and doesn't come in unless invited so there's no "surprise visits") which is about fifteen years old, nice neighborhood, pool, tennis courts, garbage dumpster verses trash day (which I prefer) and weirdly lower association fees than the first place which did not have a pool or a tennis court.

3. Since it's a condo, it's not unlike an apartment in the good ways - roof, shoveling snow, mowing the lawn, taking care of the outside of our place is Not Our Problem. It's a good size for us, in Paris or NYC it would be considered roomy, in NJ it's considered small but we have our own washer/dryer, the kitchen is decently sized, we each have our own closet and a home office. It's big enough to throw a good party but small enough to discourage long term visitors. It's not overly expensive to heat or air condition. It's small enough that Jow and I can clean it on our sloppiest day in a day if we're being ambitious.

4. It made financial sense for us. At the time, the government was giving an $8K incentive for first time home owners (which was a good chunk of our down payment), it worked out (with the association fees, property tax, etc) to about what we were paying in rent. It is unknown as to if there will be any kind of social security left by the time we need it and neither Jow nor I work for a big enough company to get a really bangin' 401K/retirement option where we'd get pensions or the company matches a substantial amount of money which means we do need to focus on our retirement. A big part of that focus is that we have a roof over our heads so we have money for piddly things like not eating cat food. There's also the matter of since this is part of a county program, while we'll never make a huge sum of money should we ever want to move, we are also *guaranteed* to make a small profit on our place no matter what the economy looks like.

5. Both Jow and I have spent our twenties as most people do, moving around a lot (him more than me!). I have never owned a place to live in that is likely to be mine for at least 5-7 years (like a prison bid as I like to cheerfully say), likely longer. I wanted to know what the energy would be like in terms of creating a hearth. I can only speak to my own experience, but our energy has been building in our home because we treat it like our home, I had never personally been able to do that when renting (and that's on me, others' experiences may be different). We put a lot of energy (in painting, in decorating, in magical work) into making this place feel solid as a hearth, it feels more like a hearth to me but that could also have a lot to do with my particular place in life currently, building a hearth wasn't exactly high on my list of shit to do as a maiden, in the mother stage it's much more important to me. I also spend a lot more time here - working, playing, eating, entertaining, etc than I did in my other places in my twenties which again could definitely be life place attributed. My last apartment was so ridiculously big, we never fully unpacked and that energy definitely carried over. For me, home ownership was also about taking charge of my future post-divorce and making sure I had a place to live when I was old, it was also about starting my new life as a grown up and taking control of my financial life as well. It was a v. definite start into my new life and attempting to ride the tiger instead being ridden by the tiger.

The Secret, Serial Killer Boards and You

So, as usual, Gordon and I are thinking about the same thoughts across the pond, though perhaps coming to different conclusions (don't worry, I bought the Cupcake wine today so I'll be safe during the latest snowocalypse). Today he's pondering The Limits of Visualisation: Why You Still Need Magic. A lot has been made of The Secret's many flaws and issues. As Kathy Griffin said when her assistants made focus boards and then attributed her recent uprising in success to said boards, "I'm so sure it was the two of you and your Secret boards that did this, not, like, my many years of constant work." So besides taking away that you should never get into a sweat lodge with these people, as Gordon said, visualization is not enough.

So don't do that. Instead, as Gordon advises in a previous post, create a success map.

Or as I call it, a serial killer board. I watch *a lot* of crime procedurals and inevitably, a serial killer has a board that looks like the picture I have in this entry. At first, Jow desperately tried to get me to stop calling it that. But he eventually succumbed to my irrefutable logic. A serial killer, at least a tv fictional serial killer, has a Miss Martha level of organization and attention to detail. A tv serial killer takes a long time to catch (usually a whole season at least) by a crack team of one of the best groups of CSI agents/detectives/forensic anthropologists that can usually solve a case in about 35 minutes but s/he manages to stumps them for 25 episodes and generally can even up the ante by becoming personal and killing something that this said team loves and *still* not get caught for 25 episodes because of their drive to succeed and attention to detail. This fictional serial killer has an implementable long term plan. Is that or is that not the point of a focus board/success map?

Now, I am definitely not telling you to become real life serial killers. Real life serial killers aren't anywhere near as fun or cool as the fictional ones because of the whole morality/hurting people/having massive psychological issues/winding up with a needle in your arm and the long sleep issues. But a fictional serial killer is written by a team of writers, very carefully so as (if written correctly and no one is asleep on the job/phoning it in/being super half assed about it) there are no plot holes for the show.

And that is actually the point, Charmers. There should be no plot holes in your magic. There should be measurable goals, magical work and mundane work to make sure that your magic is doing what it's supposed to be doing. If it's not, you need to re-evaluate what you were doing and who you were working with and if your goals were reasonable and achievable magically and mundanely.

A focus board is not going to do this for you.

But what it *will* do is keep your eye on the prize and in my opinion, that's the real purpose in having one. You might be easily distracted like myself and get sidetracked from all the important shit you're actually supposed to be doing and instead watching back to back episodes of Bridezillas in your pajamas and/or drinking French Greyhounds and getting sucked into Facebook for nine million hours or maybe you're reading too many self improvement books and can no longer sleep like a grown human adult. It's easy to get completely and utterly off track.

That's why you need a serial killer board.

How to Be as Organized as a Television Serial Killer and Keep Your Eye on the Prize

1. First, think about what you're trying to accomplish in your life. For me I started by thinking of words because my brain sees words before pictures. My words are: Aspire, Create, Live, Serenity, Serve and Want.

2. Now find pictures that you feel are good representations of what you're trying to accomplish. Mine are:

Aspire: Joan Holloway (Mad Men)(she is curvaceous like whoa and Queen of the Secretaries), black and white picture of the Eiffel Tower (to remember to find my inner french chick) and Erzulie's symbol (to remember to drop it like it's hot)

Create: Typewriter (i is a riter noaw), a spinning wheel (I spin yarn as part of my income) and Mnemosyne (she's the mother of the Muses).

Live: Rolling pin and cookies (making things from scratch), a bedroom from anthrologie (keep my house in a way that I like) and a champagne cork (enjoy the good things in life)

Serenity: Crow Yoga position (yoga helps me feel centered), candles (make me feel calm) and roses (remember to find beauty)

Serve: Parvati and Shiva (remember to be a divine housewife and be present romantically) and Leigh from Secretary (draw your own conclusions, Charmers)

Want: Bank vault (to have money saved), a Saab convertible (I really want my next car to be a convertible and I could afford a used Saab and they're supposed to not be horrific to work on or horrifically expensive to repair and they're safe), passport (to keep traveling)

3. Get a smallish cork board and push pins. Pick a font if you want to print words, I find Fiolex Girls conveys the fictional serial killer intensity I'm trying to go for. I also used good quality heavy paper for my pictures and scrapbooking scissors to cut out my pictures so they had pretty edges.

4. Arrange. This is an awesome meditative stage where you get to play god of your own life and arrange all the pictures in a way that makes sense to you. I grouped my pictures according to each word.

5. The finishing touch. All serial killer boards have yarn connecting pictures and articles together. To be completely frank, I have no idea why that is. It looks cool? But magically speaking, it's useful as weaving the yarn through the push pins and connecting them together can be a magical act if you use your intent. You should also think carefully about which pin to connect to which pin. For me, It was even more magical because I got to use the (pink) yarn that I had spun myself for this.

6. Place in a position you will often see. If you're constantly glancing at it for a quick second at a time, I think then putting the pieces together internally is more of a subconscious versus conscious act. Mine is in my office, just out of direct eyesight which helps too. Plus when I get bored working, I tend to look around a lot so that adds to the occasionally seeing it but seeing it often aspect.

On the Sundering of Feri: The stars/ the moon/ all have been blown out . . .

So, I'm on the fringe of Feri. Just in deeply enough to have a friend basically say holy shit there is so much going on right now it's *crazy* and people are acting *super crazy* to each other. I neatly filed it away in my gossip folder but didn't really venture further in until just now when I read T. Thorne Coyle's article The Sundering of Feri. While I don't really feel much more confident on the specifics of what happened and was surprised to learn Thorne isn't teaching Feri anymore ( . . .again, see fringe), this part was really meaningful for me:

It has been said that we are moving from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age. Pisces wants to hold things close and in reclusion, within existing structures, striving for a beautiful purity. Aquarius wants to open up the windows of the Witch's hut—or sometimes bust down the walls - and let in some fresh air, while figuring out how to build something new. While I have great sympathy for the Pisceans, and think that likely there will always be those needed to hold that polarity, my work is firmly on the side of the non-conforming Aquarians, even when we vehemently disagree. The world needs us.

This, this, a thousand times this. If ever there was a full mission statement on my feelings about Paganism and Witchery, it would be this. As an actual Aquarian, I am always doing that, sometimes to the chagrin of those around me. I always want to bust down the walls and see the inside of your hut, I want to show you mine. I want us to build something together and when it doesn't work anymore, go down to the river and throw it in and start again.

It's also my deepest fear. That I'm not . . .whatever enough to be an expert in my own right as a hearth witch. That I lack children and a full time job with no duties of a traditional soccer mom, that I'm not witch in the woods enough as I only have a vague connection to the land and don't take awesome midnight journeys for wood and roadkill. And there are women I admire greatly who fit reasonably in either of those categories and sometimes I start to feel lost because I'm in this weird in between place. I feel sometimes not enough like anyone else I know in this blogosphere until Jow reminds me of my darling PEH, Gordon who keeps me grouned by just being him across the pond, thinking some of the same random stuff I do about magic and other things, putting things together in a way that makes sense and travels and drinks too much wine and I think, there is still a place for me. (Sister will you follow me/Sister will you dance with me/ like a flame you must be wild . . .)

I'm always going to want to bust down the walls, even models have limits, as Jason reminds us. So whenever a tradition breaks, I can't help but be excited in a weird way. Because . . .then the walls are busted down, we can rethink *everything* and *anything* and what really works and what doesn't work and when we can put aside our egos enough and show each other our soft squishy bits, our broken bits, the bits that made mistakes, that's when shit gets real in the best possible sense. We're not united in one shaky illusion, we're a dozen nations, strong in our sense of self and our vision. At the end of the day, more than anything, that's what we are as hearth witches, dozens of tiny nations threaded together by our hearths however big or small, permentant and temporary and we get to be woven together here on the world wide web, whispering our secrets and magic and joys and sorrows to each other here in the ether. And I'm honored to be part of that, our bouquet of nations that florish here. When I am restless and fretful, I forget about that, the beauty in being bound together by words. I'm honored by all of you who visit here and there will always be a place for you in my nation. Always.

On Black Swans.

When I first started out in the blogosphere, it took me a little while to get introduced to Gordon, but one night Jow was laughing while reading a magic blog so I was immediately interested. I then started reading Gordon and launched a one women campaign of desperate devotion. Eventually, Gordon was unable to resist my assault on his blog and my dogged fan girling and gave in. It soon became apparent that we likely shared a wine addled brain and had similar views on magic and weeknight drinking. Both of our partners have been indulgent about our marriage of the minds and I have come to refer to him as my PEH (Platonic European Husband).

I love all of my other blogosphere buds, and they're always really good at making me think about various things (especially RO, Jason, and Kenaz) in different ways, but Gordon has always managed to articulate the habitrail that makes up my brainmeat into succinct, concise English. More over, he makes it into a plan.

Sometimes our little corner in the blogosphere gets into a hivemind. In late April, we all got crazy about LifeHacking and who wrote books that were good about it and who wrote books that weren't and what did it really mean to have the perfect day. I was new, I needed shit to blog about anyway, so I jumped in as desperately wanted to smoke with cigarettes with the cool kids.

Then things started to get weird. Or wyrd for those of you with a spelling fetish. My boss started talking about cutting my hours and somewhere in there, Jason was talking about not forcing things to happen a certain way as in, yeah, I could be focusing all my mojo into getting more business for my boss's company or I could say something along the lines of, oh hey, I'll bust my ass, I'll write, I'll craft, I'll hustle/whore any kind of project that's in my realm, I'm trusting You (collective You, my gods who are kind about my dilettantism and how I couldn't contain my Pokeman tendencies in my baby Pagan days) to not let terrible things happen to me.

I love my day job. Not because it's particularly awesome, but it's mindless, it pays v. well, it has kickass hours, a really kind boss and a window. I would honestly stay here until my bosslady retired or dropped dead. Security is indeed the whore in me as Heather Nova sings. But it's a tiny company, just me and the bosslady and we're affiliated with the pharma industry and . . .everyone's merging and downsizing and tanking so it's been pretty barren.

I love Jason's explanation of doing magic, with the three levels and all of that and I see it working super amazing awesome. On an intellectual level, I would think, yes, this is the way magic should be done. Jow does awesomely with it, people get awesome results and who doesn't do magic to get results? But in reality land, my brain is a mess of tubes and wheels and many Hyperbole and a Half moments where I can never manage to think about the three levels when it's go time.

In early summer, bosslady and I started talking about cutting my hours and I felt That Moment. And . . .I didn't have all the pretty words that Gordon has or a way to articulate it right because I didn't even realize I was doing it. But I had a Shrödinger’s Cat moment and I started shoaling like whoa. I didn't know I was doing it because I didn't have the words, though I had the actions.

So I started thinking, okay, if my hours get cut, I can collect a little bit of unemployment, we can cut off our delicious delicious tv for a while and use the farmer's markets to eat more produce and it will be okay. My boss never cut my hours, but I immediately started working on other projects in a slow steady manner. I managed to land a respectable freelance writer gig that pays decently well for writing and allows me to work as much or as little on it as I can manage.

When shit started getting real around the office as we say in Jersey, my boss let me know that unless something major changes, we're going to be out of business by the end of the year. Gordon in his infinite kindness when this all started to go down, said, you should write this. Make your blog into a book, make it happen. And a few weeks later, it went from shoaling to a black swan moment. All the while, I had been doing magic - japa, candle devotions, mojo bags and hands, a honey pot. I had been trying to write a kitchen witch book for years, but it never came together right. One day after work, I went home and wrote enough notes to see that it could be a book.

Since then, things have been happening fast. I calculated my potential unemployment with a little freelance writing and realized I could easily take a couple months off, perhaps three. During that time, I can write my outline and really get down to brass tacks in making magical supplies for Trevia. I can write a few fiction outlines (though, to be honest, while I had always thought I'd be a fiction writer, most of the gigs I'm getting are nonfiction, so perhaps not or perhaps not as a staple). After the three months, I would be able to do enough content writing with a bit of freelancing to make approximately what I am making now.

All of these things that I've wanted - to make my own hours, to work from home, to be able to have many small streams of income shoal together into one actual income seem to be coming together. If this were to happen and my book was to be accepted, I would be able to really hustle and promote it, unfettered.

And it's sped up even faster this week. Jow and I put together a really solid plan for Trevia on Monday while sitting at a posh bar in the middle of the day. And during this week, I used another one of Gordon's tricks, A Secret Spell Booster Enchant in Real Time. I'm scared to say it because the ink is not yet dry on the paper, but if one of the things I am working on gets final finalized, my freelance writing is going to be boosted into a whole new arena, allowing me to write lifestyle pieces in addition to content writing. I've also submitted four pagan pieces this week which would be really good on my resume for the book potentially.

I'm not going to lie, I'm exhausted and vomity feeling about all this. If my company does go under (and that seems likely) by year end, the potential to have the professional life I really have always wanted is right there in front of me. And I have been hustling hard for it. But right now, that's all it is, is potential. I could suck working from home, I could suck writing/crafting for a career, I could wind up having to work retail again. It's all just spinning right now and I don't know where the arrow will stop.

But dear goddess, how I am trying. And every bit of will I have in me right now is working to make my own luck and to be more than a barely published sickly secretary who can't work a regular 9-5. Every black swan moment since this started, there has been a constant devotional in the back of my head. Please just let me succeed as a career writer and crafter. Please let everything I've worked for and tried at and failed at and succeeded at be leading up to this.