[New Year, New You] Weekly Writing Prompt: Something You've Been Putting Off

The New Year, New You Project is an experiment in Magical Radical Transformation.  Please see here for how to participate! 

Please remember to leave a link here to your blog entry with your response to this prompt or an update on your own Experiment.

Deities: Beaver, Uzume, Sehkmet, Ullr, Demeter, Saraswati


Phase of the Moon: The Waning Crescent Moon right now.  Use this phase to focus on banishing laziness from getting shit done that needs to get done.


Days of the Week: Tuesday, Saturday


Inspirational Music for Your Brain Meats: On the Radio, Regina Spektor (No, this is how it works/ You peer inside yourself/ You take the things you like/ And try to love the things you took/ And then you take that love you made/ And stick it into some/ Someone else's heart/ Pumping someone else's blood/ And walking arm in arm/ You hope it don't get harmed/ But even if it does/ You'll just do it all again)  


Let's face it, Charmers, the critical component to success or failure in your goals is your ability to do shit you don't want to do.  I can promise you that your goals are crammed chock full of glistening gems that you would rather claw your own eyes out than address.  If you liked addressing these things, your goals wouldn't be goals, they would be called Items I Am Already Doing No Problem-o.  


As O-Ren Ishii once said, Now's the fucking time.  Stop being a slag, stop complaining, stop coming up with amazing awesome reasons as to why you can't do it right now and close your eyes and grit your teeth and just do it.  Do it now before everyone else starts making their half assed efforts towards radical self change in a week or less because once you jump this hurdle, the other hurdles become much easier.  Now when you're most tired, now when you least want to.  Now is the time you show the universe how magic is done.


I believe in you, Charmers.  

[New Year, New You] Supplemental: I Can Change One Thing

Lyn has a great free journal work book available through her blog, Witch Blog that will help you change one thing in the new year.  Check it out!

[New Year, New You] My Response to Goals

The New Year, New You Project is an experiment in Magical Radical Transformation.  Please see here for how to participate! 


Please remember to leave a link here to your blog entry with your response to this prompt or an update on your own Experiment.



My Larger Goals for 2012:


Grow my magic focused writing

Grow my crafting business

Work on personal magical practice

Work on body love while working on eating and exercise habits

Enjoy our year of engagement together

Pay off my credit card debt

Do more fun things



Bite sized pieces for between now and Valentine's Day:


Magic focused writing:

Have a powwow with my PEH, Gordon, and a few others about how to go about getting my first booklet out.  (mostly done)
Investigate small occult presses, Kindle Direct and Amazon direct (done)
Write and submit an article monthly to Witchvox (done for this month)
Come up with a premise for said booklet (done)
Start writing a short course and test out a delivery system for it (Jan)
Investigate costs related to using my own illustrators and editors (in progress)


Grow my crafting business: 


Release my first magic/fragrance oil for boys (thanks to AIT!) before Valentine's Day
Release my Goddess of the Hearth essential oil blend before Valentine's Day
Work on my Goddess Dollies next week since I have some extra time
Work on restocking my wares
Figure out my craft show "bunny trail" in Jan for restarting in March


Work on body love while working on eating and exercise habits:

Dress well as I am right now (a constant work in progress)
Focus on what I'm putting into my body
Start exercising two to three times a week regularly and sustainably (next week)
Love my body right now as is (a constant work in progress)

Enjoy our year of engagement together: 
Plan something to do for Valentine's Day to celebrate the egregor of love together
Start being more list conscious again (next week)
Do new things together for our dates
Get dressed up for each other

Personal magical practice:
Start japa'ing every day (next week)
Start evening practice (next week)
Finish Spare Oom (next week)
Do our first rit together (next new moon)

Pay off credit card debt:
I'm already consolidated, so it's just a matter of continuing the work I started and paying off minor credit cards.  

Do more fun things:
My bff and I currently have plans to go to a goth night in a couple weeks
Spaghetti taco night was fun
Keep my eyes open for new and interesting things to do and not settle into hibernation mode


Magical things:


Writing
Do magic so that I have things to work on.  Write enchantments.  Meet with Certain Spirits

Grow Craft Business
Outsource to Jow for prosperity work as he does a good job with it for my crafting.

Body Love
Continue meeting with Certain Spirits

Engagement Enjoyment
Menstrual blood in Jow's marinara.  Our Spare Oom magical practice jamboree which will make us closer or stab each other to death.  Good marriage prep.

Credit Card Debt
Continue my own prosperity magic which I've gotten lazy about.  Poor honeypot.  >:\

Do More Fun Things
Continue glamoury rituals pre-fun things.


Divination


Radiomancy
"Horse and I" Bat for Lashes through Pandora.  Well that's terrifying.
(Got woken in the night, / by a mystic golden light. / My head soaked in river water. / I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called a horse out of the woodland. / "Take her there, through the desert shores." /They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now." / The smell of redwood giants. /The banquet for the shadows. /Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark. /Came upon the headdress. /It was gilded, dark and golden. /The children sang. /I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed. /They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back." /They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back." /There is no turning back. /There is no turn. /There is no turning back. /There is no turn. /There is no turning back. /There is no turn)


Tarot
Housewives Tarot, Four card spread

The Hermit
Two of Cups
Five of Pentacles
Knight of Pentacles

Basically, I need to be able to balance everything for everything to work right and to make sure that I get enough down time and don't get discouraged by potential financial problems (maybe a loss of a job, an appendix, my car, who knows) and to use my ambition wisely to fuel all my projects not just the fun ones basically.  Things may not go according to plan but I need to keep pushing anyway.

Spirit Consultation


Me: So . . . what's holding me back here?

My Muse (bored): The same thing that holds you back every night, Pinkie.  You get afraid and you freak yourself out and you stop yourself before you get to awesome.

Me: So how do I fix that?

My Muse: Stop doing it.

Me: Your divine helpfulness never ceases to amaze me.


Me: What's holding me back from losing weight?

Spirit: You're afraid to be empty.  And alone.

Me:  What!  Where the fuck did that come from?  I guess it must be right if I managed to get startled by the answer.  I didn't think I was lonely but I guess I do a lot of things including eating to be not lonely?   And I guess while I never spread my legs to fill me up a la Amanda Palmer's "Runs in the Family" I guess I do open my mouth a lot to fill me up.

Before I start eating something now, especially if it's something questionable, I remind myself that I'm not empty and that seems to help a lot.  The gym is just a matter of routine, the food stuff gets more complicated and spiritual/psychological which I am carefully unwinding.

[Recipe Monday] Spaghetti Tacos

All the cool kids are doing it.

Maybe it's Monday, maybe it's not.  The point is that it's Solstice which means traditional celebration is needed.  Now it's not quite as much of a high holiday as Rex Manning Day but important nonetheless.

This year I have chosen to celebrate it in a manner that is cross culturally traditional for all cultures all over the world.  All cultures.  Which means guzzling white zinfandel, eating spaghetti tacos and watching iCarly with my bff and Jow as thirtysomethings are prone to do in their own company.  

It's not too late to join the awesome, here's the recipe we came up with:



Spaghetti Tacos
1/4 box linguini
1 large can of crushed tomatoes
1 package ground beef
1 package hard taco shells
1 packet taco seasoning
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Brown the ground beef in a deep frying pan and add half the packet of taco seasoning. Drain the grease. Add the crushed tomatoes and the rest of the taco seasoning and simmer on low heat on the stove top. Bring water to a boil in another pot and add the linguini with a little salt and olive oil and cook for 8 minutes and then drain. Put the linguini into the hard shell taco and then the meat sauce and then the mozzarella. Nom!

Happy Longest Night everyone!  Keep it sexy!

[New Year, New You] Weekly Writing Prompt: Goals

You wish it was Avon calling.

The New Year, New You Project is an experiment in Magical Radical Transformation.  Please see here for how to participate! 


Please remember to leave a link here to your blog entry with your response to this prompt or an update on your own Experiment.


Many of you have already started to set goals for yourself which is awesome.  If you have not yet, this is the prompt for you to do so.


What do you want to accomplish in 2012 using both magical and mundane means?  

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't generally plan my activities around moon phases/days of the week but I know some of you are into that so I list my recs here for those of you who do.

God/dess/es: Athena, Bhramari Devi, Thoth, Var, Daikoku, Rat

Phase of the Moon: The Waning Crescent Moon right now.  Use this phase to focus on banishing your negative attachments

Days of the Week: Wednesday, Sunday

Inspirational Song for Your Brainmeat: What the Water Gave Me, Florence + the Machine (‘Cause she’s a crueler mistress/ And the bargain must be made/ But oh, my love, don’t forget me/ When I let the water take me)

Most of you have set the larger goals, but now is the time to do a few things:

1. How are you going to accomplish these large goals in your daily life?  You need to start breaking it up into bite sized pieces.  Our particular Experiment goes until Valentine's Day.  What can you reasonably expect to accomplish by then?  How will you do it?

Example: I want to be more physically fit.  What days will you go on the gym?  What's your Plan B if you can't get to the gym that day?  Do you want to be able to run for twenty minutes without feeling like you're dying?  Then how much time will you spend on the treadmill on Week 1 and how much on Week 2, etc?  Will you be modifying your diet/water consumption/alcohol consumption?  How?  What will you do when you go out with friends or go to parties?  What's your plan for when you get bored with the gym?  What about when you're snowed in or sick?  Really get into the meat of what you're trying to do.  You're going to fuck this up sometimes and that's okay.  But you need to start laying down real ground work because the more you you flesh this out, the more it becomes real.

An aside: While not the example given, many people want to write books.  I strongly suggest looking at my PEH, Gordon's eBook crash course and Penelope Trunk's advice today.

2.  What magical acts (rituals, spellwork, whatever it is you do) can you do to help you accomplish this goal?  If you are into Planetary magic, you may want to consider looking into the Gates work that RO does to help you accomplish your goals.  Thinking strategically in magic isn't something that comes naturally to a lot of us either.  Check out Jason's books on Strategic Sorcery if that's something you need some guidance on.

Continuing with our example of wanting to be more physically fit, you may want to consider taking yoga as part of your regime.  Not power yoga or sweating yoga or all the other ridiculous crap we add to make it more efficient.  Spiritual yoga led by a knowledgeable teacher.  Do ritual work to feel more present in your body.  Enchant to really make your body into a temple.  Put orange essential oil on to make you feel peppier and more able to do your work with a tiny spell rhyme attached to it.

3. Use your preferred method of divination to figure out both what you can do to make sure these goals will happen and also to figure out what road blocks keep you from this.

4. Consult whatever inner or outer spirits you may work with as to what's blocking you from achieving your goals.  If you're the meditative type, when meditating consult your spirits there.  If you aren't the meditative type, when you are just about to drift off to sleep when your mind is relaxed, ask what's preventing you from achieving these goals.  In terms of "who" you're asking, you can ask personal spirit guides or god/dess/es, your Younger Self, Talking Self, and Higher Self or even personifications of the traits you're either trying to emulate or discourage.  Whatever works for your personal cosmos.

That should be more than enough for you to try to figure out over the holidaze.  Get to work!

[New Year, New You] My Response to Making Way

Apparently my Muse likes pin up girls.
I blame all the American  Horror Story.

The New Year, New You Project is an experiment in Magical Radical Transformation.  Please see here for how to participate! 

I've been reading and commenting on everyone's responses to the first prompt, Making Way and encourage everyone to get to know your fellow Charmers whether or not you're doing the Experiment yourself.

I think it's a good idea for me to post my own workings with the prompt before posting a new prompt so you can see what I'm doing instead of me just handing down proclamations (. . .which I'd frankly prefer to be doing because I'm exhausted all the time right now but share share and all that's fair) as well as any observations from reading everyone's work.

In terms of general observation on everyone's work, the pattern I've noticed the most personally is that most people were good on two of the three items and the third one was invariably reacted to as ". . . shit."  But you all did some serious reflecting on your troublesome third aspect and started figuring out ways to deal which is v. v. good.

Clean House
For me, at the time of writing the prompt, my house wasn't too messy but as the week wore on and all the holidaze prep paraphernalia and a few days later I was feeling like a big ol' hypocrite because I was surrounded by mountains of clutter and feeling more and more stressed out.

We made plans to clean and decorate but, you know, that's hilarious like a reliably funny sitcom to our god/dess/es overlords so needless to say that even though Jow and I generally get along disgustingly well, we totes got into it on Friday (My bff (scandalized) : You yelled at Jow?  Me: Yes.  AND WAIT UNTIL HE COMES HOME!  She: Um . . .wow) when we were supposed to clean/decorate and have a romantic night in.  Now lest you think we're mice, Jow and I both have fearsome tempers and used to have Epic Battle Royales with our exes but we both got sick of living like that and do a lot of conscious work to not be like that anymore.  And for both of us, we're much happier not living life at a tsunami level of constant rage.  But once in a blue moon when our buttons get pushed in exactly the right sequence, it's on like Donkey Kong.  So we spent our Friday night sifting through that and eating shitty food from Applebees that made us both feel ill because we're not used to eating shitty food anymore.

This time of year is particularly difficult because if you were raised with Christmas (and possibly Hanukkah), there's this egregore that this is the most wonderful time of the year doing battle with your actual experiences of some of the most magical holidays and the holidays where your alcoholic father was in a horrendous rage and made everyone cry for Christmas (insert your own trauma here).  In fact, it's been proven that it's impossible not to be depressed this time of year.    Once you really sit with that, dealing with the holidaze becomes easier.

So yesterday we cleaned our house, I cleansed with my cleansing incense, we hung evergreen roping that makes our house smell bizarrely like the McKittrick, we cloved oranges and arranged them in a bowl with Miss Martha ornaments, cinnamon sticks and a particularly prancey reindeer.  We put out a poinsettia that I didn't kill unlike its mate and a basket full of pinecones.  We decorated a ridiculously tiny bonsai evergreen with garland and ornaments.  We listened to A Darker Shade of Pagan and drank mulled red wine that I made and ate clementines and chocolate cherry bread and had the best night possible, given the crushing weight of the holidaze.

Time


My computer's post it notes have been having post it babies.  But I feel like I've been using my time as wisely as possible as it's being spent dealing with holidaze related errands and work when I'm not working.  Also, I'm doing this Experiment which is time consuming and alternately wonderful and terrifying.  I have not been screwing around the intertubes much as there's just no time for it.  I'm going to work on getting through the new year and then restructure from there.  Things are getting checked off my to-do list slowly but surely (there's a finished quilt and 12 jars of ginger peach jam in my fridge so I think I'm doing okay).  While I'm a terrible gossip and reality show whore, I found my Platonic Euro Husband's link to an article on Not Listening v. useful.  I've frankly been much happier with just news snippets, Jezabel and articles I read off of my Facebook/Twitter feeds verses the full court NPR/CNN barrage of despair.  Yes, everything's horrible, I know, I know.  I've been better for not rubbing my face in it on the regular.

Rocks


This holidaze season has the heightened excitement of both being engaged and being without a few people who were close to me.  My Senior Druid's description of the holidaze ("I'm laughing!  I'm laughing!  I'm crying!  I'm crying!  Oh god!  Oh god!") is particularly apt for me this year.  It's been a hard adjustment, I miss them but we're all better off without each other.  For me the hardest rock to lay down wasn't the wrongs that had been done to me but to forgive myself for the things I did wrong to make those relationships toxic.   As the adult child of an alcoholic, my reaction to a toxic situation is to bathe in that fucker and figuratively drink myself sick on it because that's all things I understand.  I tend to want to just let that relationship keep getting less and less healthy and more and more mutated until all it is is an exercise in emotional cutting.  I'm trying to stop doing that, I'm trying to stop engaging and learn to give myself a clean break and release old fetters but it is not a natural impulse.  But I've been doing a lot of work on that since my divorce and even more work on that since the fall.  Because I need to, otherwise I'm so full of word vomit (I could hear people getting bored with me. But I couldn't stop. It just kept coming up like word vomit.)I don't know what to do with myself and I'm so full of toxic yuck that I can't do anything productive because everything I do is tainted and reactionary.  So I'm working to get off the merry-go-round with the understanding that I'll get back on it sometimes because it's in my lizard brain to do that.  But working at it and being vigilant is important and forgiving myself when I'm not stronger than it is even more so.

[Retro Recipe Monday] Party Sandwich Loaf

From The General Foods Kitchen Cookbook:


Party Sandwich Loaf
4 colored sandwich fillings
1 unsliced loaf of sandwich bread
Butter
4 packages of 3 oz cream cheese
Red Food Coloring

Prepare colored sandwich fillings.  Remove crusts from the bread.  Cut lengthwise into 5 long slices.  Butter each slice.  Spread each of 4 bread slices with a filling. Place the bread slices on top of one another in order listed.  Top with remaining buttered bread slice, making a five layer loaf.

Soften 3 packages of cream cheese.  Blend in 2 tablespoons of the cream.  Spread over top and sides of the loaf.  Soften remaining package of cream cheese.  Blend in remaining 1 tablespoon of cream. (Note: I'm assuming they mean the cream cheese?)   Tint a delicate pink with red food coloring.  Place pink cream cheese in a decorating tube and garnish loaf.  Wrap loaf loosely in waxed paper.  Chill at least 3 hours.  When ready to serve, place loaf on a large platter.  Garnish with lettuce and ripe olives.  Slice and serve.

For red filling: Combine 1/4 pound minced boiled ham and 1 minced pimiento.  Add mayonnaise until consistency desired.  Season to taste.

For yellow filling: Combine 3 minced hard cooked eggs with enough mayonnaise to make consistency desired.  Season to taste.

For dark filling: Combine 1/4 pound mashed liverwurst and 2 teaspoons grated onion.  Add mayonnaise until consistency desired.  Season to taste.

For green filling:  Combine 1/3 cup minced sweet pickle with 2 tablespoons minced parsley.  Add mayonnaise until consistency desired.  Season to taste.