An opening of our ritual minds: I am ready for magic to be done upon me. Hear that, all you good witches of the world? I am keeping my friendly eye open so you can swim into my ken, anoint me with lavender and sage, squeeze my shoulder, see my heart, and free me from the sorrows of the past.
And in the meantime, while we wait for these great powers to appear outside our peripheries, our windows, our most labyrinthine and remote theaters of the mind, our own magick must be practiced.
An old spell, a fingernail under the skin of the impossible, a start. I’ve found this mentioned as a radical self-acceptance practice in various books and videos and heard it here and there on the winds and whether or not it achieves that beautiful end for us, it does the sort of peaceful, incremental, solid magick that we need on a day-to-day basis. Especially, oh darlings, if you’re like me lately with heartbreaks and losses and regrets filling your cup to overflow, it gives you a chance to dash all of that out into the sink and fill up again with something that can warm you and feed you and heat you so that steam rises out of you and you know that the work is being done.
A simple thing. I’ll tell you what it is, and then I’ll show you how I use it.
First, we find our white blank space – an essential tool for my own private school of magick. A laptop with an email address box that lets you send to yourself, a scrap of paper, a fancy journal, a recordable session on your phone, a wax tablet. Whatever lets you make a mark in the world and retain it, read it back at least once or twice if you care to release it through fire or the tremendous power of a delete function. This is your personal record. It will not make sense nor need to – to anyone else in the universe. It is your shorthand for how you are being. It is your periodic table of elements. It is a great and holy gift no matter how you believe your believing that only you can give yourself.
Then you write out as messily or prettily as your soul is inspired to do scribe two simple words: I love.
And then you fly.
You fly with that message through your eyes, through your body, through your memories, through the sensations that interact with the world, seeking what matches those words. You write and you investigate and write and you search, and you write and you write and you write until you look inward and outward and feel a satisfaction that you have found all these flecks and glints of gold and sifted them into your personal record. Until you hear the sweet chimes that ring, that your inner voice will remark upon your list and say golly, I am amidst an extraordinary amount of good and worthy things.
Whether it means more than that is entirely up to you sit with and decide. For me, it always arouses the general passions, rouses the blood, and makes me alerted to the fact that if I am capable of even seeing this inside and outside my life, it must mean I am open to the possibility that I can be this for others. I can make a thing worth listing for my friends, for the silence spaces in the world, I want to be in this state of mind more and longer and with greater intensity. It shifts pebbles and rocks and boulders that settle in the spirit.
Then, without delay, you take a space and write again: I am grateful for…and you again search yourself for where that prompt takes you. Gratitude is such an essential ingredient for magick, it breaks seals, it salves hurts, it moves you out of defensive crouches and arms crossed over faces, it makes the world and your life stop looming over you. It evens the playing field so that all that has been given to you – and regardless of your trials – I think it true that often many unseen and disregarded miracles are occurring for you in perfect parallel with your pain.
Gratitude can feel a bit galling when you’re in pain, but that’s when and where it’s most necessary, not to forgive or to ignore, but just to see the potential in the world for more than your fixations. To unclench those fists so you can take the day that will be offered to you again and again as a birthright of the being until the moment it is not, and see all the elan vitae – the magic juices – the power in the moments that come when you accept that your time will be in some way limited. You will only get so much. So living a more grateful existence means far less room for fear, for hurt, for the agony of waiting for consequences and redemptive arcs that you have no control over initiating. It feels your life with light.
Emptied of all the angles of gratitude – for now, for this writing, for this ritual, we have one last area to address. The future. That delicious tomorrow pie baking away in the oven of time, unavoidably perfect and slid into your open window each morning your eyes pop awake. What wildly anthropomorphized ingredients should we put into it? Write out “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” in your scroll of love and power and begin detailing all the marvelous possibilities of a new day. The next steps in your personal quest. Alert the universe to start paying attention to the loving and grateful soul that is willing to work for a better tomorrow. Allow yourself to empty out every penny in your piggy bank of impossible and unlikely. Dash away the cynical voice that says good things don’t happen and least of all happen to you. Think on moving yourself and all your belongings to the plain of personal delights, align stars, set your own fate. Pour it out and wed it to the magick of trying. Of being a person who just wants to try and see.
This done. Read it back. Read it back twice.
Tell the witches, who were listening and reading over your shoulder that, you are grateful to be counted amongst them, but their services are not required.
Then, if you can, give yourself a few moments of quiet. Think what you like about it all. Most importantly, listen to what remains to be said. Note what voices rise up within you to challenge this great power and why they feel the need to interject.
Close the ritual with a knowing that you did this and can do this whenever you need it.
For me, it goes like this:
I love curious cats out on the back porch. Compassionate people. People remembering my name. Calligraphy. Clean sheets. Kind-hearted, filthy-minded people. The sky at daybreak. Waking up to a dry road. People caring about my home life. Boys who email me back. That place where I can enjoy that without anxiety. Buying replacements for things before they run out. My story and the escape and the power and the drive it fills me with. Mahjongg. Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling. Making progress on big messes. Actually eating what I bought for purposes of eating. Garlic bread. Garlic anything. Folk music. The poem I wrote. That our event is gonna go just fine, with several provisos, but basically. The word provisos. That I remembered the word provisos.
That little blue flame of excitement for my life that even all the back ache and anxiety and stress and bad internal conversation cannot put out. The hope that a boy will crawl out of the sea straight into my arms at any given moment. The knowledge that even if I choose not to acknowledge it, this that feels like an eternity of servitude, will end. That I have willpower and I can motivate myself. That feeling after a good cough. That I am having a vacation. That I know the dance goes bird by bird. Stillness of body, stillness of spirit. A heart that cannot help but to see beauty, even in the things that lurk and scrape the skin away.
Let’s be grateful we have a warm house. We have clean socks. We have clean water to drink. We have the kindness of others (even if they are not bespectacled, chap-types), we have music to listen to. We have the terrible bravery of attrition. We have alcohol! We have the wisdom of our forebears. We have the backspace key. We have the new day dawning. We have headache medicine. We have stories to tell even if we have to cross out half the words. We have a bathtub and a firm mattress.
I’m grateful for the time I have with my mother, for the new baby’s new energy on the way, for my lovely friends that reach out when I’m having a hard time. For not giving up even though it’s hard and I want to. For a brain that can be creative and entertain me when I’m feeling low. For people who love me through these times when I don’t find much about me worth loving. For a routine that keeps me from flying into outer space. For pain that passes. For so very much hope that this time could be different.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I kept pushing at engaging with the things that make me feel dismissive and jealous and learned from them instead of backing away with my nose in the air? If I got up early again tomorrow and started putting some things back in order that I’ve thrown around during this fallow period? If I exercised tomorrow and got these aches and unpopped muscles worked out. If I worried more about myself and less about the random encounters I have and how I’m coming off in them. If I listened to Loreena McKennitt and calmed down again and didn’t impose giant expectations on myself for the eight to twelve hours I’m awake tomorrow. If I painted my nails fire engine red.
Given that I have spoken truly, dear universe, I close this ritual.
