It's looking lazy...

It's been one of those weeks.  I despise weeks like that to be honest but when your muses don't wanna play, you just kinda roll with it and work on projects that don't require too much creative juice.

You can throw some podcasts on in the background and just veg crochet.  You ignore deadlines.  You ignore the phone.  You ignore the world.

The end result is a bit jarring. You're a lot calmer at the end of that day.  You're able to look at things much more objectively.  You're able to look at discussions and go... This ain't my circus.  Fuck these idiots.  I have better things to do.

Like figure out what's going into my Book of Shadows.  Usually a Wiccan, Witch, Pagan, etc will keep a large amount of collected information and things that they've actually tried in terms of spells and rituals in said book.  

I've been studying and practicing for about... 13 years now.  My book of shadows is... sad looking.  I don't have a lot in it right now, but that's because I've not really done a lot of this "formal magick."  Formal magick being used in reference to actually collecting spell and ritual components, doing the groundwork of divining the right time of the day/night and doing the quarter calls, invocations etc.  I call that formal work.  When was the last time I did a ritual?  About two years ago.  I did one to finally fully let go of the babies I had lost in my miscarriages.  Named, said good-bye to one at a time, and let go of.

Most of the magick I do, when I actually find it's needed, is informal.  It's "Oh shit, that's a lot of friends on facebook reporting they feel like shit, time to break out some light blue and white candles!"  and let them burn through the day.   It's "damnit, I didn't need to think about this past traumatic event, time for some purple."   It's "That's our neighbors arguing for the fifth time this week and it's only Tuesday, I'm smudging right now because I don't need that shit leaking in."

It's having fluorite and Tiger's Eye in my pocket that I can play with when I'm out in public and start feeling the anxiety coming on.  (Mine deals with too many people in one place, have had that problem since I was little, but it got worse as you can expect with the PTSD fully actualized.)  It's having animals get a lot closer to me than other humans just to say hi.  (Heh, the Fiance is still getting used to this.)

But I'm digressing, back to the Book of Shadows.  It's always evolving to be honest.  At least they should be.  As you're growing in your craft, your book should be growing and evolving to reflect the information you're learning and not just about magick, but also about yourself.

Mine is like I said, kinda empty.  Mostly because I've been journaling in a separate book for over twenty years.  What goes in the BOS is what I use in my magick frequently.  Mostly just to commit the information to memory more than to refer to, but it's still kinda....well, abnormal if you believe a chunk of the magick community.

Keeping true to yourself in magick is more important than keeping true to a set dogma taught via book or person.  Else, it just spins out of control and you will find spells going haywire, situations that were once peachy going sour, finances crumble, etc.

Catharsis: It's there.

I seriously think that there are times when the rituals that were once to help engage in that process, were deliberately discouraged and banned.  Not because they were a competing religion but because such rites make it harder to control a human.  Because that human wasn't distracted by emotional constraints and they had dealt with their shit to an extent that allowed to take of care of themselves and those around them that they cared about.

Rituals and catharsis... they go hand in hand.  With so much lost of the Old Knowledge, such rites to deal with grief, lose, etc are much more spontaneous, less structured and more personal.  It's a blessing curse, because what works for one person... will not work entirely for another person.

Here a few weeks ago, I had another miscarriage.  It'd been... four or five years since the last one, and it was until halfway through bleeding like a stuck pig that I realized it what that was going on.  Kinda hard to mistake to that ache honestly.

One of the things I love making is toys.  It's been almost impossible to crochet for any decent length of time since the miscarriage, but I am managing. I wasn't expecting to end up with these three let alone more than one, but it would seem that this had been my catharsis.  I don't dare do anything that would ensure a full term baby yet, because we need out of California first.  Give it a few months in Phoenix, and then... well, we'll see what the universe holds us, won't we?