Those of you who know me in the real world – or those of you who’ve been coming to this blog and reading the posts that aren’t there – know that I’ve had a very heavy load of work-related stress for the past eight months in general and the past eight weeks in particular. I’m not to my breaking point, but I can see it from here.
In the material world, I tend to favor material action, but this situation seems to call for using every tool in the toolbox – including magic.
The skeptical say the danger of using magic is that you’re relying on something that isn’t real – magic doesn’t work. On the contrary, perhaps the biggest danger of using magic is that it works too well. But magic doesn’t give you what you want – it gives you what you ask for, and what you work for. Parse your spells as carefully and precisely as a corporate lawyer writing a contract, or you’ll find Coyote or Loki or some other Trickster laughing while you slip on a cosmic banana peel.
So I set out to carefully and precisely define what I want and need. I spent several hours going over what’s wrong, how I got there, and what needs to happen to make things well. When I finished, I read it over carefully… and it sounded an awful lot like “put things back the way they were before work went to hell.”
As I’ve said before, I’d make a lousy Buddhist, but the Buddhists are right about one thing: suffering is caused by attachment (the Buddhists are right about a lot of things, most of which I have trouble accepting). And while suffering is by definition unpleasant, it’s also a good motivator. If a factory hadn’t closed in 1995 I never would have left Chattanooga and all the baggage of living in my home town. If another factory hadn’t downsized in 2001 I never would have left Atlanta and formed the connections and relationships that are so helpful and so pleasant in my life now.
If I put things back the way they were, what opportunities for growth may I be turning down?
When I came back from the Druid Gorsedd in August I said I had seen what was possible: Pagans living successful lives in the mundane world and then working and practicing on off time. I was building a network of connections in the Pagan and UU worlds. I was prepared to spend the next 20 years becoming a wise Druid and using my professional career to finance it all.
Is this stress and suffering calling me to something else? And if so, what?
If I work magic to reset my life, I will inevitably work toward a vision that’s based on what I know – incremental changes from what I am/have now. On the other hand, if I say “Goddess, put me where you want me” then I open myself up to things I’m not thinking of now, but I also fail to take responsibility for where my life goes… which is also likely to be incremental changes from what I am/have now.
It seems the magic I most need to work now isn’t to fix my job, it’s to open my eyes and ears to what I’m truly called to do and be.
Whatever that is.
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