Make Your Own Magick

(Scroll below for magick blogs + rituals)

I practice magick because I tend to float away from myself. I leave my body. I disappear into thoughts. Fear finishes pictures before I have enough information to understand what I’m looking at. An old voice starts talking and sometimes my body reacts before the rest of me even gets into the room.

Ritual gives me somewhere to stand. It gives my body instructions.

Stand here. Face this direction. Move my hand. Say the words. Turn. Look again.

For me, ritual is a somatic, moving meditation. A sequence where there used to be a reflex.

Ritual gives the pause a body.

I used to think a lot about magick mostly as a way to ground myself, clear my mind, choose a better thought, change my state. I still use it for all of that. But lately I’m interested in what happens when the ritual meets me somewhere messier.

What happens when grounding finds rage? What happens when protection strikes too early? What happens when panic makes a monster? What happens when an old voice starts playing automatically? What happens after I fuck up?

I’m less interested in using magick to get away from what I’m feeling. I want somewhere to put what I’m already feeling long enough to see it clearly and choose what happens next.

Sometimes that changes the feeling. Sometimes it changes what I do with it. Sometimes it gives me five seconds between the match and whatever I was about to set on fire.

That space has become some of the most useful magick I practice.

I’m also a mom trying to remember myself between dishes and diapers. My altar is often the kitchen counter. My wand is my finger. My son orbits my legs while I perform the LBRP and sometimes joins in by parroting the words. The dishwasher runs.

The sacred survives remarkably well around crumbs.

My husband used to read Crowley and Lon Milo DuQuette aloud to me while we sat on a tri-fold cushion in a moldy motel. I was pregnant. We ate toasted PB&J bagels. We had very little. Those teachings came into my life there.

I carry some of them still.

The Teachers I Carry

Aleister Crowley gave me ritual, symbolism, correspondence, and the idea that intention can be given physical form.

Abraham Hicks gave me a language for attention and emotional movement. I learned that reaching for a slightly different thought can matter more than demanding that I leap from despair into happiness.

Louise Hay brought me to the mirror. She made me curious about the sentences repeated so often that they become the room we live inside.

I’ve changed plenty since first encountering all three. I expect to keep changing. I take what stays alive in my hands and keep working with it.

Then the Animals Came

While making ANYMALS, I started giving different emotional patterns bodies.

Coyote. Porcupine. Seahorse. Skunk.

They became more than characters in songs. They gave me handles.

Porcupine helped me recognize the moment fear raises its quills before I have enough information.

Turn around. Look again.

Seahorse gave panic somewhere to move. A wave can throw the whole body around without becoming the whole ocean.

Skunk taught me something about staying. About territory. About the old apology for existing.

Coyote keeps walking. Gets hurt. Makes mistakes. Licks wounds. Gathers themself. Continues.

I started realizing that I could speak to a pattern more clearly once I could see it. Instead of Something feels bad. Fix it. Make it stop, I can sometimes recognize:

Porcupine is already turning. Seahorse is getting swept away. Skunk wants to disappear. Coyote needs to sit on the hill for a fucking minute.

The animal creates a little distance. Inside that distance, sometimes I get a choice.

That feels like magick to me.

How I Practice

My practice has become less about escaping uncomfortable emotions and more about learning what they are doing.

Anger gets a body. Fear gets a body. Shame gets a body. Protection gets a body.

Sometimes the ritual changes how I feel. I can go into the ritual upset, and always feel calmer after.

The important thing is that I have somewhere to stand while anger moves through me.

Magick can be the second between feeling something and becoming its reflex. A hand against my chest in the mirror. A pentagram drawn in the air. Turning toward the direction I usually avoid. Saying a sentence aloud and suddenly hearing how cruel it sounds. Closing a door. Opening a scary closet myself. Repairing something after my quills landed somewhere I wish they hadn’t.

Feel. Stand. Move. Orient. Look again. Choose.

That sequence matters to me.

Protection

I used to think protection meant keeping painful things away from me. Now I’m interested in another question:

What happens inside me when something painful gets through?

I can close doors. I can draw boundaries. I can leave. I can also enter a room that once scared me and discover what is actually there.

Sometimes protection says, Get this out of my space.

Sometimes protection says, I can stay here long enough to look again without losing myself.

And sometimes protection means hearing the old voice say, God, you’re so ugly, and becoming angry on behalf of the person being spoken to in the mirror.

That has become one of the strangest forms of magick in my life: protecting myself from the voice that turns what I did, felt, feared, or looked like into who I am.

My Crow Creed

I honor my body as the first altar.
I listen before fear finishes the picture.
I let anger move without making it my identity.
I let fear speak without handing it the steering wheel.
I protect the soft place.
I look again.
I repair what I can.
I choose what gets to stay.
I release what I’ve been carrying for somebody else.
I create my own rituals.
I trust the symbols that stay alive in my hands.
I refuse to turn what I did into who I am.
I return to myself.
I leave breadcrumbs.
I cast with integrity.
I respect the will of others.
I am the altar.
I am the wand.

Chaos Magick, Briefly

The piece of chaos magick that stays alive for me is simple:

Use what works. Invent what you need. Let your practice change when you do.

A ritual can be elaborate. It can also happen barefoot in a kitchen with cereal stuck to my heel.

A symbol can come from an old magical system. It can also be a porcupine that keeps showing up in your songs until one day you realize she has been teaching you about fear.

A spell can be words spoken inside a circle. It can also be the first kinder sentence that interrupts a recording you’ve been playing in your head automatically for thirty years.

I’m interested in magick that survives contact with ordinary life.

Motherhood. Dishes. Anger. Mirrors. Chronic Pain. Panic. Art. Marriage. Laundry. Old voices. Small choices.

Magick I can actually use while my life is happening.

That’s what I’m making here.

Make your own.