Practical Magic: Glamoury and Tealight Hearths

Charms, Hexes, Weeknight Dinner Recipes, Glamoury and Unsolicited Opinions on Morals and Magic

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Fix Your Situation: One Small Thing

Last we spoke, I implored you to burn this place down.  You have some idea of what this looks like from watching me, I think.  The doubt.  How I freak when leveling up.  My obsession about not living like a filthy hamster but yet unable to break the filthy hamster cycle.  

But, like, we're doing magic to get out of our comfort zones because if we were living the lives we wanted to live in our comfort zone, we wouldn't be doing magic, no?

Watching me torch my barn down to the ground may have terrified some of you.  It should.  It's really freaking scary.  My house is a disaster, up until this morning I had at least an inch of roots on my hair (which has mysteriously become shinier and more luxurious by actively not washing it as often on the advice of Bridgette, who makes natural beauty products for a living), there are tiny gnats, a random gross cat smell that I can't find the origin point of, a 40+ hour work week in a super detail oriented environment, free time is about as accessible as finding the Holy Grail as a cup impishly hidden somewhere in the UK, I'm tired and wired all the time, I'm more anxious than usual, I am behind in my book's word count because surprise it's really hard to work three full time jobs at once and I'm at the stage when it's like having a baby - it doesn't matter if I think I can do any of these things, it's going to happen whether I want it to or not.  As one of my mentors is fond of saying, I like my magic to be more metaphorical and less literal, thank you.  

***

An aside: Yesterday, I was at indiemade and two identical ginger twins (15ish?) stood silently entwined in each other. One was more sullen than her sister.  I have come to expect this in places where weird is less accessible, I think it's like seeing a bear in the wild for them.  They did not touch anything and left after standing there for a very long beat.  The sullen sister came back with a ten clutched in her hand.

From Texting with Jared:

Me: She just bought a Lucrezia Borgia candle from me.  I'm excited and terrified about what she'll do with it.

Jared: What uses might it be put to, beyond secrecy and assassination?

Me: Well.  The subtitle on the candle is Tarts Don't Gossip (When There's Poison Involved).  Also.  What 15 year old knows who Lucrezia Borgia is?

Jared: Did she seem to?  Or just like the candle?

Me: I'm an arms dealer.  I sell, I don't ask questions.  She was wearing a pentacle, however.  So Becki at school better watch her ass.  

***

So, generally when discussing the constant scream of fear, despair and existential angst that is omnipresent in my brain meat, Jow's solution is to Just Change Everything.  We go around and around about this like a cranky, irritated ouroboros until we are both annoyed enough at each other to put the television on.  

I worked too hard to get here to Just Change Everything, I want to be in this pit of toil and despair.  I want to finish writing this book and be published by Llewellyn.  I want to have a successful career and a successful small business.  And when he is not too aggrieved to see it, he chose a lot of toil for himself too - working as a massage therapist (very physically demanding) and going to school for nursing (mentally demanding) which gives him ever so slightly more free time than me which makes him The Housefraus on Call for us.  Once he finishes school, it's not like he's just going to kick back and relax.  He's going to be on his feet all the time, lugging people around and working strange hours.  But he wants to be in a helping profession and he's good at helping and good at this kind of science.  So until we come back as housecats, we need to look at the lives we've actively chosen for ourselves.

You do too.

It can feel so overwhelming, the endless list of Things That Must Be Done and like living in some kind of Julie/Julia Project hell realm that requires 12 hour days, dinner at weird times and domestic dismay.  

But you can do something, right now.  Change one small thing.

I did this morning.  I feel constantly surrounded by negativity right now.  It's that time of the year, it's cyclical- no one is happy, everything is broken and we will never see the sun again.  So I decided to re-start The Glad Game on my Facebook page.  And it's been really, really nice to read things that make people happy.  I start to feel like I can breathe.  So I write for my book.  Not as much as I would like, but it will never be.  And it doesn't matter if it is, one way or another, it will have to spring from my body.  I have to try to make it as painless as possible, but accept that it will be painful anyway.  I root through my tea cabinet and find the tin of Soothing Tea I had bought on clearance a billion years ago, it's supposed to help me with my pitta.  I don't know that it will but it's decaf and tastes both weird and good.  It can't hurt at the least.  I look up how to help fix my pitta through food.  I don't know that I'll do it, but maybe.  I take out the other tea I got for Jow at the same time that's supposed to help him with his kapha.  I think, I'll make him a cup when he gets home.

Then I think, he's going to be tired when he gets home from work and I haven't cooked in months which feels crummy as a hearth witch so I start cutting up brussel sprouts and looking up how to cook swiss steak.  So now dinner is prepped, I wrote, I'm researching, I'm fixing my pitta situation nominally, my hair is dyed, I wrote this blog entry and it's all because I changed one small thing which helped me feel like the world isn't a pit of misery.

What small thing will you change?

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Deborah Castellano's book, Glamour Magic: The Witchcraft Revolution to Get What You Want (Llewellyn, 2017) is available: https://www.amazon.com/Glamour-Magic-Witchcraft-Revolution-What/dp/0738750387 . She is a frequent contributor to Occult/Pagan sources such as the Llewellyn almanacs, Witchvox, PaganSquare and Witches & Pagans magazine. She writes about Charms, Hexes, Weeknight Dinner Recipes, Glamoury and Unsolicited Opinions on Morals and Magic at Charmed, I'm Sure. Her craft shop, The Mermaid and The Crow (www.mermaidandcrow.com) specializes in goddess & god vigil candles, hand blended ritual oils, airy hand dyed scarves, handspun yarn and other goodies. She resides in New Jersey with her husband, Jow and their two cats. She has a terrible reality television habit she can't shake and likes St. Germain liquor, record players and typewriters.

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