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General Blog Description: Exploring Southern Hemisphere neo-pagan practice and culture from the point of view of a progressive witch living south of Perth, Western Australia.

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Straddling Both Sides of the Fence

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

What to do when your magical mojo dries out?

I just came out of a year that heralded a great deal of upheaval. In the thick of it, I was being pulled this way and that by magical forces which insisted that I change. Right now, I feel rather like a long noodle that has been extruded, ready to coil into a new being.

Saturn Return is a bitch.

So, here I am. About to turn 30 and on leave from my career, ready to begin studies for a potential new one, surrounded by art materials that reminded me what I thought I was gonna do with myself in my late teens. I feel like I have ripped all the pages out of my journal, ready to start again. And I am so ready to feel the buzz again.

Being exhausted wrings a lot of magical energy out of your soul. Over time I have slowly lost the sense of enchantment I used to find with the world, to the point that at the last public pagan event I attended, I left feeling empty.

Where was the joy and excitement that I felt at my first gathering? I no longer felt energised by the dynamic of people, but instead I felt disillusioned, beleaguered, and admittedly a little hollowed-out. Was it because everyone knew me now, having run workshops and helped to facilitate ritual in previous years? Was it just that it truly was a ‘phase’, and I’d finally gotten over it?

Ups and downs in one’s spiritual life is not unusual. Everything has its ebb and flow, and I had probably encountered en ebb, exacerbated by the fatigue that had smashed me down over the year where I paddled madly underwater trying to keep all of my commitments afloat whilst I constantly summed each of them up, wondering which one to give the flick next.

You see a lot of upheaval in the pagan community, with members stepping into and out of the umbrella at will. But is some of it due to this loss of mojo when it comes to interacting with those who you once identified with? It is easy sometimes to place the blame on the community itself for changing, when it is actually you have changed. I would balk at the idea of outgrowing a community, an umbrella term, or a particular flavour of practice. Instead I am choosing to sit in the space, to breathe deep, and pay a bit more attention.

Those whose ideas I held onto then dropped as I became more self-reliant in my spiritual path, I am slowly paying more attention to. The fluffy bunnies and the new agers, the leaders and the craftspeople – why are they here? What can I learn from them?

And what can I learn from the Gods? Can they teach me, too?

I have morphed from a humanistic pagan, a pantheist or a panentheist, to someone who is flirting with the tenets of the so-called piety-posse, looking for a deeper truth, searching for answers where others have found them. If a deity slaps you on the face and the humanistic pagan face goes red, is it all still inside their head?

I wish to open my arms again, and be a seeker once more. Instead of wrestling with labels and schools of thought, I have asked to be guided by forces and forms that are well beyond my reasoning and rational comprehension. That is why I loosened the shackles of atheist cynicism and decided to play on the side of the neo-pagans in the first place, after all. Misinformation be damned – when you’re a chaos witch, every myth is valid.

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Lee is an artist and witch hailing from Western Australia. Her practice is one woven from both an intiatory eclectic Wiccan circle and a rigorous solitary practice that is heavily coloured with chaos magic and probably too many unicorns. Sarcasm, dry wit and Happy Squirrels are par for the course.

Comments

  • Ailuros
    Ailuros Tuesday, 14 January 2014

    Thank you for writing this piece. I am going through a liminal time as well, and this is just the sort of thing I needed. Blessings!

  • Lee Pike
    Lee Pike Tuesday, 14 January 2014

    Thank you, Ailuros. Yes I am allll about liminality right now, in more ways than one. Blessings to you as well.

  • Alay'nya
    Alay'nya Wednesday, 15 January 2014

    Dearest Lee -

    Wowsa! What a blog!

    I so appreciate your openness; your honesty, and your soul-searching. You do truly seem to be in a transition time.

    I especially resonate with what you said at the end: "That is why I loosened the shackles of atheist cynicism and decided to play on the side of the neo-pagans in the first place" ...

    Big transition, big time.

    Fatigue skews our perspective. I hope, that with the next change of seasons, you feel more renewed.

    But there seems to be something bigger going on with you - I'd call this a Tower time - because you have "loosened the shackles." And you yourself say that you're staying in place, just relaxing, breathing, going deeper. I so admire how you are handling this - and would suggest to all of my students and readers that they do exactly what you're doing, when in a similar situation!

    Thank you for sharing, for providing an instance and (by your example) guidance on how to go through such a time.

    Many blessings, dear one -

    Alay'nya (Alianna J. Maren, Ph.D.)
    Author, Unveiling: The Inner Journey

  • Gus diZerega
    Gus diZerega Monday, 20 January 2014

    At the risk of sounding like Bill Clinton, "I feel your pain." The "2X4 school of enlightenment" seems to apply to many of us. You give few details beyond the intensity of your situation, but here is something that did me enormous good during the darkest night of my soul. It or a version of it might be useful for you.

    Identify every major theme of suffering in your life. Not the details, the themes. Like illness or stifled career or being always alone or some such. The big stuff.

    Consider each theme as an entity.

    Identify what the experiences have given you that are positive and that you likely would not have arrived at any other way. It is not important that they are big, only that they are positive and that you HAVE to be sincere.

    Invoke them at your altar. THANK them. You GOTTA be sincere. If you can't, you are not ready for this ritual. Save it for later.

    In my case symbols for the responsible powers have been on my altar ever since - and it has been years. It was one of the most powerful rituals I ever did. And I am deeply grateful now.

  • Deborah Blake
    Deborah Blake Tuesday, 21 January 2014

    There seems to be a lot of this going around :-). Thanks for voicing it so beautifully.

    Fatigue definitely saps our ability to touch anything non-concrete, whether that is creativity or deity. I am struggling with much the same thing, and my whole circle is feeling the need to shift in some way...we're just searching for the right direction.

  • Janet Boyer
    Janet Boyer Tuesday, 21 January 2014

    "Misinformation be damned – when you’re a chaos witch, every myth is valid."

    Love this! I agree with Deborah: many of us are "feeling" this. Guess it's time for caterpillars to transform yet again. :)

    Great post!

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