Last week’s Sexy Pagan Friday offering is as good a place as ever to start off a little rambling about what has probably been my most significant magical practice since returning to KCMO.
Most of my effort, magical and otherwise, has been devoted toward settling in: to establishing my space, and to being in the right place at the right time. Notice all the green in that photo: my hat, my scarf, my pocket handkerchief, the shirt you really can’t see because I got super dramatic with the lighting, and even my fucking socks are green. Zip back through my last few spf posts, and you’ll find a shit ton of green in them, too.
Taking a cue from Aradia, who did this diligently before she quit her office job back in June, I’ve been incorporating planetary colors into my clothing as much as possible. (Wednesday is a fucking challenge: I look absurd in orange, which basically leaves me shit out of luck.) It’s a simple, mindful thing, rather than an act of overt magic, but it’s something. (Mondays are my favorite because purple.)
This also goes back to something I’ve touched on before: crafting a new image for myself as I become too old–and too committed to “professional” life–to let my freak flag fly full time. Since then I’ve learned that I receive very different from both the mallgoers who patronize my jewelry store and the coworkers who’ve known me for six fucking years now when I wear a tie and nice shoes. Simply put, they take me more seriously. (This, of course, should come as a surprise to no one.)
And, I will say, it sure helps that men’s fashion has gone in some pretty awesome directions since I made this decision. Vests are seriously back in style. Colors and patterns are vibrant and fun. And pocket squares!
It’s difficult to gauge the efficacy of general prosperity magic–yeah, I’m doing pretty alright, but I’m also busting my ass–but judging by the ways in which I do seem, increasingly, to be in the right place at the right time, I believe that I can call the experiment, at worst, a moderate success. The things I want to buy are on sale and in my size, I sit down at the right table to meet close friends of the hosts of open events, people respond to my messages on OKC, the art store has a shipment of the strange craft supplies I’m after in the deep discount corner of the basement.
I want to escalate this shit. I bet I can make a talisman out of a tie or a pocket square. Can you enchant a suit? I’ll fucking find out! (And you can’t tell me no one has never tried. The question is, did they blog about it?)
But it kinda fucks with my head. I mean, yes, these are magical successes, in a sense, and I am having a good time with it. But it’s all so fucking butch. I no longer fit my own image of a witch, or even a wizard or a sorcerer. I mean, there’s some precedent for a magician playing the straight man… but being a magician did some fucked up shit to my head: Aradia was preparing to stage an intervention.
The realistic solution is probably to get better at code switching: taking off the work costumes as soon as I get home and putting on clothes that are more in line with my self-image; finding times and places where those clothes are more appropriate.
And keep doing magic.
Always do more magic.
