Goals are hard for me sometimes. Life is a journey, not a destination … right? Of course it is. But I’ve done enough meandering for now, and maybe it’s time to get my magic in order the same way I’ve been doing by shifting careers.
I’ve already mentioned a few goals as part of the “Begin at the Beginning” posts, but let’s get just a little more specific.
1) Rewrite my formal “Book of Shadows”. The first versions were good. They taught me a lot. But in the process, they’ve also become irrelevant. And maybe come up with a new name. I’m getting far enough from Wicca that Book of Shadows seems … inappropriate. This will be the ongoing process of a lifetime, of course, but it’s still occasionally useful to restart a manuscript from scratch.
2) Perfect a daily practice. As above: this is the task of a life time, but concrete steps can be made more immediately. I want to have a ritual plan for every day of the week by the time the semester begins. I will be doing Yoga two mornings a week once the semester begins, so that’s Tuesday and Thursday. I think I also want to go through my full Pentagram Rite two or three times a week—since doing it actually every day seems to be too much for me, at least at this stage in life. Which leaves me with two or three days a week still in need of a ritual—probably Monday and Friday.
3) Complete my self-directed course of ceremonial study. Although I’m comfortable with this pushing past the coming year, I want to make serious progress. As above, I am trying to have a concrete plan by the time the semester resumes.
4) Re-establish my lunar rites, this time on a Dark-to-Dark lunar month rather than on a Full-to-Full. Yet another ongoing task, but this one I have already made good progress on: performing Lunar rites for the first two nights of the Dark Moon.
5) Practical magic. I’m a magician, damn it. I’ve been bending the universe to my will for the last decade and a half. Sure, my charmed life is partly mortal luck and partly white middle-class privilege, but too much has gone too well against odds too strongly against me. I’ve been cultivating my web of influence for years, and it’s served me well … but it’s time for me to grow up and start making more sophisticated demands of the universe that “good friends, good times, and no starving to death under the bridge”.
I’m starting small: reupping the existing wards on my car; making new car-protection talismans for myself, Aradia, and whomever we know that would like the third (for some reason I felt the need to make three); redesigning my house wards (to be implemented when I return to the Sunrise Temple).
6) Resume my explorations of the Underworld. See previous post on that subject. That process has begun as of this Dark Moon. But that gets a post (or three) of it’s own, once I’ve had the chance to process.
There will be more goals, of course. But these are where the radical transformations will begin.