There are a wide assortment of reasons that my magical practice (and, with it, my blogging) has been, at best, sporadic for the last year or so. Some of them are magical dilemmas (how to incorporate the experiments and lessons of the previous two years into my personal practice), some of them are spiritual failings (see previous, also: devotional work is hard and scary), and some work and school related (overtime in the mall! senior thesis! trying to catch a date!). But I think the biggest reason is that I’m lonely, and that I just don’t enjoy working or worshiping solo.
A good number of my most exciting magical and spiritual experience have been in group contexts: my first elemental energy work, my past-life explorations, the spirit-hunts, and the aura-games with my friends in and just after high school; the WPA/KU Cauldron before and after my failed life in St.Louis; discovering partner-magic with Aradia, and later with Sannafrid; the trials and tribulations of the proto-coven. Even most of my best solitary experiences took place at times in my life when I had physical access to other practitioners to plan, brag about,and/or commiserate over my experiments and experiences.
Every time I go back to Kansas City for breaks, doing magical work with Aradia, Sthenno, Pasiphae, and Aidan are among the highlights of the trip. When Aradia and I went on a cross-country road trip, we made a point of doing magic in each of the two parks we visited, and those moments were definitely among highlights of the vacation.
Since Sannafrid graduated, though, and since things got weird between myself and some of the local pagan group … I’ve had no one to practice with. My current lover is, against my own rules, not a practitioner. And our schedules don’t line up particularly well, leaving me struggling with another of the various unintended consequences of having taken the name Satyr Magician: too horny to think is also too horny to do magic, and there’s only so much I can do to take the edge off all by myself.
Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that anything’s hopeless: despite the flu that took me out for the entirety of the Full Moon, my practice is the best it’s been in a while. With the help of my familiar spirits, I’ve been repairing the damage to my Inner Temple–escalating rites followed by a whole lot of nothing was pretty hard on the place. I’ve been working hard (again) on getting my shields back to a level where they keep out what they need to without blinding me to the world. (This seems to be one of those never-really-quite-work-it-out problems.) My Sight has definitely been improving, though my mind-reading/empathy is still not back to what my crazy Scorpio ass expects it to be.
But it’s just not as much fun to tell Aradia about my latest adventures over the phone, or Sannafrid over chat. I need a physically present community. I need mentors and students and peers to keep me honest and innovative. And I need it to be fun. As hard or as frightening as an individual experiment or experience might be, my practice as a whole has to be pleasurable. I am, after all, a hedonist witch.