One hesitates to speak of good fortune \u2013 it\u2019s taboo. One is simultaneously afraid of being named a braggart, and of having one\u2019s luck evaporate.\u00a0 Be that as it may: I have long lived a charmed life.\u00a0 Being in the right place at the right time is pretty much my story.\u00a0 I have achieved this (inasmuch as it is an achievement, rather than a blessing) through two things: listening to my instincts, and my web of influence.<\/p>\n
Growing up in Lawrence, I walked everywhere.\u00a0 As a young magician (though that word implies more intention and structure than I ever had going on), I practiced magic everywhere I walked \u2013 spinning webs, lobbing energy spheres, or even just playing around with subtle trance states.\u00a0 Over time \u2013 years, literally \u2013 I became increasingly attuned to those places where I spent the most time.\u00a0 If something interesting was going on somewhere I frequented \u2013 I knew, and I would show up just in time.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
This was before the days of cell phones: if you wanted to meet someone somewhere, you had to call them in advance and hope they happened to be around, or make use of a pay phone (if there was one) when you got there.\u00a0 My magical friends \u2013 Kat, Lyra, James \u2026 I use your real names here in the hope that you recognize these stories and contact me – rarely had to call me.\u00a0 They would just show up, and there I would be.\u00a0 Thirty minutes later, if I wasn\u2019t waiting for them when they arrived.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
I came to call this knowledge of time and place my Web, and anchored it to a number of tools that lived on my altar (my Orb, in particular, if you recall it from the Story of Tsu<\/a>).\u00a0 When I wanted or needed something, I fed that need into the web \u2013 no ritual, no ceremony, just focus \u2013 and it usually manifested sooner rather than later.\u00a0 When I moved out of my parents\u2019 house into my first apartment, I moved it with me.\u00a0 I moved it again and again, as I moved around Lawrence.<\/p>\n When I moved to St. Louis, it was a little more complicated.\u00a0 For one thing, the move was so frantic that I forgot to take down the house wards before I left.\u00a0 For another, I was homeless for the first ten weeks \u2013 it\u2019s hard to set up a power-center while living out of your car and sleeping on your buddy\u2019s couch.\u00a0 (Not saying that it can\u2019t be done: I\u2019m sure many of you out there are up to the task.\u00a0 But it was very hard for me.)\u00a0 When I finally got my apartment, I still had to make another three or four trips back to KC to get my things, including key components of my altar.\u00a0 Nor was my life in St.L ever really stable: unemployment, temp jobs, and the batshit crazy jewelers I worked for there; friendships falling apart, an ill-chosen romance, and isolation.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Still, I did my best: laying down lines of power as I searched for jobs, marking trails as I did what partying I could.\u00a0 As wrong as so many things went, they still went very well in many regards.\u00a0 I had my choice of lovers, though I can\u2019t say I made the best choices.\u00a0 I never went hungry or got into any real trouble.\u00a0 Despite my initial successes, it took about a year before things really started moving in my favor \u2026 and by that time it was too late.\u00a0 Too many things had already down the shitter.\u00a0 That said, I got out of my lease without a problem and found a safe place to land.<\/p>\n Kansas City \u2013 where I landed \u2013 was a little easier: being closer to Lawrence, where too much of my energy was still invested, things didn\u2019t have quite so far to stretch.\u00a0 I had an easier time getting jobs, making friends, and even started going to school.\u00a0 All of which made it easier to lay down roots and get more of the same.\u00a0 Again, though, it took about a year for things to really get rolling \u2013 for last-minute decisions and gut-felt impulses to star putting me where I needed to be; to get that feeling of \u201cI need to be a Missie\u2019s tonight\u201d.\u00a0 It was a series of fairly wild coincidences led Aradia and I to being in the same place and time at the right moments \u2013 little, if anything, in my life has turned out quite that well.<\/p>\n Now that I\u2019ve moved again, it\u2019s time to build a new annex to my web.\u00a0 Hopefully, between my more sophisticated witchcraft, my more focused intention, and my larval ceremonial practice, it won\u2019t take a whole year to get the web established.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already started<\/a> the process.\u00a0 I\u2019m making interesting friends.\u00a0 Let\u2019s see how it goes, shall we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One hesitates to speak of good fortune \u2013 it\u2019s taboo. One is simultaneously afraid of being named a braggart, and of having one\u2019s luck evaporate.\u00a0 Be that as it may: I have long lived a charmed life.\u00a0 Being in the right place at the right time is pretty much my story.\u00a0 I have achieved this … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[21,214,291],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-art-of-magic","tag-pushing-the-boundaries-of-coincidence-and-chance","tag-web-of-influence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1B","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}