New Year New You 2018: Week One – Making Way

I’m (once again) doing Miss Sugar’s New Year New You Experiment in Radical Magical Transformation because I find it’s a really good way to kick my own ass into getting things done. It’s a good mix of practical, magical, and thought-based exercises to help accomplish specific and significant change in your own life. If it’s relevant to your interests, give it a try!
 
Instructions: “You can’t start putting all this awesome new crap into your life and body until you get rid of the old crap. Old crap here is defined as many things such as relationships that are no longer working, old crutches, clutter of the mind and of the house.”
 
Tarot Card: Two of Swords.
 

 
Why am I choosing the two of swords?
Well… Firstly, it was the card I drew at midnight on New Year’s, so it’s kind of sitting with me right now as a Thing To Think About, and secondly because the “two” cards are all cards of “just starting out”. The Aces in tarot are “high” – if we want to mix this with, like, poker metaphors – less like “let’s start at the very beginning” and more like the distillation of a given suits essence. Two is where the journey begins, when you’ve taken your one foot and put it in front of the other for that first completed step. So a “two” seems fitting here, as this is both “promt #1” and the second week of my current project.
Beyond both of those things though, I chose the Two of Swords because one of its messages is “Get out of your own way!”
 
Because, yeah, I get in my own way a LOT. I dither. I second-guess. I straight-up self-sabotage. I run through endless lists of why Trying The Thing is a bad idea that will put me in danger and not result in any pay-off. I’m looking for work right now, and a friend of mine suggested I start a Patreon (or similar) to help fund my poetry projects. The very idea terrifies me. Being vulnerable. Asking for help. O.O
So, naturally, I’m looking for part-time admin work instead.
 
This project isn’t about Receptivity, the way my Queen of Cups project was. But it is about connections and security just as much as it’s about pleasure, creativity, and desire. So it might be something I set up as an experiment, to see what, if anything happens. (<– This is me, telling myself there's not stakes here, no risks, so that I'll actually do it. Maybe. Maybe).
 
As for the questions in the writing prompt:
 
Where would I like to be putting my time? Modeling, writing, dancing, reading, cooking, entertaining with friends, going on dates with my wife and (fingers crossed) other cute queers.
 
Where am I putting my time? Modeling (less than I want to be), writing (slightly less than I want to be), cooking, looking for work, social media, fretting about money, some socializing and dancing, but not as much as I'd like.
 
How can I change this: Well. I can find other work, which would help with the fretting about money, and mean I could stop looking. I’ve contacted my temp agency and my modeling regulars and am sending out resumes, so there’s that. I can spend less time on social media and more time doing cheap/free things with my wife and inviting friends over for pot-lucks and cooking-dates. I can make myself go out dancing (a great thing to plan in January, I realize, but it could happen). I can watch for signs that people might be interested if I flirted with them, and then (if I like them) actually flirt with them and see if they’re responsive. Which might lead to me asking someone out on a date.
All possible. Some achievable entirely under my own power. Some is chance. But that’s why we do magic, right? To push the odds every-so-slightly more towards our own favour. So I guess I have a laundry list of what I need to do with this project.
 
Literal, physical cleaning of the house: At this point, I’ve mostly gotten rid of the stuff I don’t use – though there is a clothing/yarn/fabric swap coming up at the end of the month that I might be able to find a few things for. My house-cleaning is more about managing clutter and keeping on top of the vacuuming and the dishes. I’ve got a rack full of clean dishes, but another rack worth still to do. A lot of things to put back on shelves, clean laundry to put away. If my Saturday (today) tasks have included returning a library book, washing the pots & pans, and finish up the lard-rendering, then my Sunday tasks can be putting away the clean laundry and putting books back on shelves.
 
On a less physical level: Normally I would walk around the house burning incense, but it gives my wife a headache do… It’s been a while, but I think I can still remember how to magic-suds a place with The Elements, so I think that might be what I try.
 
As for emotional baggage… There is so much of it. This project, and the last one, are about letting go of that stuff. But here I am, and so much of it is the same stuff that was weighing me down six years ago. Aegirine stone is a good one for letting go of shame, for getting its hooks out of you, but I don’t have any of that, so I’ll have to make due with what I’ve got.
 
Labradorite – for the courage and power to own one’s gifts
Malachite – for help with making changes and with inviting pleasure and success into one’s life
Moonstone – for fulfilling desires and granting wishes (how very Nine of Cups)
Rose Quartz – for self-love and forgiveness
Charoite – for healing emotional fears
Bloodstone – for (re)aligning ones lower chakras with one’s heart
Carnelian – for waking up one’s root and sacra chakras
Black Onyx – for cleansing negative energetic gunk from one’s system
 
What I’ve been doing: Wearing my black onyx pendant and my cheroite ring in the hopes of pulling some of this nasty stuff right out of me and making room for better stuff (stuff I can call in with the labradorite and rose quartz I wear every day, with moonstone jewelry, with the malachite and bloodstone I have in my treasure box).
 
This post feels like it’s been one long sigh. But wish me luck anyway?

New Year New You 2016: Week 1 – Making Way

So I’m doing Miss Sugar’s New Year New You Experiment in Radical Magical Transformation (again) because I find it’s a really good way to kick my own ass into getting things done. You should try it!
 
Instructions: Clean the house, weed the wardrobes, and generally get physical stuff out of your space (or back in its place). THEN Magically cleanse your place (and your head-space, too). Miss Sugar suggests doing this during the waning moon, which is technically happening right now, but only just.
 
Tarot Card: If I were to assign a tarot card to this week’s prompt, I would almost definitely pick a Fire card. After giving the eye to the Queen, the 8, the 2, and the 4 (as well as The Chariot, as it happens – all that “get-up/wake-up and go” stuff), I’m inclined to stick with the Two of Fire (“Possibilities”) because of its connections to balance & harmony, planning & decisions, and new ventures, plus the fact that it’s a Two, which means this is all about taking small (but consistent) steps towards getting the hang of Doing(New) You well.
 
Thoughts:
I feel like the accumulate/de-stuff-icate cycle is one that I’m never going to actually finish. Like the Wheel of the Year, periods of abundance and paring down happen in their seasons.
I’ve got a year-at-a-glance horoscope (I get the we’moon date book every year as a birthday present to myself) telling me that, in spite of Scorpios (in theory) being better at elimination than accumulation, it’s time to deal with wealth (of various kinds) and material security.
 
A talk with a friend, about two months ago, included the ways in which we’re both more “switching up” than “throwing out” these days. Accumulating stuff, yes, but it’s stuff that will last. Good quality things. Things that actually fit our senses of self (whether we’re talking furniture or machinery or clothing), rather than “single-season” or otherwise disposable items that we’ll wear out too quickly because they’re poorly made. Glass not plastic. Cotton and linen, wool and silk rather than polyester. Things we can repair or alter ourselves. Things we’ve even made ourselves – thus getting Hours Of Fun from the making, before getting (hopefully) Decades Of Fun from the wearing or using of what we made. Things with stories attached to them (“I got this skirt at the Harvest Swap, it used to belong to A. Fatale” or “I got this necklace/yarn/knife on my trip to Iceland, last Summer” or “My wife found this antique yarn winder behind the crack house on the corner – Can you believe they put it in the trash??”).
 
I feel like the stuff in my life is edging slowly towards being the kind of Stuff that is (a) limited (hahaha, here’s hoping), but also (b) almost permaculture-y in the way each item comes with many “purposes”: This shrug will keep me warm (and stylish!) when it’s finished, keep my hands (and mind) busy while I’m knitting (and spinning) the yarn, help me strengthen chatty connections with other fibre artists in my community/ies, and help me become a better knitter & designer, too. This cheese plate is beautiful (beautiful is a purpose in my world), can be used to serve cheese and other goodies, and comes with a story because it’s a wedding present from the House of the Dragon.
 
As far as the state of my home goes…
Yeah…
Thanks, entirely, to our annual Winter Solstice Partay (and the corresponding, too-brief but much-appreciated visit from our Archivist), our house is actually… not a total mess.
Admittedly, “not a total mess” is about as good as it gets around here. Our front room is functional as a dining room, but it’s also doing multi-duty as (a) my spinning wheel storage room (none of my spinning-related machinery is functional… yet), (b) my wife’s steam-engines display area, (c) the work-shop-ish area (still lots of stuff for doing leather work, including a sadle-stitching bench and two sewing machines, but also jewelry-making), and (d) the garage because my wife – somewhat understandably – keeps her skis, ski boots, winter boots, and her bicycle in here.
Still. We’ve been eating at a table with chairs (rather than eating off our knees, sitting on the couch) for a couple of months, and I am overjoyed about that!
The party has meant that our kitchen is stocked (overstocked) with really fancy food, and the living room is cleaner and tidier than it’s been in a month.
We still have (lots of) art and family pictures to put on the walls, and heaven only knows when next we’ll try to tackle that business. I’m eyeing January 1st as a date to take the (put up on December 20th) Winter Solstice Decorations out of the windows, though we’ll see about that as well.
 
Energetically speaking… My altar has had a cursory clean (using a Lysol wipe, of all things!), and I’ve been keeping up with my candle offerings. It’s time to start making water offerings again, I think, though I’m not sure how I’m going to do them. I may pour (boiled) water into the shell-composed tea cup on my altar once a week. Or I may do the water on the stove like I used to do. Maybe a bit of both? I don’t know. But it seems like the right thing to do, so we shall see where I go with this.
My wife has mentioned that my insense gives her headaches, so I’m going to have to find a different way of energetically cleaning my space – It may just mean that I do the Big Clean shortly after she leaves for work on a day when I know she’ll be spending the night elsewhere (Yay, Polyamoury!), since this is one of the least labour-intensive (and therefore most likely to actually get done) means of House Cleansing that I know of. That being said, ti’s been a long-ass while since I gave my place that kind of a clean. Time to get on it, me-thinks.
Other than that, I gave my brain a bit of a once-over as well. Not in the sense of going to my “Magical Internal House” and giving that a wipe down, but by having a look Inside and doing some self-care and assessments (relevant for Week 2, as it happens).
 
Questions:
1) Is my time being well spent?
At this point, mostly yes. I mean, I still Internet waaaaaaaay too much, and I know that. I’m generally making a point of keeping off the computer (like turning it right off, when possible) when my wife’s at home. I find myself looking at things that I’m neglecting though.
Some of it is “Should” stuff, like sending out more job applications for part-time/casual reception/admin work. But that’s not actually what I’m concerned with on the NYNY Project Front this go-round. (Doesn’t mean I should ignore it, and I do need to acknowledge it, but it’s not my focus. You’ll see why that’s relevant in a second).
Stuff I’ve been neglecting due to the guilt-shame-fear spiral that I have around money and employment:
(A) Self-care & my mental-emotional health. Which is part of why my goals for this Challenge are what they are, to be honest.
(B) Spiritual study and contemplation. Yes. I’m such a bougie whatever-whatever, but that stuff is actually important to me, and I’ve been missing it for over a year. I want to get it back! I’m considering the remarkably affordable Alternative Tarot Course from Little Red Tarot, actually, as part of way to get some of this back – this is also why I’m picking a tarot card for each week of this Challenge.
ART for the sake of making and finishing art. Yes, I’ve got a poetry manuscript on the go, and I want to keep up with that. But I miss scribbling stories for the hell of it, and I’d like to see if I can’t do something like the Fanfic 100, but for Random Short Stories and try to flash-write something in the 2000-word range, maybe once a week on Productivity Wednesdays or something).
 
This is all stuff that my Poisoned-by-Capitalism brain has a lot of trouble with allowing me to “get away with” doing (and, yes, finding myself a damn part-time job – the kind that lets me blog/novel/poet as needed in between phone calls and accepting deliveries, while earning a salary – would seriously help on this front, but go with me here) , but which are also all things that I think will seriously help me with my actual NYNY goals as well. Funnily enough, those goals have to do with putting down the baggage I’ve been hauling around for 20 years so that I can get myself free (or at least free-ER) and be happier and more open to Receiving things. More on that next week.
 
I’ve signed up to do one volunteer shift per week at a local food centre that focuses on neighbourliness and skill-building. I figure, I’m a fucking Kitchen Witch. Food is how I help people out. I might as well do it on a larger scale and see where it gets me. If nothing else, I’ll learn how to Feed The Multitude on donated produce, and that’s a skill I’d love to have.
 
2)What Big Rocks Are You Carrying?
I am carrying a couple of doozies. The whole point of doing NYNY again is to actually put some of them the fuck down. But I’ll fill you all in on that with my Goals post for Week Two.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

New Year, New You – Prompt #1: Making Way

Responding to “Making Way”:

The prompt asks us to talk about getting organized. Organized time, organized space, and the stumbling blocks we already know we’re going to have to deal with.

So.

Time, Space, and Great Big Rocks (that’s the universe for you, eh?).
Onwards!

Space: Is a mess.
This is (a) typical of me, but (b) currently exacerbated by the piles of home-made gifts strewn across my dining room table and my side table. (Part of me says “Once December is over, I’ll have so much more space!” And part of me suspects that it would just get covered in more crap before very much time went by).

I did manage to get everything done for our visit to The Relatives the other day but, in spite of having got six presents, a gift basket, and a lot of wrapping paper out of the house, my living room still looks a bit like a Ke$ha song exploded in it. (Specifically the part about the dirt and glitter all over the place — we ran out of vacuum cleaner bags a few weeks ago and we’ve been making due with sweeping. It’s… not actually all that effective).

Time:
I feel like I have a back-log of Things To Do – most of which are either related to my currently non-existent Etsy store and the rest of which are related, in one way or another, to writing. Either through my poetry show or through my actual, personal work.

I can look at the things I do and the things I make and, despite being able to see all of it, I often feel like I’m not getting much done or else that all I ever do is look at shoes. I know part of that is just Xmas stuff – I’m doing a lot of knitted presents this year, which means I spend a lot of time sitting in My Chair using my hands for something other than typing. I can also say that I’m juggling between five and seven careers (not all of them paying much at the moment, but still) right now, and the scheduling and running around can be a bit of a Thing.

None the less, being aware of what I’m doing and when I’m doing it are things I tend to struggle with – at least a bit. I get lonely and, before I know it, I’m realizing that I’ve just checked twitter for the 47th time in an hour. Or I get myself into a tail spin about ZOMG Not Enough Time and… waste time freaking when I could be focusing on Getting X Done.

As for the Big Rocks that I (already know I) have to deal with:
Because my schedule is pretty much always in flux[1] – and my income is pretty closely tied to that since I’m doing freelance everything, more or less – I periodically get caught in the ZOMG No Money weasel-pit, which means I end up spending hours hustling for work (of various kinds) rather than actually working on stuff.

Beyond that, my Big Rocks include:
Self sabotage
Discomfort with money[2]
Making Excuses (see above)
and
The “I Can’t”s. (This is related to the self-sabotage, but goes beyond that into Brain Weasel territory).

Areas where I’ve let things slide to the point they they are lying, mangled, at the bottom of a mountain somewhere behind me:

A) Boiling Water offerings: I’m not actually sure why I stopped doing this. Part of me says “Because you went from 100% working-from-home to adding a full-time temp contract into the mix, and are still working the extra job while trying to fit all your bookings and other commitments in around it. That’s why.” But that’s not all of it. The other reason is because, honestly, I resent (and therefore find ways to avoid) doing things when one of the Reasons I’m doing them is in order to avoid feeling guilty about not doing them. And it got to a point where I was playing so much catch-up with what I’d set up as a daily micro-ritual, that I actually didn’t wanna play any more. It’s a petulant little excuse for not doing something, but it’s still there.

B) Yoga. I stopped this one because I started a day-job. Part of why I was able to keep it up (for a couple of months) before that was because, due to my East-facing windows, there were always a couple of hours in the morning where I couldn’t work on the computer (due to glare), so I’d use the time to do yoga, do my water offering, run errands, and so-on. It got my day off to a fairly good start while also allowing me a few hours of “warm-up time” before I really had to get down to brass tacks. When I started the day-job, I lost that time and didn’t (not couldn’t, exactly, but didn’t) make the time in the evenings to keep up the physical end of things.

C) Writing. Which isn’t actually lying mangled at the bottom of a mountain somewhere behind me, but which remains a challenge when it comes to doing more than blithering on in yet another blog post. I’ve got Part One of a three-part porn story up at Good Vibes Magazine, and that’s giving me plenty of motivation to edit the remaining two parts into posting-worthiness; and I’ve got the shadow of a poem or two kicking around building up the steam it takes to come out. And both of those things are a big relief to me. Because, otherwise, I’ve been feeling really, really unwriterly of late. Not fun. Don’t like it. 😦

Things that are Looking Up:

Possible gig as a professional tarot reader (this is very much still in the works, but we’ll see where it goes).

Did a boiling water offering today.

Signed up to take part in a food-security-related Blog Carnival (not so much with the money, but definitely with the funneling my thoughts down the avenues where I want them to be going, so yay).

Temp contract (theoretically) coming to an end in seven weeks, thus freeing up my mornings for more writing, more modeling, and getting back to doing regular yoga!

So that’s where I’m at right now.

TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

[1] Which is actually how I like it, by and large. If my schedule has a lot of variety to it, I don’t end up feeling bogged down by monotony.

[2] This is relevant because my Goals are, on the surface, fairly connected with my finances.