On paper 2016 looks like a fairly good year for me magickally, at least insofar as my position in the local Pagan community. I spent a lot of the last year working in community events: Pantheacon, Many Gods West, Pagan Pride, etc. I gave a lot of presentations and, I feel, acquitted myself rather well. I met a lot of amazing people from across the region and made some important connections and a few really good friends. 2016 saw the one year mark of doing public sabbats as Illustris - our collaborative ritual group. We're quickly approaching the two year mark (Ostara I believe) and are going strong. We're even expanding the project to include monthly salons to provide safe and supportive space for asking questions, discussing Pagan/magickal issues, and practicing magickal techniques. My hopes are pretty high for them. Last year we even saw the first of what I hope will be many inter-group Pagan/magickal leadership meetings. Helping to create a cohesive and supportive local Pagan community is incredibly important to me and I'm really happy to be a part of it. Sounds great right?
The downside to vast amounts of community work and activity is less time and energy for my personal practice - the heart and soul of who and what I am. You see the thing about community work is that it's at least 90% about communication and managing logistics. Giving a lecture is all about effectively communicating your audience, whether you're talking about database structure or how to giving offerings to Santa Muerte. Putting on a ritual is about getting your supplies from point A to point B, marketing in a way that the people who would enjoy it find out about it and actually show up, then facilitating other people's experiences, and finally cleaning up after yourself and everybody else. No matter how magickal what you're ultimately trying to do is, you need to do a lot of extremely mundane work to get there. So while I spent a goodly chunk of 2016 engaged in highly magickal activities, most of my work in them was either quite mundane or focused on supporting the magickal experiences of others.
My goals for 2017 are to 1) spend more of my limited energies on my personal practice and writing, and 2) to figure out how to balance my community and personal work. For the former I think actually putting down at least an hour or two a week explicitly dedicated to my personal work and writing should help tremendously. I'm a virgo, if I've written something on a to do list or schedule then I have to do it. I expect the latter to be much more difficult for me. I've never been good at balance; ask anyone who knows me. If I bother to do something at all I tend to do it too much. As a good friend said to me on new year's eve, I don't take breaks I just break. I think I may need to put that on a bracelet or something and just wear it all the time, perhaps with another that says "hubris." I think the first step on balancing out my community work is going to be expanding the Illustris leadership. Right now it's just me and Raye and that's a lot of weight for just two people to bear. If I could find people to facilitate maybe one out of every three rituals, that would be a huge help and is fairly realistic (some awesome friends have actually volunteered and I love them for it). So hey, if you're in the Seattle area and want to learn how to lead collaborative ritual shoot me an email. Beyond that I think I'm just going to have to pace myself and check in with friends to keep a better perspective on my activity and energy levels. If any of y'all have suggestions on better maintaining this balance I am all ears. Rising to a community leadership position is hard. Thank the gods I have the support of trusted friends.
We all need to do mundane things in order to live magickal lives. The trick is figuring out how to balance everything so that planning, logistics, and interpersonal issues don't drain you of so much energy that it pops your magick balloon. I am very, very bad at this and thus need to woman up and ask for help from the people I trust on a regular basis. One-time grand gestures do not create change, only consistent progress - no matter how small - can actually break the habits of a lifetime. Gods keep me mindful.
