Showing Up is a Virtue

Whether you are riding out a mania, feeling like dog shit, or anything in between, dragging that ass to the altar to do your dailies no matter how you feel is one of the most important things you can do as a practitioner. Perhaps the usual docket of prayers, supplications, and invocations feel a bit off today. No problem- Switch it up! Throw in a few less familiar pieces of magical or spiritual prose, try out a new mantra or breathing technique. Just do something, and do it right there where you belong, right there at that shrine.

In times when we make exceptions to things due to outside variables we create a border, a boundary, sectioning off that specific part of our usual behavior as something we can, or should, skip under certain circumstances. This makes sense for most things in life, but as practitioners when we don’t feel up to our best, it is perhaps the most important time to show up at the shrine. The mind needs experience finding solace and strength in our practices under a wide variety of circumstances. How else will we remember that avenue is open to us when the shit is really hitting the fan?  

It can be tempting to write off that practice time, whether it’s five minutes or two hours, but the benefits of truly living the experience of your spirits and your practice always being there for you, whatever the weather, cannot be overemphasized. When the sky is falling and the forecast calls for brimstone, it’s really good to be completely solid in your knowledge that the spirits you’ve cultivated relationships with are still right there for you. And the only way to really achieve this is to press on under each new set of strange circumstances, clawing your way across the floor in some cases, to say, “Hey, I have faith in y’all. Can I get a hand here?” 

This goes for the good times too. It’s a consumerist trap to only seek connection when favors are needed, a cultural curse we all must learn to deal with in our own ways. Stop to consider in these good times exactly what your experience was of getting there, and notice the places along the way where you were carried or where fate seemed to outsmart probability. Remember to give thanks to those who hold the boundaries, guard the posts, and bounce the riff-raff. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to a practice or practicing in general, you’ve got honored ancestors of blood and practice watching out for you, who care about you and have no illusions about who and what who you truly are. And they care about you anyway.

Often when I write about spirit work it’s a facsimile of a lesson I wished I had been given, rather than finding out the hard way, on my own. My guess would be that those of you magic users out there who have the currents of established traditions woven through your webs have a less difficult time with this than those of us who are always feeling around in the dark, ever scrambling to cobble together something that both feels right and works, while shadowboxing with self doubt through it all. But damn, it can be hard without a teacher. An elder. A wiser, more experienced mage or sage you can truly trust. So this is for you, sorcerous orphans of the materialist age, those of you who, like me, have a potent need for a sturdy foundation amidst the cascading cacophony of life but don’t have that wise tutor, those established go-to workings that were gifted and thus need not be deliberated, the trained and habitual resolve to return to your shrine or altar regardless of literally anything else that may, or may not, happen. To you, I say;

Keep it wyrd, friends. On the daily.