Doing the Work

Doing the Work

No amount of platitudes or shiny things from Etsy or Ebay or Gothic, Hippie clothes will make you an awakened magickal being if you don't do the work. Work on yourself and work for others. Witch is a job description, witching and witchcraft is something to do. You study, you read, you go out into the cold, wet world and you do it. Balls to bone. You have to do it. You can't not do it. It hurts your heart to see the injustices, the pain and fear. It makes your soul soar when you see the kindness, goodness and grace. You have to do it. Alone in the dark facing your demons so you can help others do the same. You have to wait up all night to see the sunrise. You need to bake that cake, light that candle, do that spell, hold that person's hand. It's when you sit and channel during your morning cup of tea. It is the blessing of the food you eat at lunch. The silent prayers and sacred songs. In the child-like wonder at the gobsmakingly glorious world around you. Yes you will have bad days. You will get sick or broken, or even kind of crazy. Yet you get back up. You pull up your grown-up knickers and get to work.
Yet you can do it. You can change the world in big and small ways every single day. Every. Single. Day. It has an awful lot less to do with mystical charms and an awful lot more to do with stubbornness. Stubbornly refusing "that's just how it is". 

“There is a power in you. Old and strong and deep. It remembers being a wolf. It is time to stop pretending otherwise. To stop the platitudes and insincere niceness. You need not be cruel but if you are look at your cruelty squarely in the face.  To be strong is to find your weaknesses and to sit with them, give them tea and look them in the face. Often they are ourselves, ghosts haunting us from the great beyond of self death. Sometimes they wear our parent’s faces, or grandmother’s or that teacher who made you terrified.
You don’t have to like them, or forgive them or be suddenly transform them with love. Yet after really looking at them, seeing how they hold sway over your internal life, of your thoughts and feelings and desires these faces fade. Sometimes they crumble into dust before your eyes and are blown away by the beating of your living heart like moth wings.
The strangest thing is that those who don’t fade, the scariest parts, like the wolf, stop snarling at you and sit at your feet. They growl at those who would harm you long before you see the knife. They push you to live when you are pulled into the soft glorious afterlife draws you. It digs you out of the numbing cold into the fire of being awake, aware and living.
When you walk in this, with a thousand angels at your shoulder and a wolf at your feet, some only see the angels, and some only see the wolf.”