Winter of My Discontent

I wrote this article in early March when it was still unseasonably cold outside. Although things have changed somewhat, the issues that I faced then are still very much active today. Therefore, I thought that I would share this writing as the Vernal Equinox has arrived. Winters are harsh up here in the Midwest tundra, and this winter was more harsh than typical. It makes me long for warmer climates and less hostile weather.

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried." 

Richard III - William Shakespeare

Another day of sub zero cold, snow, ice and just miserable freezing weather. When the sun shines, it is too cold to even go outside and observe the day without being heavily bundled up and wearing a ski mask. We are teased once in a while with a slight thaw, only to be hit a day or two later with what the weather geeks call a polar vortex. One scientist has hypothesized that extreme weather is caused by warmer than usual air displacing the frigid air currents over the pole and pushing them further south, thereby causing the jet stream to loop north and south instead of maintaining a northerly transit over the North American continent. Some might joke that what we have here is more like global cooling than global warming, but it is in fact warmer air currents in the poles that are causing the shifts of extremely cold weather. Alaska is having a very warm winter and the Midwestern Great Lakes looks like a scene from the last glacier. Extreme weather will continue to become more extreme, and everywhere in North America is being afflicted by it. There is no refuge except in the southern most states and the Carribean. So, here we are, getting punished by one of the worst winters in recorded history, and all I can do is just endure it and hope for an early spring. I stay indoors as often as possible, and I don’t travel much, becoming even more isolated in my household hermitage. If I am grateful for one thing, it is that I don’t have to commute to work in the hostile frigid weather.

You have probably noticed that I am not writing as much as I used to. Articles are being posted perhaps once or twice a month. The reason why is that I am avalanched with work from my day job, and by the time I finish up the day, my brain feels like mush. Since part of what I do all day long is to write up responses for business bids from the various States, I am engaged in writing a lot. I am also writing UNIX scripts, SQL scripts and performing various other system analyses. I am in a world of work, and besides that and my ever important relationship with my lady, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to do everything that I want to do. I haven’t been doing much with my spiritual studies and practices other than the rudimentary meditations and minor offerings in my temple. There are no big workings planned because there is so little time to plan and perform them.

While it is true that I am in a bit of a rut that I need to climb out of, I haven’t had the inspiration or been able to build the initiative to do so. Winter has not only frozen the land that I live in, but it has also frozen my spirit and brought all spiritual and magical progress to a standstill. Perhaps there is hope since I am now starting to write articles for my blog, and I am starting to look over my notes and attempting to jump start my research projects. I have cleaned up my temple area and have organized it, but as of yet, little has been done in that space. I have made some plans to perform some workings in the near future, but we will see what happens. The harsh winter is having a paralyzing impact on me, and I need to break the spell that it has cast over me.

Even though I am doing quite well in all of the areas of my life that really count for a lot, such as my career and my relationship, I am still dissatisfied with my lack of initiative and achievements in the spiritual and magical areas of my life. I have book projects just sitting around and not being worked on yet and I have to do something about that stasis which seems to be pervading my work. I can blame it on the winter, and perhaps it is having more of an affect on me than I realize, but still, there really are no excuses. I just need to focus and get moving again. And so, I keep promising myself that I will endeavor to persevere, whatever that means. Hopefully I will be able to break through this frozen and static period of my spiritual and magical life, but I believe that things are only going to get more busy at my job. I knew that this day was coming when my job would once again take up the lion’s share of my time and efforts, but I seem ill prepared to deal with it.

Sometimes I envy those who are singularly dedicated to their art of magic and who can spend whatever time is needed in order to teach, write books and practice magic without any interruptions or distractions like having to make a living. Maybe someday I will have this kind of freedom, perhaps when I finally retire, but until then I can sense that my career is about to really take off and engulf me with a massive workload. If my company wins this project that I have been working on, helping them to build up technical responses and exhaustively answer questions for the State, then I will get my wish and be made part of the team working on a long term project. This large-scale project will fully engage and challenge me on all levels. It will be exciting and challenging to work on this project, and the company will earn quite a large amount of money for achieving it (and so will the team members). But I believe that my occult studies and practices will correspondingly suffer, since they will have to be put on the back burner while I toil away at my job.

Luckily, I happen to love the work that I do, but there is more to life than work, or so I am told. All I know is that I must push forward and take whatever opportunities come my way. Unlike some people my age, I don’t want to loose my job and become underemployed doing something for a living that I hate . It is my burden and my good fortune to have to spend the majority of my time working at my job, which is probably what many other people go through each and every work day. I should be grateful for having such a demanding and rewarding job, but sometime I would rather play the flute, work magick, read and research new ideas and concepts and not have to deal with the everyday stresses of an IT type career. Of course, when payday comes around every two weeks, I forget about what I would rather do and instead feel relieved that I can pay all of the bills and have a little left over. I am lucky to have this well paying gig, and I know it, but still, the winter goes on day by day, and I wonder what other possibilities there might be for me to have my cake and eat it too.

*****

Spring is coming, and the first thaw has already reduced the amount of snow on the ground, although it has snowed again since and carpeted the ground with white just as it was beginning to look like some kind of transition in the earth was really happening. I have sensed a number of changes already occurring, and I know that this year will be quite different than any other year. I don’t exactly know why, but I sense that changes (and I might add, good changes for me and those close to me) are immanent. I want very much to get really deep into my magical work, and I hope that one of the changes that will occur is that I will get this sorely needed opportunity soon. As the Vernal Equinox is nigh upon us, I am hoping that I will be able to once again re-engage with my magick and spiritual discipline. Sometimes life just becomes so busy that everything else takes a back seat until that busy time has passed. I understand this fact, and it is one of the issues that any magician who has to work a regular job, keep house and manage a relationship will have to resolve in order to have the time to have a spiritual life.

Frater Barrabbas

Hot Summer Nights - July 2012

So, we are at the threshold of the Dog Days of Summer when the temperature supposedly reaches the highest points for the year. Up here in the Midwestern tundra, summer often has quite a variable of temperature and types of weather. The only month that it has never snowed in Minnesota is July, so that should give you an idea of how variable the weather can be. However, this year, summer came early, and after the deluge of rain that occurred from May through the middle of June, it became extremely hot and humid, with a series of record temperature days being achieved. Thankfully, it did cool down somewhat, but now it’s going back into the extreme levels of temperature recorded earlier.

As far as I am concerned, the climate is certainly demonstrating that extreme weather conditions have now become the norm, due, in no small part, to climate change and the increasing blanket of carbon-dioxide that is covering the earth. While conservative politicians either outrightly deny that climate change is a fact, or they say that it is only an unproven hypothesis, the world is quickly becoming warmer and the weather patterns more extreme. The motivation for this extreme denial of the obvious truth has more to do with short term gain and inherent greed than it has to any open criticism of the scientific process that was used to determine it as fact. Meanwhile, the average folks would rather believe that climate change is a myth or some remote distant future than have to face the fact that the nations of the world need to drastically change their way of acquiring and consuming energy now, since climate change and peak oil are going to have a profound effect on the world whether anyone believes it or not. Facts have a nasty way of intruding on political punditry, but unfortunately the whole world is affected, not just a small minority of wealthy plutocrats.

***

Summer is usually the time when I don’t do much in regards to magical ordeals or major workings. For me, it’s a time for rest and recreation. I feel that the short duration of warm weather up here is best enjoyed by doing things outside wherever possible. For this reason, I am working on getting my grove completely operational, since some of the artifacts that I had built there previously succumbed to the dry rot endemic to a heavily wooded terrain. I have recently installed two new Stangs (one associated with the Underworld or Death, and the other, Life), and I have also developed an outlier shrine to the goddess “Maid of the Woods.” So with these and related tasks completed, I am preparing for some deeper earth-based workings within that space.

How I approach working magick in a grove is quite different than how I do it in my temple. For one thing, I tend to abandon scripts and elaborate ritual workings altogether for more simple and direct kinds of workings. In the next few weeks, I will seek to re-acquire this space for outdoor pagan worship and extemporaneous magical work. Once I am successfully able to get the grove into a fully functional working environment, I am planning some major workings. Yet due to the extemporaneous nature of these workings, I don’t exactly know what I will be doing just yet. However, I will report and edit some material from my journal into this blog so I can share a little bit of what I have experienced.

I am also planning on generating two more fourfold elemental planetary talismans in the month of August. These will be done on the evening of August 22 and 28 while the moon is waxing towards full. The first evening will be dedicated to the planet Jupiter, and the second, nearly six days later, will be dedicated to the planet Venus. Once these operations are completed, I will have six of the seven planets fully covered by 24 of the 28 talismanic elementals. I wasn’t able to schedule a working for Mars, so that will have wait until later in the autumn or in winter. My reason for skipping Mars is because I couldn't find any of the Mars based Lunar mansions available during the waxing moon. I also didn’t want to invest the inverted power of any of those Martial mansions, since that is what happens when the moon begins to wane.(Inverted forces in talismanic magick are often used as curses, generated during the waning lunar cycle.)

The Jupiter working will have to overcome a bit of a delicate obstacle, namely that my elderly father will be visiting during that week. I am planning on consecrating all of the metal disks and the associated sigils well before he arrives, but the actual working will have to be timed after he has retired for the evening. My father has always been a no-nonsense kind of man, and he finds the occult, metaphysics and anything else that is intangible to the five senses to be false and unreal. My father fought me all during my youth, trying to persuade me, sometimes harshly, that occultism was the occupation of crackpots. He is something of an atheist or perhaps an agnostic, so we are quite opposites when it comes to spiritual, occultic or psychic subjects. Needless to say, I want to avoid offending him with my supposed spurious activities, so I will be quiet and discrete, doing my magick while he sleeps. I’ll have to be quiet since the guest bedroom that he will be using is located on the floor directly above the temple.

My ultimate aim is to have all seven fully charged planetary talismans and use them in conjunction for a working later this winter. I was blown away when I combined all four of these talismans in my own version of the Talismanic Portae Lucis working, so I suspect that being able to harness all seven will be quite a powerful experience. I am truly looking forward to it! I have a ritual entitled the “Septagramic Vortex Gate” and I would like to use the seven talismans as potent materialized markers for the points of the spiral vortex gate, which consists of seven nodes (and eight, if you count the point in the center of the circle).

As far as literary works are concerned, I will be starting to fully edit my sixth book that has the title of “A Pagan Magus” sometime in the next couple of months. Right now, the raw text has around 250 pages, so I will need to condense it down and remove some of the more extraneous text. I will need to also determine the illustrations that I need, and then contact my artist friend and see about paying her to produce them. I will also need a cover, too, but by the end of this year, the book should be ready to pitch to a publisher. I might also consider starting my own publishing house and printing the book in that manner. I haven’t made any decisions yet, but I do feel very good about this work. It contains some of the best commentary that I have yet written on the basics of witchcraft based ritual magick. My audience for this book are individuals who have at least mastered the principles of spell craft and basic Pagan or Wiccan liturgies, and who want to work more advanced rituals without having to abandon their already acquired craft.

My mundane job has become extremely busy, but I am thriving amidst all of the work. It would seem that I am once again redefining myself in regards to my career, and that is something that I have periodically done at strategic moments in my many years in IT. I have found that reinventing myself periodically is vitally important, since it is all too easy to get caught up in rut, and then someday become a victim of periodic reductions of force, or RIFs as we call them. I have a great team that I am working with, and I am getting a lot of positive exposure to corporate managers. I feel lucky that I love the kind of work that I do, and therefore, I find it an enjoyable challenge to invent new solutions to ever more complex problems. 

I must admit that I really enjoy writing scripts and then testing them, going through the frustration of debugging them, and then finally experiencing the joy of successfully completing and implementing them. I guess that makes me something of an IT propeller head, but then I was always a bit of nerd from the very beginning. When I was a kid, only scientists programmed giant room-sized computers, and now, I am just one of many millions of humble IT database professionals. I find it very magical when I create something from nothing but obscure lines of code, so my mundane profession fits my more inner personal occult predilection. Anyway, I will complete this large IT project that I am currently working on by the end of the second week of August, and then it will get quiet again. My focus will shift to taking some time off and also getting some additional training in my field. 

So there’s a lot of things on my schedule for the next couple of months, but most of it consists of enjoying the summer. I want to ride my bike on the many bike trails in Minneapolis, go kayaking on the interlocking city lake system, and take a five day drive to the badlands of South Dakota. There’s plenty to do between now and September, and each day I am reminded about how short the summer is, and that the beginning of winter is just a mere 14 weeks away. That is quite a sobering thought indeed! As for the warm weather and slight lack of rain, I am simply adjusting to it. We are not experiencing the kind of drought that the rest of the country is having to deal with, and it isn’t quite as hot as it has been further south. Our garden is growing quite well, and our tomato plants are about to bear the first fruit of the year (besides the strawberries of June). I am looking forward to spending some idyllic time with friends and in the grove, seeking to plumb once again the mysteries of this great and wonderful earth.

Frater Barrabbas