As we wade through the slow grind of summer, through a Mars retrograde which makes everything just that much more difficult to accomplish, I find myself questioning why I would even write.  I like writing.  It isn’t that nothing is exciting anymore, far from it!  It just feels futile, or less important than other things.

I find myself bickering online more often.  This actually works pretty well at sheltering my family from the worst of my inner bitchiness.  I’m not taking things personally, and I can step back from any fight.  I just feel contradictory.

There was a meme of two guys standing around and talking.  One had a t-shirt that read “Revolution Now”.  The other had a t-shirt with “Incremental Change At A Time That’s Convenient” on it.  One guy says to the other “We’re not having much luck either.”  Yeah, I’ll bet.  Change comes on its own timeframe, not yours, and it doesn’t take the form you had envisioned either.

In the Near Term Human Extinction community, a lot of people are stuck in despair.  Granted, a lot of regular people are stuck in despair too.  However, the common phrase bantered around the NTHE community is “Action Is The Antidote To Despair.”  Well, I have to say, no it isn’t.  An enchanted worldview is the antidote to despair.  The two guys standing around with t-shirts should really try “thoughts and prayers” next.  You have no idea how ironic it feels for an ex-atheist to say that we need more thoughts and prayers.

When you can’t act, when your actions are futile and don’t change things, and when you’re stuck, the antidote to despair used by my ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years wasn’t action.  It was magic.  It was all kinds of different magic.  From talking to your ancestors and explaining your grief, your rage at them for not protecting you as they swore to do, to talking to the spirits of place and explaining your disappointment in their care for their places overrun with toxic chemicals, to the good old fashioned cursing of those who clearly need cursing, to the basic warding of your house and family, all of these forms of magic work on your own consciousness.

You know full well how effective confidence is at convincing about a third of the people to go along with your vision without question.  You also know how confidence changes how animals behave towards you, how they can sense whether you intend to harm them or not.  Despair and confidence are opposites.  You know how Derren Brown acts, what his body language conveys, and you know how a mentally defeated person acts, and what their body language conveys.  You know that humans are ritual creatures, and you know that changing your behavior actually comes before changing your mental status in a lot of cases.

If you know that you are going to crash and burn on your present course of action, then you have to fly lower.  Don’t fly towards the sun.  Fly towards the shadows instead.  That means different things to different people, but then, magic is like that.  It never was one right way to read the tarot cards, after all.  It never was one right way to baptize, and it never was one right set of beliefs that are true.