Everyday Life

We recently had a household shakeup, with one member leaving. Everyone is doing all right, so that's not what this is about. What this is about is the hard or boring tasks we have to do every day and how they fit into our spiritual side - and maybe there will be another post on why these "sides" are separate.

I did not take before pictures. The sight of the pantry in all its tremendous disorganization is burned into my mind anyway, and I wanted no reminders to look back on. I would open that door every day to find something (or not), and it would bum me out - not only was the person who was supposed to be the Pantry Keeper gone from the house, but the pantry remained as un-kept as the day they left! I would grumple about it to myself, and then eat my whatever I had found and wash the dishes and repeat the process next time I was hungry. This is called "a rut" and I was in it!

Yesterday I got the impulse to clean it. Just. Clean it all and not stop until I had done it. Not half-done it, not good enoughed it, but Done It.

It took hours (four episodes of Supernatural played through in the background). And now it is Done. Clean. I'm very proud that what I had hoped would happen over the last few years had actually happened - because I Did It.

Sitting afterward and eating the cornbread I'd made with the almost-expired mix I'd found, I thought about all of this. How I had waited so long for someone to take action. How it ultimately fell to me, and how I did it and now it is done. Wishing for something, casting spells for something, hoping for something - this is all fine. But doing something, the work, to make it happen is where the magic really is. I took my intention to that pantry.

"This feels like a Frigga moment," I thought. I ushered the pets out of the room (incense is not always good for them), and cleaned up the altar and made a ritual for Frigga. Here is my loose prayer (loose because it was on the spot, as most of my rituals are):

Thank you, Frigga, for the strength and determination to make my home better. Thank you for helping me make this a good place for Childe and me to be - safe, calm, clean. Thank you for that rush of energy, for helping me focus my intention and turn it into action. Thank you.

It may sound boring. So you cleaned a pantry with your own two hands, BFD, it's not like to twitched your nose and it got done, you know, magically. Magic, though, is not a toy - some kind of mystical roomba that comes out at our bidding to clean up the messes so we don't have to.

Magic is many things. One of them is the meeting of intentions even when it's literally a chore. Magic is calling on your inner resources and meeting your needs. Magic happens every day. We make it happen.