The part of my work I like best is the time I spend talking 1-1 with people and helping them solve the problems of their internal worlds. My coach (I have one too! I’ve had several, actually, and will have more, I’m sure) calls this Technician Time, the time you spend actually Doing The Job.

We’re in the height of summer, and coming up on early august. August 1 is Lúnasa, or Lammas, a holiday celebrating the first day of the harvest season. I take this metaphorically as well as literally - it’s a moment of taking stock of what we’ve grown and created throughout the year since the winter solstice. We can pause, offer thanks and a prayer for a good harvest season, and then dive into reaping the fruits we’ve planted.

This morning I was meditating on my back deck when I realized the greatest peace was coming to me through smell. The air here is thick plant aromas and humidity. I tried to identify particular smells, and the two I could were pine and rain. Mixed in were several other scents, including a valerian-like perfume whose plant I’ve never been able to identify (it’s not actually valerian).

Learning to be vulnerable happens in stages. I can think I’m being vulnerable, even say to myself “this is a vulnerable share” as I speak with a loved one, only to realize later that my mind did something incredible: it kept me from even seeing the vulnerable truth, so that I couldn’t possibly put myself at risk by speaking it aloud.

Here are a couple phrases I’ve been saying / hearing lately: “The world is on fire”, “We just have to keep going”. Makes sense; shit is really scary.

Sometimes it takes going somewhere very different, and doing something very different, to realize how Same you’ve been doing things for a while.

I’m leaving for a trip in a couple days, so this week’s blog and newsletter is fun ~slideshow~ of some recent magical things. Enjoy!

I think judging other people is normal. “That’s not how I would have done it,” we think, watching someone else do it “wrong.” A lot of us harbor a secret belief that we would handle things better than just about everyone around us - even as we closely monitor ourselves for fuckups, because secretly we don’t trust ourselves to do things right. This is a hard way to live, and it’s one I’m actively working on letting go.

You know that feeling where you have so many tasks to track, so many jobs to do, and so many emotional works to work on that it feels like all these things are flying around you, batting at you and clouding your vision, and you cant wrangle them no matter how hard you try?

There’s a moment when I’m talking to someone and I can tell I’d be able to help them cross the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

This week I want to write about joy and how to experience it.

I am a village witch, and what this means to me is that the magic I make and the rituals I share are simple, accessible, and made for everybody. No secret rooms or hierarchies: village witchcraft is by and for the people.

In early April I left on a twelve-day voyage to Italy, where I spent almost every minute in motion: hiking, sight-seeing, listening to audio tours, eating amazing food, talking with my partner, and a thousand other things. It was amazing and stressful and exhausting and expansive.

I returned home six days ago and was immediately smushed into the ground by a feverish cold. Today I am finally beginning to feel like myself again.

We all have times when all is well, and we think we “should” feel happy and good, and still we do not. I am coming out of one of those moments now.

The moon in April is sometimes called the Egg Moon. This time of year brings baby animals, new life bursting out of the ground, out of the trees, in ourselves. This week is going to take a different shape from previous blogs / newsletters: I’m going to walk you through my process of dyeing eggs, along with why I do it this way and how the process itself is magic. This will be a picture-heavy week, so if you love books with lots of pictures in them, this one’s for you.

The spring equinox (tomorrow, March 20, at 5:01am EDT) is a moment of perfect balance between light and dark. Can you feel how this balance comes through without us even trying?

I’ve found myself delightedly broken out of the pattern of pushing and overwhelm that I spoke about in my blog last week. (Oh! As I’m sitting on my porch writing this, my neighborhood barred owls are calling back and forth to each other in the loblolly pine stand across the street.)

I have always gone through times where I am holding too much: started too many projects, committed to too many social engagements, put too many things on the schedule and taken on too many assignments.

There’s a moment during the leap between one thing and the next when we question all our decisions: the new thing isn’t here yet, so what if leaving the old was a terrible mistake? What if I’m not able to complete the new, or it fits even worse than the old?

This week has brought a lot of positive, earth-shifting movement, and along with it, the necessary humility and awareness to make such changes happen. When we grow, we outgrow old skins, and the process of wriggling out of them, or splitting them open to crawl out of them, is . . . honestly, uncomfortable feels like an understatement.