The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft

When you know you don't know everything,' he says, 'you keep learning. And there's always more to learn. That would be my higher level of advice. Learn everything, study everything. Regard everybody as a potential teacher. When you are the smartest one in the room, you can get really contemptuous of other people. But at some point, you realize there are lots of other criteria by which people may excel. Somebody may be incredibly talented at music or art, or absolutely astonishing at human relationships or something else. We have to give credit to all these things as values. You shouldn't think, "Well, I'm better than everybody else because I'm good at this one thing." Humility can allow you to put what you've got into service and understand that that's our function.

It occurs to me that the energy in my body is the same as the energy in the red power lights, just a different current. What’s inside the office lights is inside me. It’s also what’s in the stars a million miles away. The water in my blood is the same stuff rushing in the creek next to me. The wind that is outside of me is also inside of me. I pull it in and push it out; it is the same breath being used by the frogs, the birds, the people breaking into cars downtown, pumping through the HVAC systems of the condos down the road. I pick up my hand and stare at it, thick, heavy, cold. I am earth. This is earth. I am the dirt I am walking on. I am conscious earth. They are here all the time. Something, finally, clicks. Bliss floods me, like a drug, like a wave. I take a great, heaving breath. All the atoms in my body remember what it was like to be inside the core of a star right before it went supernova. Before I know it, I am staring at my hand, crying. I am crying because my hand is a miracle. It’s like I have never seen it before. My hand is all five elements made flesh. I am a miracle. Everything is a fucking miracle. It is urgent. It is overwhelming.

...guilt is like fuel. Sitting by itself, it is useless and dangerous. Put it to action, and it is power.

I don't know how many times [I chant], but at a certain point, I notice my mood shift, as if I had been briefly meditating. I have been told that this sensation--this certainty that settles over your brain and body--means your spell has worked, that you have successfully shifted the cosmos to your will.

What I also realized, somewhere along the way, is that guilt is like fuel. It's useless and dangerous sitting alone by itself. Put into action, and it is power.

There is no correct way to do this, to do any of this, Diana. That's not the point of Witchcraft. You do it your way, the way you're inspired to. That's what makes it powerful. Haven't you learned that yet?

The real question for me becomes: What is a practice, and what is a religion? A practice is a living thing. I feel like religion in some ways--and I hate to say it--is dead. It's dead because it's not evolving. Religion implies an agreed-upon creed, and somebody is in charge. If you're doing something because someone told you that's how it's supposed to be done, but it doesn't feel good to you, then you're still being led by someone else versus being led by your own self-direction and standing in your own power of growth, intelligence, understanding, and compassion. And that's what a spiritual practice is. It's self-directed.

The history will never be perfect, and we’ll never know what really happened or how people really used to practice magic. No one will ever agree on these things. So I’m trying not to see Witchcraft as a path home to the past. Not anymore. I think it might actually be a path to the future.