Becoming Thankful for Mabon

On the actual day of Mabon and the fall harvest, as I’m come to view it, I had a wedding out of town back in my hometown not a place I particularly love to frequent in this time frame of my life. The energy shift for me is uncomfortable and unpleasant.  It’s becoming more and more apparent at how sensitive I am becoming to the influence of my environment.  I was so thankful to have this wedding planned at this time, however, I was happy to receive the invite and looking forward to my dreaded ride to my homelands.  Don’t get me wrong, the actual place itself is beautiful and blessed with many natural resources and the small town feels so safe yet less still than what it once did.  kind of like the rest of the world really. A little less safe.  A little more broken people.  People who gave up and in a long time ago.  People you once saw glow barely holding onto a sparkle.  Life having hit them just the same as it hits everyone else.  Each one of them now having experienced more loss and grief than they did in high school.  The star football player and one of the most popular guys in school looks like he experienced more pain in 10 years than some do in 30.  More fortunate than some but a whole lot less fortunate than others.  Kind of the theme for me really, I learned a lot of lessons about gratitude and how it works during this cycle. I typically start these explaining what Mabon is in length and the historical facts and traditional ways of celebrating it and how I chose to celebrate it.  This one though feels different than that, more internal, more personal.  Not able to put the mask over the experience of it.  Don’t get me wrong, I know those things and I played the part.  I decorated the altar and learned all about it but this one wasn’t a surface level experience to celebrate. It was a journey.  It was letting the walls be destroyed and the house be a little exposed to the elements and experiencing the discomfort.  All while testing your ability to give gratitude to your harvest no matter what that harvest appeared to be whether perceived as good or bad.  How can you be grateful for the things in life when they don’t feel like a blessing at all, they feel more like a kick in the face telling you to stop trying to be anything different than what you are.  Stay down, don’t bother.

 I struggled hard to look forward to writing this.  I have loved every step of the way through my healing during this process of celebrating these wiccan holidays. Even during the truly difficult introspection during other celebrations I still relished continuing this exploration, still believing in the possibility that magic could exist, and I truly could write my own destiny.  I could manifest money, success, confidence, emotional stability, weightloss, loving my body, loving to learn, explore, push the boundaries of my comfort zone.  Test the limitations of my intuition.  During this season, however, my bravery to believe any of that was being tested.  It’s easy to believe in magic when everything goes exactly right but the world doesn’t work like that.  The world is a balancing act between one thing and another.  Just as when you shine a light you get a shadow you will also get the feminine energy with the masculine, and you will always have to balance that.  The more aware you can be of what you are putting into each side of the scale the easier it will be to know how to balance it.  If you aren’t looking you are leaving everything in your life a gamble.  Letting everything life has tip the scales for you.  Who cares about piling it on, choose a pile for me.  If my life is full of a bunch of unfair shitty things well then, I guess my life is unfair and shitty nothing I can do about it.  The scary part is that is kind of true there really isn’t a single god damn thing you can do about it.  unfair and shitty things will be brought to the table somehow and some way.  There will always be people and circumstances that really try to buy your copper as brass.  You always have the opportunity though to see the truth to say no thank you I’m knowledgeable and aware that I have copper and can receive the price for copper from another opportunity or individual that knows the true value.  To do that though you have to be able to say no thank you to the brass, which is also better than what you had to begin with and wait just a little longer uncomfortable wondering will the opportunity to sell it as copper ever come if not than I missed out brass would’ve been better than nothing.  These in between places the “waiting places” that Dr. Suess discusses in one of his fine works of historical literacy.  I use the example of metals by the way because my partner hobbies in scrapping and I support this because reduce, reuse, recycle. 

I guess what I’m getting at in all my heavy sappy metaphor bullshit is life will always challenge you this tik tok I saw was a guy demonstrating that the fall is inevitable it isn’t a matter of if you will fall rather than when you fall. He would fall randomly and everytime his friends would catch him and he said you will fall but you may not always hit and that spoke volumes to me.   Your loved ones will die and challenge you.  You will go through break ups.  You will lose your job.  No amount of magic will ever be able to stop these things from happening.  As much as the magic would be awesome.  Magic to bring people back to life.  Heal all physical ailments. Poof a magic wand and you never have to hurt again it doesn’t exist.  I wish it did too.  Kind of.  Kind of not. If those things didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to learn or even know about it and the complexity of what human mental awareness can hold.  How much emotional depth a human can feel.  Why are we so aware of our own deaths both mental and physical.  Why are we doomed to replay memories of our worst experiences again and again some of us more so than others.  Why are we destined to experience poverty and lack.  You must see it to change it.  You must see all the shit being brought to your table and decide is it worth adding this to my already getting heavy side.  What will it cost me? How out of balance will I be if I take it on.  You must really be willing to sit in the waiting room for something different.  Me myself, I’ve never been that patient in the waiting room. I’m scared I won’t have enough good to combat the bad so I will take whatever crumb of good I can.  I’m aware that eating this will have 2 points to my bad scale later it will bring with it guilt and shame. Disappointment in my perceived health goals completely put there by my own mind to bully me into accepting that offer.  You’re getting low on dopamine babe don’t you want a small hit of it right now?  really help ground you and make you feel better.  A lot of bad is piling up on you don’t you want the stress and anxiety relief of this cigarette you will cough and sweat and struggle to breathe in the night and interrupt your sleep but isn’t it worth it right now.  See this is what I refer to as my paternal family curse accept most of them had the demons that are known as drugs selling them on shit packaging it up as a way out when it was a door even further down the dark side of the scales.  I’m unfortunate to have this sure but way more fortunate than others to have never sold to that customer thankfully because of my dad and his broken-down pawn shop of terrible valueless items, I was a little more careful than that.  Not even close to as careful as I should’ve been.  More careful than some others will even get the chance to be.  See some will get lives that no matter how hard they try to keep it out the garbage will flow in, and it will reach there scales and they will feel like its going to be impossible to get all of it out.  You are never going to wave a wand and clean your shop immediately out of all the crap life forced onto you.  However, you can make some friends.  Have a yard sale.  Give things a way.  Tell someone about the item you have and how it’s too much to put on the scale and see if they take it because their scales are a little more balanced and when the wheel circles back and you notice they have more than they can manage you might take some of the inventory off their hands.  Have faith in the magic that if you experience a shit deal ( because you absolutely will) that you will have lived authentically, kindly, as balanced as you could muster, you focus on your own scale as much as you could and have helped so many people tip their scales that you have a whole tribe that will catch you WHEN you fall. Somehow you will look back and be grateful and thankful for the sole thought that you never hit the ground.  You are still breathing and still experiencing and collecting and that alone is a whole lot to be grateful for.   

So, I could’ve come on here and said Hey you guys are right I’m crazy and delusional and there is no such thing as magic.  I made a money bowl and now my partner is off work for 6 weeks with no pay other than enough to cover child support.  The crappy house we are buying because it is affordable after all the financial recovery we had to do after his brain surgery and lawyer fees. The shit hole is literally a shit hole as there is a hole in the septic that will cost almost half the price of the house to fix.  We spent days in the hospital because suddenly one day my 3-year-old woke from bed and couldn’t walk. His knee swelled with pain. My partner’s very first week back to work and he misses two more days.  All that magic and manifesting for my birthday and look what I manifested.  I had to drop out of school because I couldn’t afford to pay the $3000 dollars, I owe for a class I wasn’t aware was going to go over my financial aid.  Aid that I would have to take more of also even though I couldn’t find an internship and wasn’t likely to so I will owe more and likely never make enough.  I was going to add a whole lot of bad.   However, I was pleasantly surprised when the veil lifted because yeah, all these things were true.  I have no idea how I am going to make money and be successful enough to give my family the life they need right now.  Things look bleak, they are hard.  Not impossible.  The answer to all my prayers can be as easy as the right valuable item walking through my door and putting it on the table and in the meantime, I can find value in what my shop does have that others don’t. How to take what I do have and make small sales in the meantime. See the blessings and opportunities not the impossible pile of shit but first just see the scale at all. How often am I deciding on the sale exchange and whether to accept it. 

I thought I should write this before going up for the wedding knowing I won’t be able to on the day of Mabon and I could still post it on the right day if I just did it beforehand. However, I simply didn’t want to. I had a long hard week and personally didn’t really feel to magically blessed at the moment and that’s because I was waiting for the clarity, I would get on the long car ride home.  I would think not of how awful it is that my son spent days in the hospital and now we must somehow afford his expensive treatments to ensure no lifelong effects to his overall health but rather that there was an expense to be paid to make him better.   While in the hospital we saw a few children there where it simply wasn’t possible for those parents to pay for an expensive doctor to make their babies pain go away, they didn’t even have the option too and wouldn’t they love to skip a bill to make them better.  We are so much less fortunate than some in times but still more fortunate than others.  We must learn to be grateful for the smallest of wins because it is still something more valuable that found its way to your door that is improving something in your life.  your savings account that was supposed to buy you the house and allow you the repairs.  The one that made you feel comfortable enough to buy vacation tickets back in the spring because you were doing alright finally and felt you deserved to let yourself have that experience.  it’s important for you and valuable experiences with your mother a woman who you are never promised a day with.  Don’t you want to worry more about those days with your mom than a literal fucking shithole in your shit tank. Say okay fine, that savings account didn’t buy us the new house, but it bought us food during a difficult time when some wouldn’t get the luxury of having that net there to catch them at all. There is always a light within the dark, sometimes it’s just small and difficult to find. 

In conclusion, I may have stared at my vision board and cried because this life isn’t at all like the pictures, but I also smiled at the idea that some of those things I wouldn’t even want anymore because I found so much enjoyment in how I made it instead with what I was given.  It’s funny me and my partner play Diablo IV it’s a video game and it’s kind of just like that.  you search for items with certain ones in mind, you want it to have certain aspects that have the best values to your build or in personal case your character but sometimes finding those items will take a lot of time and hardwork but in the meantime you’ll find pretty decent items to help you out along the way make it a little bit easier. I don’t know I guess I may be delusional or gullible (shit most gullible according to my high school class)  but I’m still going to believe in magic because I still feel like without it I wouldn’t have gone through the things I am recently and still feel incredibly fortunate for all that I’ve manifested through it the laughs, the family support, the amazing therapist, the new friend who lets me talk with her about all my witchy stuff, the preparing to go on this amazing cruise that perhaps I shouldn’t have splurged on but I already did so might as well be thankful for it.  I have manifested things that people could only dream of.  My health.  My beauty.  My ability to write these words. My children. My roof over my head.  The people who catch me every time no matter what.so so much more.  I manifested a lot of bullshit that doesn’t look like magic at all, but I’ve also manifested a whole lot of good shit that made it so when that came flooding through my door it couldn’t even begin to tip my scale. There was no room for it.  I wouldn’t let it go because I was so comfortable waiting for it to end and knowing that it would because I had manifested all the right people and events that are going to bring it in. I have created magic all around me and I am seeing it clearly.  I know that the scales are heavily tipped in the light, and I am perfectly balanced and have extra if I need to pile any on to combat what is being thrown my way.  I simply know that one day a truly unbelievable item will come through that door and make the loss of all these other items seem so insignificant.  Until then I am willing to feel uncomfortable. I am willing to truly enjoy what items I already have.   I have so much magic when I truly look at it and now that I’m looking for it I can’t unsee it.  kind of like when you hear a word for the first time and now it’s everywhere.  So incaseyougiveash*t I almost went back to normal but I’m still a crazy witch!