Skryclad: Clothed In Visions

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Patience & Fury, Part 3

 

This is the third of a series of blog posts on how to move more gracefully through the turbulence of current events in the world. Each post can stand alone, and the order does not matter, but I suggest reading the whole series as they support each other. I am calling this series “patience and fury” though other words are just as applicable. This is the last in this series so let’s add “pertinacity and indolence”,“action and reaction” and “focused and frazzled”.

 

It is easy to to be pulled in many directions when so many things in the world seem to be in great need of attention. It is easy to be pulled in many directions, and often off the rails, because someone, somewhere on the internet, is espousing something that is terribly wrong-headed, and you feel called upon to respond. Perhaps you’ve been following the news and you are overcharged or drained by your reactions to it. Or maybe you attended a rally, a committee meeting, a difficult encounter with your family of choice, etc. and find yourself trapped between the hope and dread of when and if. The number of tasks, projects, and issues that are both important and urgent to me generally exceed my capacity to prioritize, and I suspect that the same is true for many people reading this post. This is not a recipe for effectiveness or contentment.

 

I have grudgingly admitted to myself that I cannot do everything. I am at the point of where I concede that I don't have the vision and wisdom to sort through and create a plan for the best use of my time and efforts. What I try to do, which may or may not be useful for you, is to pick and to persist. It is more important to actually accomplish a few things than to have made a valiant and/or deluded effort at many. Having already decided that all the things on my list matter to me, then picking a few and persisting with them until I finish them or I can pass the torch to someone else is the true measure of what I can do rather than what I wish I could. Some of my picks have been chosen by intellect, others by gut instinct, and others at the behest of people I trust. Don’t waste time and effort on adjudicating whether your head, your heart, the Divine, or your loved ones give you the best insight. Pondering this question is just avoiding the choices.

 

Once you’ve picked, the first stumbling block, or is it more a bungie cord attached to old habits of thought, is doing the part that excites us first. Passion is an excellent thing, but it is will that keeps us moving as passion recharges. Here’s a quote about a practice that helps to strengthen the will:

 

Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

- Mark Twain from Following the Equator

 

It has been my experience that over time the tasks that I found most burdensome became less so, and in some cases were transformed into emotional momentum as they were done.

 

 

One of the other obstacles I have experienced and frequently observe is an Alice in Wonderland shifting sense of scale that can make you feel too small or too large for the tasks at hand. There will always be people and powers that are larger or smaller than you, and the meaning of size is always relative and contextual. Feeling too small may encourage you to give up and feeling too large may encourage you to do what you cannot. Long ago, Archimedes of Syracuse proved that size doesn’t matter, though persistence does. 

 

There are many variations on Archimedes’ quote that if he had a solid place to stand upon, a fulcrum, and a long enough lever he could move the world. There is a way to apply this idea in the context of this post. You are the solid place wherein you stand. The fulcrum is your understanding and approach to the task at hand. The long enough lever is your persistence of effort over time. The magick of persistence is that it multiplies your efforts through time and space. Your journey through life while applying yourself converts the arc of your journey into a motion that affects the world. Through persistence your magnitude becomes equal to things that appeared much larger than you. The larger the change, and its scope, the more time it will take. You may have to push the lever for miles to see an inch of change. In some cases you’ll have to pass on the grip of the lever to others that come after you. And be mindful that in this kind of magick, many of us can work without getting in each other’s way. There is plenty of room for more levers.

 

To be fair to Archimedes and to give you something to ponder on, here is his less colorful and more exact statement on fulcrums and levers:

 

Magnitudes are in equilibrium at distances reciprocally proportional to their weights.

- Archimedes of Syracuse from On the Equilibrium of Planes

 

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Ivo Domínguez, Jr. is a visionary, and a practitioner of a variety of esoteric disciplines who has been active in Wicca and the Pagan community since 1978. He serves as one of the Elders of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, a Wiccan syncretic tradition that draws inspiration from Astrology, Qabala, the Western Magickal Tradition and the folk religions of Europe. He is the author of Keys to Perception: A Practical Guide to Psychic Development, Practical Astrology for Witches and Pagans, Casting Sacred Space: The Core Of All Magickal Work; Spirit Speak: Knowing and Understanding Spirit Guides, Ancestors, Ghosts, Angels, and the Divine; Beneath the Skins with other books in the pipeline as well.

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