Are you on the "right path?" Am I?
A back to school special + Don't forget your offering for Hecate tonight.
Inside: An update of my first week back at school/UCLA; a discussion about dealing with uncertainty for anyone who’s not sure they’re “on the right path”; plus Hecate’s dark moon ritual reminder; and an update about the upcoming New Moon in Libra ritual.
Recently during a Zoom meeting for the class I’m TA-ing this quarter (Aliens, Psychics, and Ghosts), one of my fellow TA’s texted me to ask if I was angry with the professor.
I guess I’d been scowling.
In fact, I wasn’t scowling at the professor but at the workload for the class.
As the professor described the lengthy list of tasks the teaching assistantship would include, I felt a mounting sense of dread. As if the flood water that had been rising over the summer, as I drew closer and closer to the beginning of the school year, was finally seeping into my mouth and nose.
For those of you who are new to Mystery Cult, last year I went back to school to get my PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA.
Making the decision to go back to school was a difficult one that I’d put off since completing MFA program(s) at Cal Arts nearly 20 years ago.
I’m not at the beginning of my career; I have a successful business — and as anyone who runs their own business knows – self-employment is more than a full time job. It’s an all-the-time job.
Unlike most PhD students, I didn’t go back to school because I want to become a college professor.
I don’t thrive in institutional settings and I don’t like competing, which pretty much rules me out for academia.
Besides, getting a degree in Culture and Performance doesn’t exactly put one on a straightforward “professional” career path.
TBH, I’m not sure why I decided to do this to myself. I guess you could call my decision to get a PhD an “intuitive” one.
During the last school year, I did course work in myth and ritual; theories of corporeality, theories of culture, and theories of performance (which itself includes ritual, gender, language, philosophy, etc.); research methodologies; Indigenous studies, immigrant studies, and more I’m forgetting now.
Loving to learn, as I’m sure most of you do, is enough of a reason to get a degree of course.
And, in my first year of the program, I’ve been exposed to many things I hadn’t even vaguely considered before.
My way of thinking is undergoing a process of total reformation. That’s a big deal.
However, if my mood is any judge, I’m currently in the part of the process where the caterpillar goes into the cocoon and turns into spittle.
Getting a PhD has taken a tremendous toll on every aspect of my life: my health, my relationships, my business, my finances…
…and while I know a lot more than I did at this time last year, I haven’t really been able to share what I’ve learned with all of you because…
…much of what I’ve learned is so complex and nuanced that it doesn’t fit into the newsletter system I’ve created for myself.
And besides, I haven’t really even had time to process it yet myself.
I’m just having to operate in faith that somehow the work I’m doing at UCLA is filtering into all my other work.
(The video above is from my first week of school last year. I miss my long hair).
My romantic relationship was not able to survive my first year of school, for many reasons, but the main one being that I have no time.
No time for resting, chilling, having fun, nor most of the other beautiful things that relationships require. Barely any time for sleeping, exercising, or eating anything but food in the school cafeteria.
[Insert a paragraph of caveats regarding the privilege of going back to school, or even having a school in a time of scholasticide; the privilege of having health to lose in the first place, or having a job I love that requires my full time attention. Boo hoo. I know I’m lucky/privileged. And I do feel grateful, but this essay isn’t about that].
The point of this essay isn’t really to complain about the challenges of going back to school, even though y’all are always very supportive, and bring me lots of comfort…
… really, what I want to talk about with you here is how we navigate periods of deep uncertainty.
We all have them.
As an oracle and witch, people often find their way into my witch’s office (lair?) because they’re “seeking clarity.” They want to know they’re on the right path.
As a public witch, I feel that part of my role is to participate in the discourse around what “We” as a collective – we witches, we humans, we who live on Turtle Island, we who care about the earth and her creatures – are supposed to do to muddle through the ongoing collective crisis we find ourselves in.
We are collectively “seeking clarity,” and oracles are supposed to help “us” find it — though I suppose historically they do so by posing riddles that are just as complex as the problems they attempt to solve.
Currently, I find myself confronted by my own riddle: “What am I doing here?”
“Why am I doing this to myself? Going back to school has been so difficult, even painful, and nobody cares if I do it or not, so why am I doing it?”
Sharing this personal riddle with my dear friend, Jade, she sagely said:
“I think you just like to do hard things.”
Friends, I felt seen.
That was the truest thing any friend had ever observed to me. But, I wonder if the same is also true of humanity in general?
Like, do we humans just like to do hard things?
We give birth to children
We raise those children
We build pyramids and suspension bridges
We wage wars and build peace
We go on silent meditation retreats and walkabouts
We get married, get divorced, recover from trauma and addiction
We write books and suffer decades of illness and/or creative barrenness
We move across country and across oceans and hostile borders
We work in factories, farms, cubicles, hospitals, battlefields
We watch our homes get destroyed by hurricanes, bombs, and the police
We get PhDs, we sit in our cubicles wondering if we should get PhDsWe rarely know if we’re “on the right path” as we do these things, or even if there is a right path to be on.
We often find ourselves wandering vague moors split with crisscrossing paths that could be deer trails or tiger tracks, pros and cons. Or both at once.
In my private sessions with clients seeking clarity I often find myself asking, “and if you had this clarity, what would it enable you to do that you can’t do now?”
Usually, the answer is something to the effect of, “it would enable me to move forward with confidence.”
Of course as adults, we (you, me, my clients, my readers) all know two things:
Confidence doesn’t equal correctness. The SCOTUS confidently overturned Roe v. Wade. Israel just confidently bombed Lebanon and Yemen and is confidently committing genocide in Gaza.
And also, confidence of the more positive variety usually emerges through repeated failure and consistent practice, rather than “feeling like you’ve got it right” or “feeling clear” about what you’re doing.
Which brings me back to our theme for Libra Season in this month’s Witch Guide: Finding Balance.
Finding balance really means: finding center or cultivating core strength.
In dance, core strength is something that allows the dancer to visit, and even enjoy, positions that would normally make a person fall.
To have good balance (core strength) requires attentive, repetitive discomfort.
Right now, I’m in physical therapy for lower back pain.
My main restorative exercise is going from sitting on a chair to standing and back again, on one leg, 30x per day. Every day. It’s not Swan Lake, friends.
In other words, it’s not big grand gestures that give us the core strength we need to endure (and thrive) in times of uncertainty.
Balance comes from small, consistent, and initially uncomfortable, habits that we repeat on a daily basis until we don’t notice they’re hard anymore.
If we think of witchcraft as a “spiritual” practice, what does it mean to strengthen our spiritual core through witchcraft?
For me it means practicing staying with the daily discomfort of uncertainty until I can move through my life like a dancer, with joy and grace.
Even and especially in the hard parts.
Tomorrow I will be dropping the follow along New Moon in Libra Ritual for my subscribers, designed to help us practice discomfort enough to enjoy it, gracefully.
In the meantime, tonight is the dark moon. You can create a space for balance to enter your life by clearing off your altar and offering any ashes or dust to Hecate at the crossroads tonight with a silver coin.
May Hecate guide us to choose the path of balance. May uncertainty bring us closer together, may our practice build in us a strong core of creativity, community, and care.
Uncomfortably Yours in Joy and Grace,
Amanda