I often think about the messages I’d give my younger self: things I’d wish I’d known, lessons and wise advice, warnings and reassurance. Sometimes I even do the work of magically sending those messages, which is always powerful, but takes (for me at least) a certain challenging mindset and a lot of effort. I save it for the big stuff like healing childhood wounds.
What I don’t much think about is getting messages FROM my past self.
I’ve been doing a lot of background work on the site lately. Arranging interviews, working on a new course, making plans for a site refresh, and getting ready to kick off some new projects. I need to get this done because sometime in the next month I need to start the 2025 refresh of the giant astro-timing spreadsheet that backs the monthly planner. All this effort means that the blog has been languishing, and I’ve been a little stuck on what to write. When this happens, I go through my drafts folder and look for posts that I started and then never completed. I’ll finish them or change them, but regardless it gives me a starting point on that blank-white-page block that writers sometimes get.
Today though, when I opened up a random old draft post, I got a pointed and timely message from my past self (Ivy of 2015 to be exact, and that’s a very old post indeed). This message was not only relevant to my current life, but also included some passing references to a September supermoon Lunar eclipse. I started that post in late September of 2015 and here I am, almost exactly 9 years later, heading into another supermoon Lunar eclipse. So yes, I just received a message from past Ivy, delivered exactly when needed, and aligned with equinox / eclipse timing to a weird degree. Of course the eclipses are in different signs, but it was enough of a parallel to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It reminded me of a much more recent draft post called Arrows through Time where I’d started to try to talk about messages to and from my past self… and so here we are.
When I talk about living an enchanted life, this is what I’m talking about. It’s not just doing a lot of spells or having strong intuition or incubating symbolic dreams. It’s about living, at least partially, in this liminal flow state where strange things happen to and with you. It’s about not having to look weird or talk weird to just be weird. It’s about the deep realization that the world that we’re all mostly wandering around and living in is a paper-thin skin on the surface of an infinitely deep maelstrom of symbolic resonance and cyclical reoccurrence and relational connection and alive awareness. It’s jewel bright and pitch black and when you look at it, it absolutely looks back at you. It’s EVERYTHING and NOTHING and BOTH and the view you get through the cracks of our skin-surface world is like the Double Slit Experiment for magic.
So what does 2015 Ivy think about this?
“…it feels magical and wyrde and wonderful and terrible. It’s almost painful to have to think of the practical and day-to-day, of logistics and project management and organization (not to mention work and laundry and groceries).
But this is why you have to have your house in order and your shit together. Why you have to have your goals stated and your plans made. All of that is groundwork so that when the stars align, the universal weather is right, and the energy of the land is at your fingertips… you are ready.
…
Any moderately skilled witch, sorcerer, or magician can raise some power and direct it. And if you aren’t there yet, there are 1000 books that can get you there. But how do you manifest that into the world? And if that’s not the goal, how do you keep your real life running while you do your great work?
These aren’t academic questions. The world is a particularly unforgiving place right now. It takes real effort to make sure that you have a safe and secure place for yourself and your family (by the broadest definition of family, natch). If you have magical tools at your disposal, why wouldn’t you use them?
At the same time, if you have larger goals for your magic, you equally need to be organized and directed and goal oriented. In a time and place where all things are permitted, magical living has never been more difficult. Persecution implies belief. But in the modern world, we aren’t burned but commercialized, commoditized, humorized. If you want to do serious magic, you have to take your magic seriously.
Seneca the Younger said: “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” You can say the same about magic. Magic happens where your preparation and planning meets the opportunity (the right alignment, the right day, the right event, the right synchronicity). All the pieces come together, all the sigils activated, all the offerings to spirits paying off.
When things are at their weirdest, that’s when your practical planning is the most needed.”
