Hi, I’m Ivy…
Mission:
Organizing Enchantment, at Home and in the World
Values:
Competence
What you do, do it well
Creativity
Creating in the world is creating the world
Connection
All things are stronger in relation
You can’t fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.
~Douglas Coupland
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
~William Plomer
Vision:
Pirate the tools of the corporatocracy
to help us follow our hearts and manifest our dreams
to create the better world
(our hearts know is possible)
Magic is where it started and it started early. My first word was “moon.” My first working was in early grade school, blessing the puddles after a rain. I played Bewitched like other kids played house. As an older schoolgirl I obsessed over ancient alphabets – particularly those that had numerical equivalents (like ancient Greek and Hebrew). I made secret codes and tried to write in them. I was captivated by all things Fortean: UFOs (particularly abduction narratives), psychic powers, cryptids, Atlantis, fairies, and so on. In class, I made obsessively detailed moon phase charts. As a pre-teen I discovered the Farmer’s Almanac. I was not a popular kid.
One of the defining moments of my life was finding a copy of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot in the library when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t have access to a deck yet (this was before widespread access to the Internet), but I made due with a pack of playing cards and photocopied the pictures to stare at under the covers at night. When I was 14, I found a copy of Whitley Streiber’s Cat Magic in a used bookstore. This changed everything for me.
In the front of the book, at the end of the introduction, Streiber included this note: “To learn more about the “old religion,” the reader is invited to write Circle Wicca, Box 219, Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, 53572.” For the first time I realized that I didn’t have to pretend to be a witch; I could actually be one.
I snail-mailed a gushing fan letter and received a kind note and a fat catalog. I ordered my first deck, the very yellow Waite-Smith, and never looked back. I read for all my friends as well as myself and made paintings of the cards on glass. (It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I learned that my maternal grandmother read fortunes with a pack of Tarocchi cards.)
During university, I traded my Rider Waite in for the Eclectic Tarot (which has the most beautiful Death card). My currently ‘working’ deck is the Gilded Tarot, which I have owned since approximately 2005. We live in a time of huge blossoming of cartomancy decks and I own my fair share. But the Gilded Tarot is a dear old friend and I use it with my clients almost exclusively.
Thanks to a weird little used bookstore I haunted during my first year of community college, other early influences included Cavendish’s The Black Arts and the Wilhelm / Baynes translation of The I Ching. My university library and a local occult shop in the slightly-less-small town where I went to school also expanded my horizons. Material on magic and esoteric religions was becoming more common and available.
The other thing I discovered in College was that my normal state of procrastination + chaos was not sufficient to keep my act together. I read everything I could get my hands on about being more organized, just for the sake of self-preservation. I started creating my own planner pages, printing and trimming them in the computer lab where I worked part time writing user’s manuals for linguistic analysis software. I managed to graduate with a degree in English Literature (focus on William Blake) and became a technical writer.
Working in the software industry gave me early exposure to Agile and Scrum. I segued from tech writing to usability design, and then slid sideways into my first project management job in 2007. I got my first Agile certification in 2009. I began to integrate enchantment and project management, simply because those were the things I spent the most time on outside of my family. What I discovered was that combining them made them both much more powerful and effective.
I started the Circle Thrice blog in 2015, mainly because I got tired of leaving really long comments on the Rune Soup blog. I started offering tarot readings based on the Black Swan a year or so later. I’m an OG member of Gordon’s Rune Soup premium membership, and credit him with my introduction to the Hygromanteia and lunar days. I also credit him with making my life more enchanted, more coherent, and more connected and for creating something beautiful in the world, which I have greatly benefited from – highly, highly recommended. I’d been keeping a bullet journal for both magic and mundane tracking for a few years, and the information I gained from his early courses was hugely beneficial.
In the summer of 2020, I turned my “bullet ephemeris” into a digital planner that I could print, and began offering it to others on Patreon. This became the Inner Circle membership I currently offer. That same summer I received a cancer diagnosis and went through the process of treatment and healing until the follow spring. That initiatory experience inspired me to write The Cancer Grimoire – the work I am most proud of. (You know, looking back, that was kind of a big and busy year for me.)
Today I still work as a professional program manager, run Circle Thrice, and do lots of magic. I live in the Pacific Northwest where I am blessed with a network of magical weirdos (love you!). I strive always to be good at what I do, to keep learning, and to make things that help make the world a bit better. Living my values means living my best life.
I love to talk about project planning and magic!
Another livestream! Had a great chat with Miguel and Vance. We talked a lot about the Cancer Grimoire and incorporating magic into the rest of your life.
Cancer Grimoire as well as how to get started using magic to create a more enchanted life. My interview starts about 30 minutes into the episode.
Really great chat about staying agile, magical goal setting and planning, and a deep dive into the Cancer Grimoire.
Powerful conversation about magic and healing and how we navigate our health.
Enchantment targets, agile enchantment, composting what you don’t want, and septic tank magic!
Podcast with Zamboni and Brian Wilkins about values, desire, magic, and planning. I rudely call Zamboni a hedonist like it’s a bad thing and we just have a great chat!
A truly moving conversation about fate and free-will when it comes to serious health diagnoses, knowing what you can and can’t control, and asking for help when you need it.
Powerful conversation about experiencing chemo through the lens of Witchcraft, walking the poison path to healing, and asking for help and leveraging networks when you need to.
Thrilled to be back on Rune Soup to chat with my friend Gordon about The Cancer Grimoire. This is a deep talk about approaching a medical crisis as an initiatory experience, the power of network effects for healing, and getting the best from a combination of Western medicine and non-materialist healing by apply an enchanted worldview.
Lovely chat about the Lunation Rite, Agile Magic, and how Project Planning and magic work together.
On being “path agnostic,” my tarot history, including the story of my evil, evil tarot deck and using the tarot for darker magic, practicing the Deipnon for Hekate and why you don’t look back.
Magic mirrors and getting immortal — or what happens when you stop pretending to be a witch and just are one, rolling with change instead of fighting against it by making your life and magic more agile.
Why Agile is THE method for organizing your life and your magic in these uncertain times, setting goals when you have no idea what you actually want to accomplish, and experimenting wildly and failing fast in order to meet even the mushiest sounding goals.
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