Practical Magic

Writing at the intersection of naptime and the scorpio new moon.

Hello friend,

I made a joke a few weeks ago that for every good week, there are six rough ones to follow. Keeps ya humble, on your toes, you know. I said it cheekily but it’s shaping up to be true.

I’ll spare you all of the reasons why and leave the woeful details to my morning pages. I only have the length of a two-hour nap and I’m hoping for some of it to be dedicated to my annual viewing of Practical Magic.

This rut I’ve been trying to claw out of for a few years now may be offering me an opening rather than an ending. I was heartbroken when I felt forced to quit my job a couple of years ago but now that’s it been some time away from who that version of me was, I’m beginning to wonder if that needed to happen for a new path to open to me. Maybe all of these things I’ve identified with for so long — career, relationships, mindsets — needed to be cleared away so I can grab hold of a writing life as Nikki Gemmell writes in Dissolve.

Or maybe it’s how Anne Lamott says, “Other than writing, I’m completely unemployable.”

While I do not consider myself an academically-esteemed writer, or even a very good one at the frazzled moment, I can’t not write. It was just easier when things were, well, easier.

Golden, amber, and ochre hues of leaves drift to the ground around me. I will never see this exact leaf again. There will never be a duplicate budding, resting, dancing from the limb of a maple again in this lifetime. It is like that with people too; our loved ones, our pets, our soulmates, and people we see in town.

It’s deeply somber mixed with the joy that we are here to witness the final flash of harvest celebration. Two dichotomous emotions share the same chair. Death and birth. Grief and love. They weave in and out, they are friends. It is not divisive. It is nature.

Trees, especially in Autumn, are a good metaphor for how beauty is so fleeting. They will come back after a season of dormancy but they will not be the same. Fallen leaves before spring buds are connected by way of compost now feeding the roots. It’s void of mysticism—the logic of how trees cycle—and it is all mysticism when you stomp through the fallen crispness. A scent that will send you to the depths if you let it, and may you, see where it leads. Practical magic.

Despite my whining about how I have no time to myself anymore, how life with a two-year-old Gemini is a constant state of breakneck speed whiplash for this steady, systematic, glacial pace Mama, how I don’t know if I’ll ever have momentum in my career again (& do I even want it?) — I do think it will make sense someday. The spell may be for me to relinquish. And maybe just chill the fuck out.

The seed of the new is in the shell of the old.
— Susan Lipshutz Scorpio New Moon reading

I can’t wait around for the perfect moment to write what is clawing to get out. I can’t wait for when everyone understands me better, when I’m mad at fewer people, or when the child(ren) is grown, to say what feels inherent. My soul will dry up. It already has, you should see the wrinkles! and the thick coat of lotion I now have to apply for dehydration. Drink water you say? That would be too easy and get in the way of all my other more fun drinks.

I suppose I’ve droned on like the person I am these days. It feels good to ramble from an inner rhythm for a few moments before I’m back to saying, “I understand that might make you upset but you can’t have skittles for the fifth snack in a row,” before a slew of tears and tantrums commence.

Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with.
— Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

Don’t worry about me though.

My knight in sweatshirt armor will be home shortly. He will drive away in the SUV, bringing the Queen to her desired playground palace soon enough and this wornout damsel will lay on the broken couch saving images of homes she will not live in, well-tailored yet relaxed fits she cannot afford wearing to her secret Pinterest boards as Gilmore Girls reruns play in the background. A true connoisseur of inspiration and comfort television.

I don’t want this season to be done with, I mean maybe the broken couch could improve, but I’m a sucker for some clarity. Maybe I’ll find some if I keep writing through it.

The writer Gail Collins said that, for women, the ‘centre of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home, and the urge to get out of it.’ It’s her story, my story, the female story. The complex annihilation of motherhood.

— Nikki Gemmell, On Quiet

Happy Samhain, witches.