I skipped Beltane advent. I didn’t want to. I just did. I forgot about it until the first week of it had passed, and then I forgot again, and again, until it was April 29th and I had no plans for Heksennacht or Beltane. Now it’s May 1st and I still don’t know.
See, this year is a year I actually started a year-long working on Imbolc. I added to it on Spring Equinox. And this month I had to face up to the fact it’s not working, and I need to scrap it.
How do I know?
Because I put the magic into a pot of crocuses. They sprouted, and then they wilted and became covered in mold. I don’t know how the mold got in there. I followed the directions on the package exactly, but maybe they were just too old to do anything with. Or perhaps I truly have a black thumb.
So now I have a nice Delft pot of dead crocuses with sprinkled eggshells on their dirt sitting on my shrine, and I have to get up the energy to put them into the compost bag and offer them to the spirits of decay in my city. Along with finding the energy to finish up the third load of laundry from last night, because by the way, I haven’t slept yet and it’s 11:30am.
The moment I realized the magic was dying was a hard one. What I was doing a working for was big. Essential for my well-being, my health, my life, my future. Essential for me to feel anything but utter, complete despair. And it died. It wasn’t working. I didn’t want to accept that.
Seeing as it’s done now, I’ll talk about it. The magic was for a house here in the GVRD, a place to live so Mr Morag and I could start a family together and have a good life. This has been the dream we’ve been trying to work towards for, jeez, 5 years now? Since we got engaged, so yeah, five years. We’ve lived in this place for three years now and in that time hope for finding an affordable place in this part of town has dwindled to nil. Three years ago you could still find reasonably sized places at prices that weren’t cheap, but were theoretically doable. It was rare, but you could find them. Now? Nothing.
Rentals have gone up too, so we are currently stuck here, here in the house of ceiling-rodents and floods on a semi-regular basis, it seems. The house of mildew in the bedroom even before the floods. The house with 2 windows and no light. The house with a terrible, small kitchen, and a bathroom that’s impossible to keep clean because there is no fresh air in there and no fan, so it’s nothing but mildew.
We’re stuck. The rent here is expensive, but it’s still cheaper than the vast majority of places out there, and continues to be cheaper than a place the size we’d need to start a family. To rent a place that size — well, what’s the fucking point? A mortgage would cost less, and we’d have more freedom and security.
It’s hard not to feel depressed and full of despair over this whole thing. It was hard not to give up right then on everything we’ve worked towards when I saw the magick dying. But what else could I do? The universe had answered my question, and the answer was not something I wanted. It was the opposite of all my hopes. The confirmation of my fears.
I tried not to think about it too much. I couldn’t handle the added burden of more despair; felt I might drown. I focused on work, because rent still needs to get paid, even when I spend the first half of the month out of commission because my spinal injury flares up and I’m stuck on opiates just so I can function without agony. (Oh, yeah, that happened too. That’s why I’ve been so quiet in April. Excruciating pain, opiate haze, recovery from both, and then a lot of work, and now it’s May.)
But in the past week, I’ve come to a different conclusion than my initial one. I don’t want to speak much about details, not publicly, not yet, but the conclusion I’ve come to is this: the universe had to shut the door on Vancouver for me so I would look elsewhere, and possibly find where we’re really meant to be.
We started looking elsewhere this past week, and we found more hope there than we ever did here. Now we are researching, figuring things out, thinking, talking, planning. I’m praying. We have a chance at a life now, and I am praying that it all works out, that what we hope for and so desperately desire comes to pass.
And I’m terrified. Elsewhere is far away, though within the same province, and this would be a massive change. I never thought I’d look at settling anywhere other than Vancouver, than the GVRD. I thought my move back here was my last big one, that any moves after would be within the GVRD. But I don’t think that’s so anymore, and now we’re looking at something big and scary and yet — so exciting.
There will be trade-offs, of course, and it will be hard to adjust, but I still think this is it. This is why the magick died — for new magick to be born. I needed a clear ending to the dream of Vancouver in order to truly look elsewhere, and find exactly what we need. And now I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen.
For the first time in a long while, I truly feel some hope again. It’s a strange feeling…but a welcome one.
So now I’m going to figure out what I’m going to do for Beltane this week, with an eye to this new opportunity. After I get some sleep.
-Morag
(Addendum: I wrote this this morning and posted it to my Patreon page ahead of posting it here on Everyday Magic, which I scheduled ahead of time. I’ve likely gotten some sleep by now. I hope. Gods, I hope so.)
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