Three Different Ways:
Dreams, Madness, and Myths

“In the name of the Omni-benevolent God, Amen…” The planetary prayer for Mercury was read with more vigor than I thought I could muster for the early morning. Perhaps I’m getting used to the early hour. “O mighty and merciful God, which in the finger of thy deity…” It’s getting easier to not only say…

I settled down after work and obligations with a queue of podcasts, the incomplete cord, and a ruler. I had left off with five and a half feet of braided cord, and now that I had my groove, I was confident that I would finish quickly. Eighty minutes into the ninety-five minute podcast, I tied…

Bad is not the enemy of Good, Perfect is. You can do Good, you can do Good Enough, and you can do Bad (regardless of intention). But you can’t do Perfect. Not without sacrificing a lot of things, relationships, resources, and pieces of yourself that you need to keep a lot more than you need…

This week has not been gentle to me. Between emergencies at work, emotional shocks after work, and familial pressures that chose this week to unnecessarily escalate, I’m tired. Saturday would normally be the day to sleep as close to noon as my responsibilities would allow. It was very hard to fully wake up as the…

The alarm surprised me this morning and I wasted eight precious minutes reflecting on yesterday’s vivid ritual and asking myself the question I had been dodging all day. Am I fooling myself? If something seems too good to be true, it probably is, after all. I could win a bingo match twice over with all…

I dreamt of rehabilitators moving into an area in the wake of settlers who had managed to make the decimated landscape inhabitable again. As the settlers moved in and through, they had to make decisions about keeping restorable buildings intact but unusable, or make the necessary changes to obtain shelter but in the process, destroy…

An unpleasant event yesterday evening left me with barely any energy left to take care of myself, much less double check the usual things I do before bed. Emotional traumas can turn even the strongest of spines into dust, and by the time my head had hit the pillow, all I wanted to do was…

I ran my thumb over the smoothest side of the small piece of amber, feeling the rippled surface. “Too bad I can’t smooth it with my rough hands alone.” I had originally discounted this particular piece because of its size in the store, but I remembered that the Book of Oberon, along with other grimoires,…