Kimberly Steele

Hi Everyone,

I am on an Ogham and writing break until January 8. Thanks for understanding as I refresh the well of inspiration and celebrate Alban Arthuan/Yule/Christmas.

I recently bought a new car after my 20 year old Toyota Scion XA became too expensive to maintain. It was a very emotional and heart-rending experience. I was extremely attached to my old car, which I named Carla somewhere along the way. We never had an accident. She did have hail damage, dinged up hubcaps, and a busted mirror. I wrote several songs in Carla, including songs from my Dream of Flight album and Somewhere in Time, which I wrote driving by my local Target. She was more of a pet than a car, though when we started out in 2006, she was just a car. She did not change -- I simply learned that everything is alive over that 20 years and recognized her as a consciousness.  Giving her up feels a great deal like losing a beloved pet. 

Because I don't know all that much magic, I said goodbye to Carla by taking her to the forest preserve and doing the Sphere of Protection in the car -- obviously I could not move around but I did my best. I even burned incense in the confines of the car, windows open of course. I have shed many tears over her and I am deeply grateful for all of our years together. I wish I had the automotive expertise to repair her on my own. I tried hard to conceive of ways to keep her.  Sadly I do not have the time or the space and I feel a great deal of guilt and sorrow over it, with worry that she might be frightened or sad even though "she" is a car. I traded her in for my new car, another small subcompact who I have named Asami. 

May the gods bless Carla forever in whatever future form she takes. 

This Open Post is open to anonymous commenters, but I do see the IP address of all commenters, so please keep that in mind. Like JMG's Ecosophia blogs, I'm not friendly to swear words worse than bitch unless it truly makes sense and belongs there. Also, I don't respond to what I perceive as trolling. Other than that, please have at it. I appreciate your comments and interactions.

I have nothing against people who feel their gender does not reflect the way they feel inside. As a believer in reincarnation, I believe souls take turns as male and female incarnations, so it follows that sexual dysmorphia would be a natural outcome in a world where reincarnation is rapid, with little time between death and re-birth. My problems with trans began when it went from being a fringe choice to a mass agenda pushed upon young children by the greedy State. My objections arose when trans tried to become the new normal, wedding the pharmaceutical-industrial complex to public schools and monopoly media in a disgusting, fascist polygamy of propaganda and brainwashing. I began to hate trans when it called me a bigot for questioning castration hormones for boys and induced menopause and mastectomy for girls, perverts in taxpayer-funded libraries, chest binders at Target, and the erasure of women’s sports. I don’t like sports nor have I ever liked them, and if I never saw or participated in another sports game for the rest of my life, it would not be too soon, but I hate seeing sports taken away from girls and women. These girls and women love sports and cannot have them because of male fetishes and insecurities. Give them back, and while you are at it, keep dudes out of the girl’s locker rooms and toilet stalls.

TRANS IS MUTILATION

Usually I don’t shout my headings like a Boomer or some doofus from Fifty Shades of Grey, but I feel it is warranted here. Hormones are the tip of the trans-mutilation iceberg. Whether they are for an F to M (female to male) or M to F (male to female) transexual, it is not a good idea to take regular doses of opposite sex hormones at any phase of life. It is especially damaging to take hormones as a child. I had a friend who accidentally tampered with her own hormonal balance by starving herself and replacing meals with diet shakes and pills during puberty. She seemingly screwed up everything: the development of breasts, digestion, and moods. She never experimented with drugs, including diet drugs. Kids who screw with the polarities of estrogen and testosterone with actual drugs blow up their entire hormonal ecosystems before they are built, trapping themselves in a paradox of aged babyhood and permanent sexlessness.

It’s just Pat

Back in the 80s, Saturday Night Live ran a particularly cruel skit called It’s Just Pat featuring Julia Sweeney as an androgynous person named Pat. Everyone around Pat tried to goad him/her into revealing his/her gender. Pat was an insipid, nasal, whiny, and mostly unfunny caricature of a human being. In that way typical of overweight, stocky adulthood, it was difficult to make out Pat’s feminizing or masculinizing features. For Sweeney, the skit appeared to be a humiliation ritual, throwing it in the actress’s face that she was only one bad haircut or some extra padding away from ugly, androgynous freakdom.

Hormones make the man or the woman, but they also regulate digestion, mood, water retention, muscle, and fat. If fertility were the only concern in hormonal manipulation, it would be a small one. Most people who become trans start out gay, and baby-making has never been a primary obsession among gays in any era except our own. The trouble with trans is that hormonal manipulation via shots and/or pills do not make a man into a woman or a woman into a man. They make either gender that takes them into Pats, androgynous and riding the middle in the worst sort of way.

Chopped

I recently uttered a single, flippant sentence in an essay that I wrote about plastic surgery about how M to F trans who opt for a colon graft end up with a second, stinky butthole they must dilate every day for the rest of their lives. There is nothing unprovable about what I said, it is plain fact. Some M to F trans have parts of their harvested lower colon implanted as a faux vagina. Because the lower colon has the function of eliminating waste in the form of stools, it continues to have that function if it is implanted in the perineum. My comment triggered a thousand liberal Karens who immediately broadcast my essay to the entire free world. I wept all the way to the bank.

Castrati, court eunuchs, and female genital mutilation

For those who think castrated males and “cut” females are a new phenomenon, please consult the annals of history or at least Google and educate yourself. Since the dawn of imperial courts, said courts have made a habit of altering boys and men by amputating their testicles and penises. Castrated men, also known as eunuchs, were put into the service of elite rulers who used them, often for the duration of their neutered lives.

The Italian castrati were pre-pubescent boys whose testicles were often removed or more commonly crushed to render them impotent. The boy’s voice remained beautiful and high throughout his manhood. They were the lucky ones.

Cutting off the testicles alone is far less painful and dangerous than chopping off both penis and balls. I have four male cats, all of whom are feline castrati. Though they do not mark their territory in the manner of unneutered male cats, they piss like champions. Their healthy urine streams strike the sides of and top of their covered litter boxes.

The court eunuchs of ancient China and old Byzantium were not so lucky. It was custom for thousands of years to remove both cock and balls in a single, harrowing procedure that fewer than half survived. Those who did survive often lived long lives, but the procedure that took their penis resulted in a lifetime of catheterization as the wounded penile stub was prone to closing.

As to why eunuchs were so popular in dynastic China and other places, it is quite obvious. Eunuchs were useful. In the golden cage of the harem, emasculated men served as guardians and petty dictators over bevies of scheming courtesans. Eunuchs knew how to exploit their liminal situations in ways that their 21st century equivalents have yet to grasp. The last surviving eunuch, Sung Yaoting, lived from 1902-1996. His own father performed his castration when he was only 8 years old.

For approximately 2000 years, Chinese court eunuchs were made into eunuchs as a matter of punishment. Full penis and testicular castration was a traditional punishment used to place men as high ranking civil servants and to assimilate them into the court. The “crimes” involved to merit the punishment of castration could be rape, rebellion, or merely being on the losing side of a war. Because eunuchs had a great deal of power, kids from poor families such as Sun Yaoting were often volunteered by their own families. Often, men older than the age of 14 were killed and those who were still young were castrated. The procedure, traditionally done in a chair with the legs spread and the organs chopped off with a sickle-shaped knife, routinely rendered men and boys incontinent for life if they were part of the 30 percent who survived. Self-administered catheters and diapers were and are the eunuch’s reality for the duration.

What about the girls?

Women have always been used and abused for their fertility, and that is why only eugenicists like Margaret Sanger desire to “help” certain races to stop reproducing. In cultures that openly hate women, girls, and femininity with zero qualms, female genital mutilation is the preferred method of ending a woman’s capacity to enjoy sexual pleasure. The advantage of FGM is that it wrecks any sense of fulfillment or power for the girl and future woman without destroying her potential as a baby factory. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the few intelligent people ever to emerge from Somalia, describes her own mutilation around the age of five by her own trusted relatives. This surgery, if you can call it that, was performed on the kitchen table with a pair of scissors and sewn up tight on the spot so she had to pee through stitches. As you can imagine, this disfigurement has caused her a lifetime of pain and suffering.

You have to pee through that

The trouble with trans surgeries and hormones is that they mess with urinary and waste systems while attempting to exclusively target the reproductive organs. Whether the transition is M to F or F to M, bottom surgery involves the shortening or stretching of the urethra. Adolescents and children who have not been sexually abused do not have any concept of the predicament of an aging urinary tract. For a woman, the first time anything penetrates the vagina and leads to an orgasm often heralds the last time peeing is normal, painless, and easy. Because the two pieces of equipment are so close together, the urethra is regularly irritated and often infected with UTIs that emerge after sexual activity. The beginning of sexual activity is routinely accompanied by frequent urination, burning, and a funny smell to the urine even if both partners start out as disease-free virgins.

Almost all men who reach a certain age get prostate cancer. Only vegan men seem to be spared. My not-young, vegan husband pisses like a racehorse. He has 100 problems, but his prostate is not one. Unless you maintain a strict diet free of animal flesh and secretions and an herbal regimen of urinary tract supporting herbs for decades, you will probably end up in an adult diaper as an elderly person.

Trans hormones wreak havoc upon digestion, cognition, and mood. The trans seeking person hopes surgery will complete the process, allowing her or him to emerge from the surgical cocoon to become a beautiful butterfly. Instead, they emerge as Pats, neither male nor female.

The reason the post-op trans person is 17 times more likely to commit suicide is because trans bottom surgery is more brutal than what was done to Qing dynasty brothel boys. At least 1 in 6 trans victims end up with searing, chronic pain that will haunt them until they die. In the creation of a faux vagina, vulva, and clitoris, the penile shaft is either inverted and stuffed inside the perineum or the afformentioned section of the lower intestine is crafted into a “vagina” and stuffed into the same area. The root of the penis is impossible to remove without killing the customer patient, and the castrated male is left with erectile tissue in the stump of his amputation. The stump has a manufactured wound-hole behind it along with reconstructed lumps of flesh as labia to cover the amputation. Unlike the Chinese court eunuch, he is condemned to dilating or re-opening his faux-vaginal wound every day for the rest of his life, lest the wound close and become septic. His shortened urethra is a recipe for permanent UTIs and premature incontinence. There is a high likelihood he will never orgasm again after surgery due to both his hormonal treatments (the same hormones are given to male sex offenders to make them impotent) and the painful, dysfunctional state of his amputated penis.

For F to M transitioning women, the process and results are even more ghastly and hideous. A woman or girl who goes through the F to M grist mill must harvest skin from another body part to form the sleeve or shaft of her future frankenpenis. The skin taken from her forearm (preferred), thigh, or back leaves a permanent track of shriveled, reddened burn that never heals, the searing brand of the surgeon who finances his next tropical vacation on the insurance payout. The urethra is stretched through the phallus, blithely casting aside its intended function purely for the sake of aesthetics. (Gee, when have we seen women subject themselves to bizarre and outlandish tortures and permanent damage in order to look a certain way before? That never happens) The frankendick will only work to function as a dildo with a pumping device. My research hinted at something referred to as “donor testicles”, and I am going to guess that means testicles are being harvested from nearly dead, male ICU patients who made the mistake of checking the Organ Donor box on their driver’s licenses.

A metioplasty involves cutting the clitoris (female genital mutilation) to unmoor it from its surrounding skin so it can stand at attention and function as a micropenis. Fake silicone testicles are added with more harvested skin. The result is the exact sort of “penis” that most straight women purport to hate and loathe, especially if said micropenis is attached to a gender neutral, Pat with a balding pate and a pot belly. Pat with a micropenis does not appeal to anyone, gay or straight. It’s almost as if lesbians prefer to be with other women.

TRANS IS ABUSE

Gays had a short moment in the 1990s when things were looking up. They were not yet free to marry, but they had gained a great deal of respect and clout in our civilization. The 1990s and early 200s showed us that gay is not that big of a deal and that anyone with a puerile interest in what consenting, mature adults do in the bedroom should probably seek help. Big Pharma had not yet cannibalized the populace to the point where it needed to use lesbian and gay children as cannon fodder in its never-ending war against the human race. Right around the time Big Pharma mated with government to create the Covid scare, we got the trans movement and the funneling of children into the medical system via subterfuge such as preferred pronouns and on-the-sly gender counseling. Fascism is the alliance of governments and corporations to create a de facto rule of law. Trans fascism was all the rage from 2016- 2023 until Dylan Mulvaney served as the straw to break the camel’s back by tanking Budweiser’s market share. Fascists cannot fascist if they cannot turn a profit, and Budweiser learned the hard way that its demographic of good old boys and sportsball bros were just as happy to drink Modelo and Miller. The name is irrelevant — it all tastes like carbonated gerbil piss, so why buy the one being hawked by the freak in womanface acting out a minstrel show of Venus flytrap femininity?

Men, as it turns out, try to become women in order to punish them. They have daddy issues galore but it is their mothers who drive them truly nuts. To punish women, they invade their private spaces and steal their trophies. Thanks to the trans movement, the physical superiority of men is now glaringly obvious in a way that was unclear in my Generation X. The strongest female athlete will always be beaten handily. If the point of sports is victory, there is no point to female sports. A group of amateur teenage boys beat the US Women’s Soccer Team, with the women scoring only one point in the entire game. They did this more than once. Switzerland Women’s National Team (it’s called football over there) went up against a group of boys, none of whom was over the age of 15. The women had their asses handed to them. Serena Williams, who is currently shilling her newly-emaciated Ozempic body, once boasted she could beat any male tennis player ranked outside the top 200. She was trounced by Karsten Braasch, who ranked 203rd and whose training “regimen” involved beer and cigarettes, beat both Serena and her sister, Venus, when both were at their physical peak in 1998.

Clearly the best sportswomen in the world are no match for a random, untrained teenager with a cock and balls. They are having their faces rubbed in their physical shortcomings, and though I should feel a grim satisfaction watching all the female jocks who ostracized and mocked me for sucking at sports when I was young, I don’t. They are getting their comeuppance and a taste of their own bitter medicine. Like me, they will never be good at sports. Not really. A man will always do a better job even if they train their entire lives. But just as I play piano and do not qualify or come even close to being the world’s greatest pianist, it does not mean I should give up playing or be mocked because I am not as good of a pianist as someone else. Women should continue being active in sports. Biological men and boys should be kept out of women’s sports so women can win fair victories against other women and gauge their own improvement on a fair grading curve.

F to M transitioners often come from abusive backgrounds. Many have been sexually assaulted and/or raped. They seek transition in order to avoid feeling vulnerable. This certainly seems true of the person formerly known as Ellen Page, who was passed around in the Hollywood System and now passively victimizes others by broadcasting her own brand of false transcendence. Sadly, the abused become abusers at a prolific rate, especially when abuse is of a sexual nature.

TRANS IS PERVERSION

The goal of transitioning is to run away from the weight of age and maturity or anything that looks remotely like it. The person formerly known as Ellen Page has no plans on aging into a bearded, wizened, beer-gutted fellow; no, Page wants to be the miniature version of her own imaginary biological son for the remainder of this articulation. She wants to be a boy, not a man. The man known as Rachel Levine would not dare to cut his hair short — to do so would prevent him from gaslighting the general public into calling him ma’am. Dude does not even look like a lady, and short hair would be far too honest, especially for an obese ex-Secretary of Health. Dylan Mulvaney said it himself: he wants girlhood for himself, not womanhood.

In the 1988 horror film Silence of the Lambs, there is an ostensible M to F trans character who captures, fattens and slaughters larger women with the goal of making their hides into a skin suit that he can wear while prancing about in front of a full-length mirror. Though the real serial killers Buffalo Bill was based upon — Ed Gein, Gary Heidnik, and Ted Bundy — were not autogynephiliacs (males who experience a sexual thrill from viewing themselves as females) but the Buffalo Bill character was depicted as tucking his equipment under crossed legs, enchanted by his own reflection.

The Buffalo Bill character was frightening because men who wear femininity as a costume are scary. A man who sees his XY chromosomal status as a cursed will always be perceived as wanting what he cannot have. To become a woman, he may exact revenge on women, killing them so that he can wear their skin.

Trans is an act of vengeance upon the polarities that make us whole. Being gay is reframed as such an extreme perversion, it must be erased so the formerly gay transperson can become technically “straight” in order to do traditional, penetrative sex. The gay woman has herself genitally mutilated show she can grow a penis out of her defective crotch and mate with other women as a man would. The gay man is castrated and wounded so he can become the quasi-feminine receptacle for another man’s sperm. I don’t know why anyone gets off on this but it is apparent there are entire autogynephiliac armies waiting to groom future autistic gay kids so they can join the ranks of the mutilated.

Rapists are still rapists even if they are autogynephilic men who have their junk amputated. Those who were straight and who raped or wanted to rape women to begin with found themselves in an ideal position from 2016-2023. The point of transitioning for many men was part sissy humiliation ritual and part espionage to see how the other half lives. There are straight men who seek a trans disguise to predate on lesbians, the final frontier for the dedicated misogynists. Losers who fail at being men must co-opt women’s causes and invade their private rooms. They depend upon cultural niceness mandates to defend them from the retaliation they deserve. They hate women and yet they want them and want to be them. Like Ed Gein, the serial killer who inspired Norman Bates of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, they hate and love their mommies in equal measure. They are not above terrorizing the fairer sex in order to satisfy their urges.

To the keyboard warriors at the ready whose fragile, broken minds are boiling over with verbal barbs and accusations of transphobia right now — go outside and touch grass. I am a rando on the internet. I do not think about you at all. Also, if you have read this far without trying to comment yet, you will soon find out that you are not allowed to comment on this essay without signing in. As I have said in the past, I am going to die without being bought. You cannot scare me and you cannot buy me off, so go away.

What I do want is to spread the message that mass acceptance of trans nonsense is over. We are done. We are now coming into a time where dangerous medical procedures of any sort will be questioned and investigated. The enlightenment is here. Allopathic medicine is fascism. Their unholy coupling with Big Government and corporate media in order to push the trans machine has been exposed.

Just a reminder that I will be taking my usual short, seasonal break from writing essays from December 19 - January 5 to rest and refresh the well of inspiration. I have put this blog's comments section to Dreamwidth Registered Users only for this moment and I will most likely turn on this same setting over my break. Thanks for understanding.

I used to be a brat.

I am working on not being a brat, and that takes a great deal of discomfort, humility, and severity. Most modern people have a raging, inner brat whom they placate and appease at every turn. Think of how many you know who believe the world owes them a living because their mothers and fathers brought them into it. Think of how many cannot withstand a scant half hour of mild hunger pangs without becoming utterly nasty . . . now think of how many of those are grown, adult men.

Even our elders are not immune to brattiness -- the whiny Boomer stereotype exists because it is true. 
Brattiness is contagious, and that is how we get posh, exclusive, gated communities where each household tries to outdo its neighbor in ostentatious, unnecessarily luxurious remodeling jobs. Litter in any space attracts more of the same. It amasses via the magnetic attraction of brat anonymity: bad behavior multiplies when nobody is sure who is doing it; just ask the internet.

The rationale of brat anonymity is "everybody is doing it, so why should I do any better?" In a sea of brattiness, personal brattiness becomes diluted and invisible. The niggling, rapidly diminishing voice of the shred of consciousness within the brat begging her to BE BETTER is easily squelched. The heiress party girl never strays outside her elite group of adrenochrome addicts because she could be confronted by someone with an intact, unsold soul. The alcoholic tries to get you to drink because being the only drunk in the room is a stone's throw away from self-assessment in an unforgiving mirror. 

Deep down in their cores, brats are driven by fear, specifically the fear of missing out. I know of one brat who is openly miserable during any recreational outing because when she goes on an outing, she spends most of the time living provisionally for future outings that may or may not happen. What this means is she vociferously complains that outings are too short and too rare, and that's why they kind of suck because she does not get to go on enough of them. In other words, she is perfectly modern.

Lost in pursuit

The primary condition of modernity is to spend a lifetime chasing happiness and to never form any kind of gratitude for it when and if it actually occurs. Modern people pursue happiness, and that is fine and good, but when they find it, they are never the least bit satisfied and already on the lookout for their next happiness fix. They cannot perceive past happiness without painting it in bitter regret that it is vanished or now belongs in some other form to someone else. Any brief focus upon the good is accompanied by severe longing and hideous damnation that nothing can ever be as good again. 

But I'm poor!

Etheric starvation -- that feeling of being constantly tired, raw, rode hard, and put away wet -- is far worse when you are poor. It is exacerbated by low quality food, and the more processed the food, the more depleted and unnourishing it is on the etheric or energy plane. Poor people must often literally work themselves to death to survive, never gaining enough rest or sleep to regain their etheric mana. Food and rest, however, are just the beginning. Beauty is nourishment, and the poorer you are, the more ugly life tends to be, at least in modern times. The medieval peasant at least had the rhythm of the seasons, the symmetry of church buildings, exquisite craftsmanship in everyday objects, and the closeness of his fellow people. He may have starved to death on the physical plane more often than we did, but slow death of etheric starvation and the autoimmune diseases it carries in its wake were not an issue.

Billionaires are some of the only individuals who can mostly insulate themselves from etheric starvation these days. They do this by consuming the most exquisite of foods, living in luxurious, beautiful spaces, and having ample time for rest.  Lower and middle class brats want to become billionaires because they covet etheric bounty in our age of endemic etheric starvation, and who could blame them? 

Nature or nurture?

There are some people who were born to be bratty. I know this because I was one of them. I have a big personality, an ego that likes to run rampant, and a propensity towards Type A perfectionism. All of the above create the perfect recipe for brattiness. 

In the 4-Hour Workweek, author Tim Ferris "teaches you how to escape the 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich". He has an alleged net worth of $100 million and an annual income of $10 million. Like many self-help gurus in his milieu, Tim Ferriss purports to believe we all can and should be millionaires. Most of his strategy, conceived before the AI era, involves setting up "systems" where one's fellow humans, referred to as virtual assistants, do most of your annoying tasks and actual work from places in the global South, such as India. In other words, he suggests becoming the computer age equivalent of a Victorian era English lord, delegating your mundane tasks to an army of underpaid, brown serfs as you enjoy the fruits of your plantation. 

Tim Ferriss is clearly a Class A Brat who enjoys a vast amount of unearned wealth. I'll also hazard a guess that much of his Bathroom Class lifestyle comes from investments. Perhaps he believes his entitlement to unearned wealth is justified because: 

1. He wants others to live the same way, which he frames as "sharing" but is more akin the drunk who is afraid to drink alone who I described earlier in this essay
2. He fails to understand all unearned wealth was actually earned by others and stolen away from them
3. He will be earning every penny of his ill-gotten gains back in future lifetimes, regardless of whether he believes this or not, because it is basically the reincarnation law of physics

If Mr. Ferriss siphons enough wealth away from those who earned it while encouraging others to do the same, he could be earning multiple life sentences as the poorest of subsistence farmers, starving to death many times under the cruel yoke of the same forces he propped up in his misspent lifetime as Tim Ferriss. There are entire timelines ready and waiting to swallow his soul.

Go for it, Bratty!

Big personalities easily become brats because we are go-getters. Luckily for me, I was not raised in a permissive era by excessively soft parents. I earned plenty of spankings along with my brother, who is another big personality. We both ended up as functional, non-trauma-focused adults.

Some kids never become brats at all because they were born sweet and retiring. Not me. Some kids need stricter limits than others or they become brats. I was bratty, but I was also given a defined set of behavioral parameters of what was and what was not OK. My love of my parents, order, discipline, and routine was more than enough to keep me in line most of the time. My parents were of a better crop of parents who understood that limits are love: they taught me to clean up my own messes, contribute my share, work hard, and to keep my mouth shut a great deal of the time. 

How not to be a brat

The remedy for brattiness is the routine acceptance of limits and working within those limits, whether we are children or adults. When we encounter Tim Ferriss's philosophy or the plethora of advice like it, our first line of questioning should be "Why do I feel I deserve wealth that others must earn for me?" instead of "How do I get as many goodies as Tim Ferriss?"

Let's say you have a rich friend who orders Door Dash seven days a week. Instead of getting pissy that you cannot afford restaurant meals delivered to your door by a Door Dasher with 2 other jobs, be grateful your circumstances have not conditioned you to be as lazy as your friend. The karmic or consequential reward of great food that is available all the time is food obsession: food becomes an easily-accessible drug that you must imbibe to survive. The Door Dash recipient who does not become enormously fat can easily swing into equal and opposite imbalance, falling into anorexia/bulimia because not having to do any work at all for food makes it far easier to develop a complex about eating too much food.

Brats get what they deserve, if not in this lifetime, the ones that follow. The gods are very, very patient. So stop being a brat unless you relish the idea of paying for it. 

Ways to stop being a brat

The first step to recovery is recognition, so if you're seeing your own brattiness, congratulations, you've already done some heavy lifting. To stop being a brat, I believe you must take six steps. These are:

1) Stop screaming

Brats love to pound sand, yelling at the sky, Mommy, God, or whomever else is half-listening to their literal and metaphorical tantrums. Behind every tantrum is the idea that someone owes the brat something. In my own case, as a bratty young woman, I felt I was owed the posh, upper middle class existence I grew up in as a child. It made me very angry, both at myself and at the greater world, that I had not experienced what was necessary to achieve that goal: Number 1 which would have been marrying the "right" man. Once I had immersed myself in daily discursive meditation as an older woman, however, I realized that I despise the concept of marrying for money with all my heart, and that I chose to marry on the poorer side in this incarnation because my soul wanted the experience. When you look at your own anger, can you identify the fear hiding beneath it? My fear was that I would disappoint my parents, whom I believe wanted me to marry "up". I also feared the stigma of being poor.

2) Stick to a single, intentional commitment for several years, no matter how absurd

Brats are all over the place, trying to put their hands into every pot and candy jar because they are afraid someone else will get it first. They want the whole world on a plate yet they won't do any genuine work to get it. In my own case, I have always been sore that I cannot speak Spanish, and now that I live in a mostly Spanish speaking neighborhood, my broken, deer-in-headlights Spanish makes me feel even more insecure. The only remedy is to study a little Spanish every day and slowly become more conversant in the language. I may never speak it, but at least I am trying!

3) Be your own parent

Raising humans is tricky. If you never had a decent, good parent, it is much harder as you have no behavior on which to model your own self-parenting. The very best parents still make mistakes. I had good parents, so I will describe some of the characteristics of good parents. Good parents are punctual -- they are not late to pick you up from school or wherever. They are stable. They put their all into providing a home for their kids, regular meals, and they don't punish their children without good cause. 

As for punctuality, if you are late for everything, be stricter with yourself. Leave earlier and make sure you have enough time not to endanger yourself or anyone else. Pack snacks and emergency supplies like a good mom would do for her kid. When you make a commitment to yourself, keep it as a good parent keeps their commitment to their child. When you behave badly, and if you are a brat like me, you are going to behave badly, don't overreact. Give yourself a time out, force yourself to sit and think about what you did in discursive meditation, and then work out a strategy that entails not doing that anymore. 

Be kind to service people, neighbors, and semi-strangers. No good Mom or Dad would allow their children to mouth off to a cashier, waitress, barista, manager, or mailman. One of the reasons Europe and the British Isles are about to fall to the insane Muslim clown posse is the propensity of Europeans to be rude to "the man on the street" and to treat any casual interaction among semi-strangers as a potential hostile confrontation. Most Americans will start up a conversation over a shopping bag with a random cashier (been there, done that recently) and we often discover we have so much in common, it is uncanny. Europeans don't have those kinds of conversations, and naturally they also lack that kind of social cohesion. I plan on writing an essay about this phenomenon in the future.

4) Clean up your own act

Make your bed every morning and thank it for keeping you safe while you slept. Shortly after you wake, sweep the floor and put away the dishes. Clean the mirror, toilet, and sink every single night, thanking them for their hard work. Brats do not clean up after themselves and the last thing they are is grateful for simple luxuries such as soft beds, clean floors, and indoor flush toilets. To clean up after yourself is the opposite of entitlement. Humility is brat kryptonite, and you are not just humble toward other humans, you are truly humble toward the gods. 

Brats are not known for their personal hygiene. Take a bath or shower every day, always keeping in mind that your personal stank is not as glorious to others as it is to you. Don't go outside of your domicile looking like a slob. Brush your teeth. Keep your clothes clean and orderly, hung and folded. Brats wear whatever presents itself on the floor. Mature adults present themselves in clean clothes that fit, not baggy, stained, ripped, or overly revealing attire from the stinking laundry pile in the corner. 

Stop swearing. Nothing says "early 21st century vulgarian loser" louder than compulsive F bombs, the S word, and every other sentence featuring words that could not be said on TV until the 1990s. You do not sound smarter when you use language that requires little to no thought and has become the common vernacular of our age. Your term that rhymes with "duck" and "suck" is about as edgy and creative as a gibberish Chinese character tattoo. 


5) Stop whining

Chances are you have it pretty good. Stop the heavy sighs 30-40 times a day. Stop seeing life as one big, painful series of disappointments. Whining is addictive like drugs. People who whine often pride themselves on their honesty, as if traipsing through life in your rawest, simplest, most explosive form was some sort of gift to others. Consideration often takes the form of a metaphorical mask, and the mask adapts to protect and spare various people and situations from your unadulterated, ugly, uncultivated truth. 

Whining gets old fast. There is a stereotype of old people wishing for death that is so prevalent, it was written as one of Grandpa Simpson's tics in The Simpsons. In one episode called Million Dollar Abie, Grandpa Simpson finally gets to try to commit assisted suicide, but of course this goes wrong. Whining in old age is a choice. When I die, if it is of natural causes, nobody will know I was sick, because I am never going to whine. Not to the doctor, not to the nurse, not to random people or friends, and certainly not to my loved ones. 

Gossip and complaining are forms of whining. In both cases, there is a displacement of one's own problems and a lack of control when it comes to blathering on and on about the negative parts of life. Just shut up already, and consider that you might be the cause of most of your own worst problems. Nobody knows the trouble you've seen . . . and nobody wants to know!

Blame is another addictive drug. Blame enough as a brat and you will eventually blame God himself. We have all been wronged in some fundamental way: that's Meatworld, and Meatworld sucks. The only point to being wronged here is that you might learn something from it.


6) Stop cursing and start blessing

You won't ever get anywhere cursing what you hate because the energy you project only makes your enemy (be it a force or a person) stronger. Use your energy for better things. Ignore what you hate and pour your blessings, gratitude, and good will into what you love. Trust me on this one; it works.

Living provisionally is a form of procrastination. When we live provisionally, we put off making positive change in order to dwell in a state of helplessness where "nothing can be done". Though some of us are doomed to undergo the trials of Job, for most, it is nowhere near as dramatic as all that. Our circumstances may be far from ideal, but they are also probably far from catastrophic, and that means we have material from which we can create new and better patterns.

There are many sad human beings on TikTok. One especially morose individual I came across while scrolling was a young, attractive man. He lamented the workaday world and the pipeline of primary to graduate schooling that groomed him and other candidates to grease its wheels. He was crying. He longed to go outside and commune with the trees. He wanted to go back to the land. Most of all, he longed to go home to a paradise that only exists in his imagination. Like Peter Gibbons in the movie Office Space, ever since the day he started working, every day of his life has been worse than the one before it. The young man correctly perceived the office as an extension of school -- divorced from the seasons and rhythms of land, sea, moon, and sun. He had not chosen this fate directly and he had grown to hate it. He wept for lost time. He wept because he felt wasted and used. Mostly he wept because he saw no way forward that was not full of the same gray-beige flotsam of corporate garbage.

Unfortunately, I can easily see this man taking his own life, and that would be terrible because he has so much potential to make change for himself and to lead the way for others who feel the same about the corporate world. His comment section was full of agreement and copious blame of capitalism for creating the juggernaut that trapped him so well. The last time I checked, he was gaining a little traction singing original songs -- he has a lovely voice -- and there was a glimmer of hope that he could somehow monetize his talent.

It's never too early nor too late to go outside

The young man cried with longing for open sky and trees while he sat inside his apartment in the same business casual attire he wore to work. I hope I did not seem like a troll when I commented that he needed to go outside RIGHT NOW, sit with his back to a tree, and begin speaking to it as well as listening. What he failed to realize is that the outside world was waiting just beyond the door. You don't have to be a subsistence farmer or a native Sentinelese to walk outside, plonk yourself down under the nearest tree, and sit there until you feel something through the layers of industrialized-society numbness and psychic sludge heap you've been programmed to carry. Trees have been waiting for us humans to begin talking to them like we used to do, and they are only one class of beings in a nearly infinite crowd that awaits once we have reinvigorated our dormant. It is not complicated. All he needed to do was to take his ass out of the building, find a tree, look down to make sure he wasn't about to sit in a pile of dog turds, and sit for a few minutes.

Don't put off what you wish was perfect

How many times have you given up or not even tried because somebody already outdid you before you got started? That is the Faustian mentality at work: the demented idea that we must be the absolute best at any random hobby or activity or it is not worth doing. Perfectionism steals joy and prevents greatness. Besides, it is often those who laud themselves as the greatest ever who are the most mediocre. Consider the field of architecture: the supposed giants cannot produce a beautiful or durable building to save their lives. The biggest It Girls and It Boys in pop music don't write their own material, and when they do, it is laughably bad. The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains art that is nearly as bad as my dancing, without the sense of humor. As a piano teacher, I can assure you that there are many people who quit piano or do not take it up in the first place because they saw a video where a pressure-cooked Taiwanese six year old played a Bach invention at warp speed. The performance was not good -- mostly it was a testament to the wonders of a specific form of child abuse -- but they did not know that, and it black-pilled them into forgoing the smallest effort toward playing the piano.

The reason I have the best job in the world is because I instill a skill that does not just last a single lifetime. No, music education, when done correctly, is carried forever in the soul. Music is merely pattern recognition and assembly. It is also intense multitasking that acts as a form of prayer. I talk about this a spell in my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking. Practice music often enough and it helps you self-realize via the cultivation of differentiation, diligence, and humility. By doing this, it fulfills karmic debts. The work you put into practice which seems to have no "reason" or true goal may very well be a demonstration to the Divine that you are willing to put rubber to road when it comes to materially committing to an intention. Studying music is spiritual work because there is only one way to get to Carnegie Hall (or its equivalent in the far, far future) and that is practice. Music is a mental plane shortcut that takes extraordinary physical plane diligence to master. It is simple but not easy. All it takes to be a musician is a few minutes to hours of practice a day... every day... for the rest of your life.

Stop dieting!

Dieting is the method by which you are puppetiered by malevolent vampires who steal your money, energy, and life force in order to line their pockets. Nobody should be permitted to install an emotional middleman between you and the food you must eat in order to survive. The best advice on eating came from Apollo, who left an extremely tiny canon of advice in the form of words: "Know thyself," and "Everything in moderation". The second best advice ever given on eating came from Hippocrates: "Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food." 

Dieting keeps you enthralled by a phantom future that never arrives. You, but thin, cute, adored, successful, and living the dream. If you are morbidly obese, it will be suggested that you have half to ¾ of your stomach either rerouted or amputated in a brutal procedure called gastric bypass. This procedure may partially deliver what it promises -- extreme weight loss -- but it means you will never again be able to eat normally. It will also not strike at the root of the problem, and that is the need to go without eating for longer periods and the need to stop using food like an illicit substance. The only kinds of dieting anyone should ever do are light fasting, going without solid food for a maximum of two days at a time (such as religious fasts), or eliminating foods that you suspect might be causing allergies or other health problems. In my own case, I went from ovo-lacto vegetarian to strict vegan in 2010, and my cystic acne, the bane of my existence since puberty, virtually disappeared overnight. In hindsight, I believe that my acne was caused mostly by dairy consumption and that not eating it lowered the inflammation factors that did what Retin-A could not. I wish I had eliminated dairy sooner, as it was not the only health problem that was ameliorated by quitting it.

Start small and where you are

Deworm your mind of perfectionism parasites. Comparison is the thief of joy and mojo. Copycatting can only get you so far anyway -- if you are truly original, you will end up going the last mile alone. It begins with intention, and intention is nothing without material follow-through. If you want to become a musician, pick up an instrument and practice, even if it is a two chord jam or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If you want to own a restaurant someday, cook something with what few and inferior ingredients you have on hand, and it had better be good. If you want to be a mystic, pray, even though you are in a grotty public bathroom. If you want to get out of debt, make an economic sacrifice such as avoiding take out food for a time, and clean your toilet without fail every night. If you want a clean kitchen, do the dishes. Do not wait for anyone else to do them. If you hate the workaday world, start doing something else you love even though there is not a snowball's chance in hell of doing it full time . . . yet. 

Use what you've got

Living provisionally convinces us that life can only be lived fully in a future scenario. Happiness will only be achieved if the circumstances are right and X fulfills Y. Nope. Get it done. If you truly hate the one you are with, leave. Better sooner than later. If you want the wall painted, do it. Forgiveness, not permission. If you have not used the item in a few years because you think you will refurbish it, sell it, mend it, or shrink into it, nope, you won't. Throw it or give it away now. Say "thank you for your gifts, and I'm sorry I could not do what I planned with you" and let it go. If you need time outdoors, don't wait until work gives you a paid vacation or until you can save up to go to a sandy beach in the tropics. Go outside on your lunch break and breathe the air, stare at the sky, and give thanks to the local ecosystem, no matter how urbanized or fractured.

Of course it comes down to gratitude

Once again, I will end this essay with a reminder that everything is alive, everything carries intention, and the fastest way of connecting with the world around you is to thank it. The reason why cleaning your toilet helps you to draw more wealth is because it is all connected. The grateful individual who literally cleans up his own crap every night says to the Divine "Here I am, humbly cleaning my toilet." People who clean their own toilets do not take nice things for granted. They generally also do not take helpful people for granted, and that humble, grateful energy attracts helpers of the noncorporeal and corporeal varieties like flies to . . . well . . . you know. The journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. The symphony of 10,000 notes begins with one lousy pentachord. The journey to no longer working for the man begins with walking outside and sitting under a tree. 


Hey everyone! I am taking a break for the week of October 24, so I will not be writing the usual weekly essay next week. I am also taking a two week break from Ogham. Thanks for your ongoing patronage of my essays and readings.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the dangers of living provisionally. Living provisionally is a Jungian term for the habit of waiting out the present moment until one's life becomes dominated by waiting for circumstances to shift dramatically toward an unrealistic outcome the provisional liver purports to want. The outcome in question can be heaven or hell, both literally and metaphorically, and usually does not stray far from either extreme. One common provisional living binary is a great Rapture (Hell and Judgement) followed by a magnificent Golden City for the chosen ones. For Marxists, the Rapture is Revolution which is followed by the worker's paradise. For a habitual drug addict, the Rapture is the acquisition of the treasured substance followed by the almighty high. For many, it is the election of the "right" leaders which leads to a glorious purge of corrupt pundits. For the unhappily single, the Rapture is meeting the future Mr. or Mrs. Right and living happily ever after. For the unhappily married, it is getting the divorce papers and living life independently. For the poor, it is hitting the Lotto/getting rich and famous and entering a new class of people. For the rich, it is gaining the power and money of those richer than them, or if they are truly rich, it is becoming God.

The reality that is never to be acknowledged is the high likelihood that life will go on without much drama for better or for worse. Those who live provisionally dread Newton's old law of inertia: an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Revolutions are not pleasant and though many purport to want them, anyone who lived through Mao's upturning of China or the killing fields of Cambodia will tell you that Great Resets are not all they are cracked up to be. I will count my blessings if the lands where I dwell never get to such a state in the duration of my life, because it will give me far more time to meditate on the reasons why people get into revolutions in the first place, like I am about to do here.

There are concrete reasons why we live provisionally, and there is no way I can list even a fraction of them here. I have come up with a few though, and this is what I have deduced.

Living provisionally is a coping mechanism

Living provisionally is a trauma response at its core, a way of shielding oneself from brutal reality via the partitioning of consciousness and the warping, avoidance, and outright deletion of memory. If you are always planning for the future, you don't have to face off with the consequences you have earned in the present, nor do those you perceive around you have to deal with theirs. When I was a kid well before Taylor Swift's time, I naively wished for what would become Taylor Swift's actual life. I wanted to be a big music star. I fixated on this unrealistic future vision of myself because it was far easier than examining my own culpability (as well as the predicaments within my community, society, and culture) in being unliked and unpopular. I thought my talent should have made me popular. I was unwilling to look at my own maladaptation and values, lest I perceive them as warped. I was unable to grok the boiling, seething, foul elements of the milieu in which I grew up in any meaningful way. All I knew was that I was "owed" and that I was helpless to claim my due. Imagining myself singing sold out concert tours helped me to avoid thinking about what would happen if I did not get what I believe I wanted. Heaven was a Taylor Swift-like place in the firmament of female pop princesses. Hell was the continued slide into suburban mediocrity, having to humbly coexist among the same people who bullied and belittled me as a preteen and becoming the same sort of complacent, boring adult I saw everywhere I looked. Living provisionally was my way of soothing the sting becoming just another nobody, going nowhere.

Avoiding failure and the consequences of failure

Nobody likes thinking of themselves as ruined, washed up, or failed. The irony here is that failure is often required to teach us not to pursue the wrong things, lest we actually succeed! Most of us have multiple competencies and talents, and becoming wildly successful at one of them may be the ultimate thief of time from the one we loved the best and should have pursued. I never thought I would be happy about my abject failure to become a popular music artist when I was young, but now that I know a thing or two, I believe I dodged a major bullet by not attaining my teenage dream of major music label success. If I had remained fixated on becoming a pop star, I would have missed out on decades of teaching music. I love my life of decency, order, routine, and uplifting others to take on music as a discipline. I still make plenty of music, and although I don't have anywhere near the fans of a Taylor Swift, I don't feel pressured to produce stinkburger songs out that reek of my insecurities, nor do I have to compete with women half my age to remain relevant. My music is loved because it came from my heart and that is enough. And it is nice that nobody doubts I can sing.

It never occurs to those who think provisionally that failure can wear a convincing mask. You can have all the money and adulation in the world and still be a colossal failure, and you can be as poor and modest as a church mouse and be a raging success. Appearances can be deceiving.

Self-Accountability

There isn't enough self-accountability among provisional livers. There is always some evil group or person preventing Utopia. There is also a weird belief that absolute doom is lurking around the corner. I once knew a woman whom we will call Erika was convinced anyone living in the Chicago suburbs would be sitting under eight feet of water right about now. I am not sure where she got the information that Aurora, Illinois would become the next great flood plane, but she was utterly convinced. This was her reason for moving out of the area. I am not sure if she ever made good on her move. 

Though Erika was a hard-working woman struggling to make ends meet and doing a valiant job of it, she was deliberately blind in some key respects. Instead of looking at her anger and fear in meditation -- fear of poverty, loneliness, disability and anger at the system that perpetuated the system, as well as her own complacent role in that which she hated -- she chose to indulge in a fantasy where "evil" got the upper hand. In this fantasy, she would either be dead or floating down a former suburban street on an inflatable raft, and that would mean she would never have to contemplate her own willing participation in the system that was crushing her and would never have to figure out how to lessen her dependency upon it. 

Erika needed to ask herself, "What is the worst thing that is still within the realm of likelihood?" One of those outcomes was that her family would be torn apart by poverty and that they might end up in a homeless shelter. In my own case, I have thought through being homeless and I know the worst part of it would be not being able to provide for those who depend upon me. Erika fell out of a highly paid position in the salary class when she became partially disabled. She had become accustomed to the salary class lifestyle and its perks. She needed to explore her fear of never getting that lifestyle back again in meditation. Needless to say, she did not. She clung to her life raft fantasy, never asking what such a symbol might represent in her subconscious.

Who benefits from those who live provisionally?

For every person who lives provisionally, there are at least eighteen with their hands out, hoping to exploit and seduce the provisional liver into giving him or her (or it) their wealth. Capitalism itself depends upon those who live provisionally, not just as sources of cheap labor but as its primary consumers. 

The eyes of a provisional liver are always on the prize. The prize is always a few steps away on the horizon. Clever presidents, popes, emperors, and kings figured out long ago that carrots work better than sticks. You can get humans to do nearly anything if you promise them the moon and deliver them a dribble of Utopia here and there, just enough to get them to continue obeying, consuming, and reproducing. 

At this very moment, you can bear witness to provisional living slavery all around you. Think of that person (maybe it was you?) who had to own a "good" handbag. One of the most bitter truths to be revealed by 2025's trade and tariff wars was that the "good" brands are made in the exact same Chinese sweatshops as the Walmart bargain crap. That Made in Italy tag means absolutely nothing.  The bag may have been finished in Italy with a tassel or some gold paint, but it was technically Made in China. 

Most of us trade our time in glorified indentured servitude to an employer, waiting to vent our accumulated Everest of anxiety in a measly week's worth of vacation per year (if we are lucky).  We bust ass in order to keep expenses from eating us alive. There may be no escape for us; it is entirely possible we may end up dying the exact way we have lived, with an array of parasites feeding off of every inch of exposed skin. Who benefits from this arrangement? Stockholders, yes. Frozen dinner company CEOs? Yes. Politicians who promised positive change and then pulled the football away like Lucy did to Charlie Brown? Yes. Certainly not us. 

Blockades to Utopia

Those who live provisionally do not spend any time in the mirror, asking "Could I be part of the reason my life sucks so hard?" Much of living provisionally is waiting for the perceived circumstances to change so utopia can manifest. "Someday my prince will come", says the romantic, "and that man will fix my life with his giant, potent, perfect penis, his infinite supply of money that magically comes from his altruism, and his perfect, monogamous loyalty to me and me alone". I know a woman who probably says the above to herself. She has been married over a dozen times. Her life gets a little bit worse every time she remarries, and her multiple marriages have caused lifelong collateral damage to everyone involved in them. She is not a lazy person unless we are talking about where it truly counts: her narcolepsy when she is confronted with the statement "Wherever you go, there you are." She is not a happy divorcee. She hates being alone. She knows her view of love is warped. For this, she blames the men and she blames her mother. She knows the primary culprit in her misery (herself) and she runs away as fast as she can, usually into the arms of yet another husband.

Many live provisionally when it comes to their health. Everyone is in pain these days. Many spin their wheels in desperate search of the perfect food, a magic pill, or amazing recreational drug that will erase a lifetime of bad habits compounded by lousy heredity and the hard truth that getting old sucks. They will complain a litany of horrors and frustration to anyone who will listen, and the worst of the bitching will be inflicted upon their loved ones. Nobody knows the trouble they've seen! Yet we all die. This is Meatworld reality. Complaining vociferously helps to ease the tormented mind just as sucking on a virgin's carotid helps the undead to continue waking up night after night.

Putting stuff off

For those who live provisionally, there is no real belief the future can be changed by an action in the present moment.  That is why they do not bother trying. There is an old joke about not doing the dishes because they are just going to get dirty the next time you eat that is applicable here. I recently criticized a fellow Substacker who made a hysterical post about how there would be no farms in 20 years because of current politics. His hyperbole was his fear manifesting itself so he would not have to take positive action: he made no mention of avoiding meat that wasn't locally sourced and butchered from his local farmer, making sure to get to his local farmer's market, or growing his own vegetables. No, it was far easier to sit in the easy chair and make dire proclamations about the end of farming.

I find it amusing when people claim they would be more charitable if they came into money. For instance, let us take the hypothetical example of a man who wins the Lotto, having promised in the past that he would pay for the orphans to have a proper Christmas if only he had tons of money. No, he wouldn't, or at least if he did come into a great fortune, the local orphanage would be low on the list, long after building the obscenely large McMansion, buying at least two fancy cars, and hiring a personal chef. If your charitable nature only emerges when you have stadium owner money, it is not exactly a force to be reckoned with.

I return to the fantasies of my young self, a self who said "If only I could be rich and famous, I would gain self-worth." No, I would not. The more people who love-bomb you for some fleeting trait such as your looks, the less self-worth you will have. The music industry has more plants than my local garden center on Mother's Day, and there is barely a shred of self-worth among them. Self-worth does not involve cutting off your nose, chipping away at your jaw bone, and going on Ozempic in an insane race to be fairest of them all. 

The hard truth that provisional living avoids is that change happens now. It is put up or shut up; now or never. When it comes to the outside world, honesty is overrated. Maybe I will write an essay about that at some point -- in my own case, I wear metaphorical masks not entirely for myself, but mostly for the benefit of others who could not handle me in my raw, unfinished states. Honesty is priceless when it comes to the self, and that is where it truly matters. In order to stop living provisionally, we have to call ourselves on our own bullsh*t. 

Hey! I am going to be taking a short writing hiatus from October 25-31. As some of you already know, Halloween/Samhain is my favorite time of year and this year I have the luxury (thanks very much in part to my generous Ogham and Substack donors) of five days off from teaching music after this year's big recital.  I am celebrating my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying (Aeon Books, summer 2026) being in the copyediting phase. I thank you all for being such loyal readers and commenters. Please pray I get a spot of good weather so I can get to the forest preserve for one of my epic walks!
 

In my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, I don't advocate dramatic purges of stuff, regardless of organization by category, unless that is what you are into. I suppose there is somebody out there who has several weeks to radically de-junk their domicile, starting by taking all of their clothing and piling it into a great heap in the middle of a bed they are supposed to sleep on later. In my book, I do not suggest that clothing should take the lead in any mass decluttering; instead I assert my opinion that one must start with EIP or Extremely Important Paperwork. Nothing bad is going to happen if you procrastinate donating your skinny pants to GoodWill, but if you procrastinate finding and logically storing your lease or home insurance papers, that is a potential disaster.
As satisfying as it is to watch videos of whole house purges, most of us, including myself, are never going to have the kind of time and resources one needs to purge our dwellings of all clutter in hopes that it will never return.

What people do have time for, including busy, full-time workers with multiple side gigs like me, is the Clean One Corner exercise.

The neglected spaces of our homes feel sadness. Luckily, our neglect does not mean our spaces will starve to death as they are not animal or even vegetable, but spaces do have feelings all the same. A good way of thinking of these spatial emotions is "vibes". You know how when you walk into a friendly person's home, it feels like a warm hug? That is a vibe. Those friendly feelings often come from the person's love for their home and their constant maintenance of it. The hypothesis of Sacred Homemaking is that if you approach raising your home's vibe from various angles -- discursive meditation, cleaning, talking to the space, treating all of its denizens (humans, pets, spirits of objects and place) with respect -- it will create a protective net of spells around you and your human and animal family.

I also say throughout the book that perfection is not possible, and everyone must treat homemaking like a beginner approaches learning the piano: you must start small and where you are. Rome wasn't built in a day. You must write a song before you attempt a symphony.

To try out the Clean One Corner exercise, choose a messy, neglected corner of your space. If you are so inclined, take a photo of the space so you can remember what it was like before. Verbally or silently apologize to the space for neglecting it and allowing it to fall into disorder (you can also do this exercise to your car if you own one) and start cleaning.I chose my very messy bathroom cabinet. The dark stains are from an herbal oil I give to one of my cats to help regulate her blood sugar. I apologized to the cabinet, took all the stuff out, threw a great deal of it away after thanking it for its service, washed the shelf and everything that had the sticky herbal oil and other nastiness, and then put it all back in order with some new storage baskets I bought from an upscale thrift store near me called New Uses. It took me about an hour to clean everything out and put it back. I thanked the space and made the commitment to keep it in a state of good repair. I also cleaned it with some homemade essential oil perfume so it smells lovely now. An excellent finishing touch for this cabinet would be to put in some puck lights so that I can turn them on if I have to see something in the deep and shadowy part of the cabinet. Decorative shelf liners would also be another good idea.

I have done the Clean One Corner exercise on most of my home, but I have yet to get to my desk, my bookcases, and under my bed. My car could also use an encore. I hope this inspires you to find a corner, clean it, and thank it and bless it for its gifts. 

Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying is coming in Summer 2026. We are in the copyediting phase at the moment.