kimberlysteele | Recent Entries

Just recorded & released Athena's tune for free download... please enjoy!

Hi Everyone, this post is likely it for this week -- I'm trying to finish a song project and I'll be pouring lots of effort into it Wednesday, when I usually put out a new post. Thanks for reading and please respect my no-profanity rules in the comments.

I have had more close friendships end due to my own choice than the other way around. In most of the cases, I was responsible for both the breakup and at least in part for the conflict that led to the breakup. In only one case did I feel completely innocent. Unlike the others, I never crap-talked this friend, I didn't enchant a guy she was obsessed with, and I was never so much as rude to her though she did not return the favor. She had an irritating habit of telling me I looked tired that I don't miss -- though I blew it off, this seemed to be a form of concern-trolling meant to inform me I was looking my chronological age and not youthful and fresh as we women are supposed to look at all times. She was often kind and considerate, but when the going got rough in her life, she turned out to be a bitter lunatic, obsessed with what she could not have. In her case, the holy grail was a biological child. She spent the second half of our decade-long friendship convinced that she deserved a healthy, perfect baby of her own genetic extraction. As an adoptee who was abandoned by my natural mother at ten days old despite being physically and mentally unblemished, it struck me as odd that she saw adoption as a vastly distant second best to procreation. Somewhere near the end, she found Jesus at the local McBox church -- during our last meeting she insisted she was finally content in life because of her newfound religion. My BS detector started ringing; she was raised agnostic atheist. The friendship came to a screeching halt when I asked, "What if Jesus doesn't have it in His plan for you to conceive?" You could almost hear the snap of the friendship breaking. Despite the pointed nature of my question, I still don't think I did anything wrong.

In a similar vein, I don't feel I wronged my vegan friends when I ended my vegan meetup group of ten years in August. Like my baby-obsessed former pal, vegans and vegetarians have become lunatics about their own holy grail, which is the toppling of the legally elected 45th president of the United States by any means necessary. They began this psychotic break in 2015, when Donald Trump went from fading reality TV show star to leader of the Executive Branch. Though my former friends accuse me of being a Trump fetishist, he has elicited no more than a "meh" from me in his entire presidential journey. I think he's done as good of a job as a person could do given the situation, but unlike them, I wouldn't take his job if it were handed to me on a silver platter, for all the power it would grant me.

I'm intellectually honest: Trump is a weird blowhard. He looks funny with his orange skin and puffy combover. He's also apparently quite competent at being President. He got in the way of foreign powers like China and Russia without goading them into firefights and he also got in the way of domestic terrorists like BLM and Antifa. He did not start any new wars. He's OK in my book. "Oh yeah, he seems OK" is the highest compliment I can give a president as a staid, born and bred, non-city dwelling Midwesterner. Make of that what you will. I am not excited about Trump. He elicits no passion from me one way or the other. I think he is OK, that is all.

Don't tell the other vegetarians, though. Former friends of mine foam at the mouth at the mention of Trump's name, their higher instincts thrown overboard in favor of Pavlovian hate porn gleefully propagated in every byte of mainstream media chatter. Between Facebook, Twitter, and CNN, their lives are one long, solid dog whistle, a teakettle of piss left on a dung-encrusted stove that never stops boiling over. My husband warned me that saying "All lives matter" got Jessica Doty Whitaker, the 24 year old Indiana mother of a three year old boy, fatally shot in the face. Recently, when I put out a sign letting my students know I would not force them to wear a mask inside my business, an adult piano student of a certain age confronted me, citing the governor's authority to deal with me for breaking the mask mandate. When I retorted with "The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land," she got so mad, she quit the lessons she had been taking for over two years. She was not mature about the matter. She ghosted me and did not pay for the half month she was present before our political disagreement. I was far more irritated by the ghosting than the money. People who are older than I am should know better than to act in such a rude and uncouth manner, especially over such trivia as politics. I just hope she finds a teacher in political agreement with whom to resume her lessons, because she was finally beginning to make real progress. I would hate to see two years of work, both mine and hers, wasted!

I am 47. Never did I think I would see a day when a despised Hollywood elite was more interested in cheering on BLM communism than making money in their chosen crafts of acting, directing, and film production, but here we are. Never did I suspect the Left would become the party of censorship. Never did I think people who marched for an end to the war in Vietnam would stump for an all out warmonger who put hundreds of thousands of black people in prison while his own son smoked crack cocaine with the groomed 14 year old daughter of his own dead brother. I didn't expect Donald Trump to be president in the first place and I'm more shocked to see that he's not half-bad at it. I'm done being surprised.

I would like to see a collective return to the old fashioned notions of civility and decorum. This means I would like to see a world where people don't shout in each other's faces or ghost their piano teachers because they are politically disgruntled. I'd like to see a world where Americans wear proper clothes in public spaces instead of open-toed Birkenstocks, shorts, sweatpants complete with sweat stains, and pajamas. I'd like to see a general disavowal of calling people the eff word and the C word and a return to more literary yet devastating insults. I'm entitled to my pipe dreams, I suppose. There are life lessons here that are being learned, that much is obvious. I pray we don't need a civil war to figure them out.

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town. Please only donate if you can absolutely afford it. I've been there. Your prayers for my continued success are welcome whether you donate or not!

We may be at peak Coronapocalypse, because Buzzfeed finally featured an article about people who were diligent savers who were wiped out by the panicdemic. In other words, a good seven months after every lower middle class person realized that shutting down every restaurant, bar, concert hall, and sports arena would decimate an already fragile economy, the geniuses at Buzzfeed managed to put together the puzzle pieces. Yes, collapse ripples from the bottom up. Yes, the financially responsible types who save every spare penny are feeling the pain right now. Yes, the Professional Managerial Class is next in line.

They Only Wanted Rest

I understand why the Professional Managerial Class was gung ho about shutting down the economy. When I was a kid, my family had more disposable income than we do now. I was upper middle class in the 1980s and I gradually fell down into the lower middle class. This isn't hard to do nowadays. I don't mind though, because I remember being an upper middle class child. Though I had all the ingredients for a happy childhood, it was hell. I had great parents, a nice house, the best schools, and plenty of food and perks. I was academically gifted and I was blessed with good physical health. What made it hell was the lack of sleep. I was cursed by my own night owl temperament. Insomnia was exacerbated by electric lights and constant stimuli. The TV was always on. Between electronic inputs and my mammoth imagination, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't alone. I had friends in high school who opted out of lunch so they could cram in more pre-college classes for credit. Nobody slept. Sleep was for wussies.

Insomnia Takes Its Toll

What happens when you don't sleep? Physically, the eyes become bloodshot and bleary. Everything itches. The ears ring. The gastrointestinal tract gets extremely messed up -- count on gas, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, diarrhea, anything but normal digestion. In the upper respiratory, inflammation is the name of the game. Phlegm: every kid I knew had issues with it, to the point where we all had boxes of tissues in our desks. The body aches. There are migraines.

I existed in a mental fog most of my youth. I was almost always tired. I was often grumpy because of blood sugar issues caused by lack of sleep. On Friday night and Saturday night, from the age of 8 - 17 I slept twelve hours both nights, midnight to noon, as my body and mind frantically tried to make up for sleep debt. Irritation at being forced to conform to the morning-centric schedules of others led to despair and eventually suicidal nihilism. Like many, I retreated to a toxic indoor world. For me, dysmorphia and obsession with my appearance plagued my teenaged mind. For the modern teen, it is often videogames, porn, or social media that becomes addictive.

Insomnia may be bad physically and mentally, but its worst effects happen in the astral plane, otherwise known as the realm of imagination, emotion, and feeling. Deep sleep cleanses the imagination, ridding it of junk. The reason light sleep is often not refreshing is because it's a surface clean. Five hours a night for me was superficial sleep -- the state of constant anxiety and misery I dwelled in as a young person only went away once a week on Saturday and Sunday.

Enter the Panicdemic

The Corona closures that were supposed to last two weeks and have ended up dragging on for most of a year were, among other things, a one size fits all solution to a nearly universal insomnia problem. Before the pandemic, the Professional Managerial Classes (PMC) were the most sleepless of them all. To be upper middle class is to give up on sleep as a human need. I have already explained how I didn't sleep as a PMC child. PMC adults sleep even less. In the PMC household, dad most likely gets up before dawn to face a grueling commute, or at least he used to before COVID. Mom's job is to manage the children, so of course she doesn't get to sleep in.

The pandemic solved all of this by ending dad's commute and cancelling the trip to school as well as all extracurricular activities, including in-restaurant dining and about half to three quarters of all brick and mortar shopping. Plane travel, an activity that used to be de rigueur for PMC families every holiday and summer break, was also cancelled without further notice. The PMC had two weeks of no school, no clubs, no sports, no dance, yet plenty of money to pay for Uber Eats, Netflix, and Amazon.com. Best of all, they had the guilty pleasure of times long past: adequate sleep. COVID was paradise; all they had to do was give plenty of lip service to "essential" workers and order their takeout food from struggling independent restaurants instead of the usual chains once in a while. Some convinced themselves COVID was lethal to large swathes of the population and not just the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Mainstream media was right there to help them gin up death estimates and foment hysteria.

The Declaration of War

The Professional Managerial Classes went to war with the classes beneath them because those classes started demanding to take their pandemic away. The PMC are not dumb. They know that rest time is over once everyone is allowed to go back to movie theaters and soccer games. For now, the essential workers have picked up the slack as they toil fulfilling Amazon orders and stocking grocery store shelves. Make no mistake -- anyone who wants to live in a country where you can hug your grandma without taking weird and special precautions and/or see the high school musical where the unmasked protagonists share a funny albeit brief stage kiss is literally Hitler and most likely a Drumpfen SS sympathizer who kills puppies as a hobby. Eight months into a pandemic that peaked within three weeks of its arrival, the cozy PMC lauds the holy grail of a vaccine by Big Daddy Government that will save us all from a flu that kills a third of a percent of the people it infects.

The New Normal the PMC thinks it wants is a state of permanent rest courtesy of lower class work (the grocery stores and delivery services aren't closing anytime soon) and government handouts. The PMC believes this can happen without a total collapse of the economy. When they pass a permanently shuttered restaurant, they shake their heads and mutter a vacuous incantation about how a vaccine could have stopped the closure if only it had been rolled out in time, or they spit a bit of foul language about people who don't compulsively cover their noses and mouths with masks. There is never an acceptance of personal responsibility such as "Fear did this and I am one who lives in fear." What they have failed to put together is how they've amputated most of the vital parts of the culture in which they used to take pride. As an artist, I have straddled the bohemian gap between lower class pragmatism and high art; I like to think I have a decent perspective of both sides. Like the underfunded inner city public schools that cut out their art and music programs, the PMC has managed to chop away the arts and all who would aspire to work in them for the whole of American society via COVID. The New Normal means no dad will be able to take his kid to a crowded baseball game ever again. It means there won't be any careers being made on New York's Broadway because Broadway will cease to exist. It means no more rock concerts, Olympics, or Nutcracker ballets at Christmastime. The New Normal is an introvert's utopia, a glass snow globe of government welfare, solitary confinement, and Zoom meetings, every man, woman, and child for himself. The New Normal is the ultimate in luxurious quiet desperation, deaf to the cries of the deplorables who aren't well-off enough to similarly virtue signal from a safe window view.

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am a braver person than I used to be. At age 16, I stood idly by when my best friend at the time was being denigrated within our own vicious clique of backstabbing frenemies. Frightened of “everyone” not liking me, I failed to defend her. We weren’t friends after that. I did all sorts of other awful things as a tween and teen that were a result of moral turpitude and general spinelessness. Like the Rush song proclaims, by choosing not to decide I still had made a choice. My young existence was a constant battle of sinking to the lowest level of my Midwestern Nice, Just Do As You’re Told, Don’t Rock The Boat programming while battling the cognitive dissonance that whispered true tales of my sniveling cowardice into the opposite ear.

Bravery, like Joan of Arc, dies hard. Once the path of bravery is forged, there is no turning back. Perhaps knowing this deep down is what scared me away from brave acts as a young person. Bravery also has its rewards. For me, it has meant having my own wholly independent business, marrying the person I wanted instead of the ones who had money and connections, and various odd rescues and rehabilitations I could not have managed if I had a smaller set of cojones. My bravery has only become extremely difficult to live down in the post-COVID era where cowards have run amok. The universal sign of the coward, the mask, is mandatory in my state of Illinois via the executive order of the current governor, the tax-evading billionaire scion of a hotel empire named J.B. Pritzker. This order was ruled unconstitutional by a court in Clay County, Illinois, but that was but one civil court. On Tuesday, October 20, he crippled the Illinois economy by closing restaurants just as they and the rest of the small business economy were showing faint signs of life. The cowards are currently still winning in my corner of the world.

Cowardice is The Blob

The problem with cowardice is its amorphousness. Cowardice does not stay in its lane and neither do the consequences of cowardice. Mandatory shut down orders were not supposed to take a wrecking ball to small businesses (or were they?), but this is exactly what they did. If large corporations were looking for the perfect way to crush their local, small business competitors in a wholesale orgy of state, city, and county government-backed destruction, they could not have found a better way of doing it than COVID lockdowns. Walmart and Amazon are doing fine. Small businesses like mine are not. I am a music teacher. I have run a successful, one person teaching studio for the last 24 years of my life. I haven’t had this few students since I began fresh out of college. If things stay the same way they are right now through 2021, I will have to close my business. For this reason, I have began to push back against COVID mentality. I slip off the mask when I am in stores. I don’t require the mask inside my business. My protests against mask-wearing have resulted in the alienation of decades-long friends. One former fan of my books took it upon himself to wish disease and death upon me and my family.

Cowardice is amorphous. Every person who wears a mask in public, including me, is a living symbol of submission to an insidious groupthink that is barreling us towards the edge of a new Great Depression. I have begun to push back because it is finally time for normal people to draw the line in the sand. If more people do not act like me, I will lose my livelihood like millions of other Americans. I will join the bread line. I don’t want it to come to that, so I push.

I mentioned that I believe the consequences of cowardice are amorphous. I am also pushing back because I don’t want the karma of those who perpetuated COVID panic. This karma is no small thing. To understand how bad is the looming karma of COVID panic pushers, we first have to look at the ways they have benefited under the current reign of fear.

Curse of the American Salaryman

There’s a certain type of house one encounters frequently out here in the suburbs. The style is boxy and superficially old-fashioned. Typically there are four to five bedrooms on the top story, a two to four car garage, and an association-controlled, postage stamp lot. A facade of fake brick on the front and grey-beige siding on the other sides is common. Inside the house, you’ll find an average American family. There are one to four children (any more is considered a bit weird, but it has been known to happen) and both parents work. Only in the very largest versions of the house can one parent, usually the wife, afford to stay home. The nucleus of these neighborhoods is the local school, which is nearly the sole reason for the insanely high property taxes and home prices all around it. The same cookie cutter houses way out in the country would cost half as much or less, but then there wouldn’t be a population willing to move into them because the school wouldn’t exist out in the sticks. In order to afford one of these suburban boxes of ticky-tacky, you need a combined household income of 100K at the entry level. Not only is this required to get a mortgage, you also need a bunch of extra stuff like insurance, cars, and a family wireless plan.

There is an odd acknowledgement that suburban life is a living hell. In the film Vivarium, a young married couple visit a new construction housing complex with thoughts of a potential purchase. They find themselves stranded in a bland, sunny subdivision called Yonder where all of the IKEA-ish houses are one of two or three models, one of which sports a plaque: Number 9. Quickly learning they are imprisoned in the subdivision, they journey down its eerily empty streets that stretch into infinity. They set fire to Number 9 and do everything possible to escape, all of which is in vain. A package arrives with a baby in it, which the couple reluctantly adopts. Months drag by and the child grows freakishly fast. The young couple, deprived of other people outside of their alien, energy-draining child, quickly grow apart. The husband becomes obsessed with digging a hole in the astroturfed backyard as the wife’s life becomes hopeless, child-centered, automatic drudgery. I won’t give away any spoilers save that the film does not end well.

Vivarium is literally a film about the loathsomeness of the suburbs. The salaryman is the young husband, who digs a hole everyday — obviously symbolic of salary class work — and kills himself before his time to do it. Meanwhile, the young wife is saddled with a completely disloyal, non-human child who throws violent tantrums when his routine isn’t followed to the letter, which to my mind was a subtle way of mentioning the unmentionable: the tyranny of raising a severely autistic child. Isolation and sameness turn what looks pretty enough from the outside into a living hell.

Though it’s not all terrible, salary class life is mostly awful. Like Vivarium, going outside is pointless. There is no connection with nature, only endless suburban sprawl and a job mining astroturf. There is no connecting with other people — salary class work is largely a dog eat dog endeavor. It is empty, hollow serfdom in the service of moronic, capitalist Montezumas who brag to other CEOs about their latest private jet vacation. The salaryman rarely sees his loved ones. His work is a constant game of musical chairs. When another chair bites the dust, he is forced to take on all of the duties of his former co-worker with no additional pay or benefits. His commute? Brutal. Or at least it was before COVID came along.

Escape Via Throwing The Lower Classes Under The Bus

COVID gave the salary class the escape valve they were looking for. For the salaryman, it brought the first opportunity his lot has had in nearly a hundred years to get a regular good night’s sleep. In the case of people my age, Generation X, it has provided relief in the form of suspended college loan payments. Many salary class kids have never spent quality family time with their parents, having previously been preoccupied with a 60 hour week schedule of school, sports, clubs, and lessons. Salary class wives have been granted time with their husbands and children, and for many, a much-deserved moment of appreciation for all they handle while their husband is out busting heavies at the office. The army of working salary class women, like their male counterparts, find it much easier to telecommute and order takeout than to try to do it all. Being a working mom stinks. You’re saddled with the responsibilities of Atlas — you not only win the bread, you have the thankless job of having to make it into healthy sandwiches. To add insult to injury, you’re the one who cleans up the dishes afterward!

For these reasons and more, the salary class is still clinging to endless lockdowns and mandatory masks with everything it has got. Never mind that small business entrepreneurs quickly going the way of the dodo — we need endless funny money so the salaried suburban Costco shoppers can afford their La Croix Pamplemousse Sparkling Water (the snooty LaCroix brand was founded by a Wisconsinite, by the way) and their bulk frozen cauliflower rice. Everyone must wear a mask, including solo bike riders, because there must be the appearance of compliance with fear porn culture at all costs. If you have the remotest aspirations to the salary class — like the former fan of my books who is dirt poor — you had better toe the line.

The salary class and its aspirants do not like to be told “no”, and when someone like me says the N-O word, the reaction is hysteria and death threats. No one is more used to this than Donald Trump. Donald Trump swooped in like Krampus to squash their dreams of Progress in the form of fully automated luxury welfare communism in 2016. They have thrown the most epic of tantrums ever since.

The salary class, as vacuous and detached as the in-dwellers of Versaille in the latter half of the 18th century, has failed to understand the fragility of its bubble. They have already popped much of the frothy economy that dropped a yoga studio on every corner and towns with 13 car dealerships within the same five mile radius. Just as Louis XVI didn’t connect the dots between his own attitudes towards the peasantry with the ill will that separated his head from his body at the guillotine, the salary class cannot comprehend that what’s good for them is not benefiting the lower working classes. The salary classite believes that since she can stay home watching Netflix, so can every else. Let 'em eat cake! The idea that she herself could end up disenfranchised or homeless due to her own disastrous cluelessness doesn’t occur to her, because up until now, there was no limit to the amount she could screw up and have someone (family, friends, government) come in and fix it for her. Now that the salary class and its COVID lockdowns have messed up the economy royally, she does not understand that she is next. She has thrown entrepreneurs like me under the bus and does not see how close the wheels are skidding towards her own well-heeled feet.

What's Next For Fearmongers

I walked away from the social justice left because I think they've got a tsunami of bad karma about to crash upon their shores. I ran a vegan meetup group for ten years. I ended it somewhere around July 2020. Vegans are some of the most toxic Trump Derangement sufferers. Like it or not, my preference to avoid the consumption of all animal products gives the social justice left the idea that I am on their side. I am not. I am a patriot and I'm willing to die for the cause of free speech; they feel differently. They think it is perfectly fine to wish harm (lately in the form of COVID) on Trump and his supporters. I do not wish harm on Nancy Pelosi or the Democrats despite their blatant hypocrisy and obstructionism. I don't wish harm on Hunter Biden, who is blatantly guilty of treason. I don't wish harm on Ghislaine Maxwell, proven child groomer and trafficker. I don't do that anymore because it helps no one, including me. What I do instead is try to act in a way they currently don't seem to be capable of acting: where they freak out, I am calm. When they start flinging bad intentions around, I wish for them to be blessed, as they truly need it.

I think the social justice left and everyone who empowered it via their fear mongering is about to get served. For some, Trump Derangement will be the reason they open their wrists into warm bathwater, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses. It's a classic double-bind: if he wins, the Great Satan has conquered. If he loses, their anti-populist cheating apparatus will have succeeded, leaving them with no boogeyman to resist. The reserves of spite they depend upon for sustenance will have to bubble up from elsewhere. Either way, I believe the consequences rolling out over the next couple of years will be severe for them. I believe TDS sufferers everywhere will find their support networks disintegrated, and their streams of taken-for-granted comfort and wealth interrupted, perhaps permanently. This is only natural law at work: they who spent the last five years asking the Universe to visit misfortune, disease, and death to visit Trump and his supporters will find misfortune, disease, and death barging into their domiciles. They made a grave mistake to wish misfortune on regular people simply for the crime of disagreeing with them.

So many of these people haven't the faintest clue how to be poor. They are not ready for the death of a breadwinner or for a sudden cutoff from family and inheritance money. Making a living has been mouse find cheese to them. They have lived beyond their means all this time, and the last thing they are is Stoic about what they cannot control.

I will be saying nothing to them. I have cut them off; I do not donate to them the privilege of my company. They are welcome to read this blog if they want to know what I think. Nevertheless, if I did say something to my former social justice pals, it would be this: "After spending five years lobbing your own turds at the opposition, don't expect for your yard to be clean and your hands to smell like roses."

Of course I could be wrong. The privileged clingers-on to masks and convenient anti-white race baiting could slide once again, slaloming around the hard limits and sucking off the grift from the same rackets as usual: Big Education, Big Pharma, Big Tech. Only time will tell what new egregores lurk in the shadows, waiting to ride the next wave of mass consciousness. The one thing I do pretty much know is that we should all hang on to our seats, because the next couple of weeks are going to be a rough ride.

-----

Hi Everyone, thank you in advance for your comments. Please refrain from commenting with profanity: four letter words that start with f, s, or c will result in an unpublished comment. Damn and rhymes with witch are OK.

Hi Everyone,

Here are three requested guitar chord charts for my accompaniments to the Orphic Hymns, Hermes, Saturn, and Athena:

http://kimberlysteelemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OrphicHymnChords.zip

Hi Everyone, for this week's blog, I'm going to go in a lighter direction and talk about some of the things I have done to honor the deities of the planets that just happen to be free. In my upcoming book, Sacred Homemaking, I'll be going into detail about the subject of honoring the planets and why someone would want to do it. Here is the short version: honoring the planets is a way of respectfully acknowledging the forces that affect our lives as human beings. It's a natural outgrowth of the study of astrology. Being mindful of the planets is fun, creative, and helps us to connect with the world around us. It's a gentle escape from being glamoured via television and social media feeds. I believe honoring the planets pleases not only the gods, but also the vast array of non-corporeal intelligences and beings who correspond to specific gods. Unlike ceremonial magic, planet-honoring activities are safe around children, and personally I think it's a beautiful way of reconnecting kids to the unseen world around them while encouraging their natural mysticism.

The easiest way I've found to honor the planets is to focus on certain activities on specific days of the week. For me, w riting new music to some of the Orphic hymns was my initial dive into formal, regular planet-honoring. I began by composing music for Wednesday's Greek deity, Hermes, and then progressed to composing, arranging, and practicing hymns for the rest of the week days and beyond. Daily practice ensured that I was performing planetary devotions every day in the most literal sense. If you're not a composer, and most people are not, you can still easily honor the planets without spending a cent. Remember that honoring the planets is about conscious alignment with the gods, done in a respectful and dare I say ethical way, of course. The reason I say "ethical" is that all too many witches and mages go the septic route, especially in the case of invoking Hecate for some reason, and do absolutely awful things without so much as a prayer beforehand. As someone who takes the triple moon goddess/goddesses seriously, I think they are playing with fire. Hecate is (rightfully) merciless when the haughty and the arrogant presume Her will as their own. Honoring the planets, on the other hand, is the spiritual equivalent of the endearing toddler who picks wildflowers to give to Mommy. If we don't put ill will and greed behind our planet-honoring, I doubt we will earn the ire of the gods.

There are more planets than the ones that can be covered by the days of the week and far more deities that can be honored than the planetary ones, but for now, here are ideas for deity honoring activities for the day of the week's gods.

Sunday

Ruled by the Greek gods Helios and Apollo, Sunday is also the day of the solar Christian God and His son, Jesus, and the Archangel Michael. Wear gold, yellow, or white, especially jewelry with a starburst or cross theme. Burn frankincense, cinnamon, or lavender incense. Light a white candle while playing upbeat music. If you dance (I don't!) Sunday would be the perfect day to offer a dance to the gods. Sunday is a great day for relaxing with family, hosting brunch or dinner, or going on a day trip or outing. If it is sunny out, make sure to spend some time outside or by a sunny window and soak up some rays. I know this sounds silly, but Sunday is the best day to upcycle an item by spray painting it gold. If you are around children (or not), you could spend an afternoon creating God's Eyes out of yarn and sticks.

A good Sunday-themed recipe would be my chick'n soup with turmeric to get into a Sunday mood with that sunny, orange color.

Monday

Ruled by the Greek goddesses Artemis, Selene, and Hecate, Monday is lunar, receptive, and feminine. Wear white, silver, or light blue. Burn a white candle Monday is a great day to do something in honor of dogs, such as taking your dog to the park. For music, I would try something soothing and organic sounding, such as the songs of Loreena McKennit. Forests are sacred to the Artemis, "whom woods and dogs delight". Sacred incenses are aloes and camphor. I burn this one called White Cloud from Shoyeido. Monday is a great day for extended discursive meditation, ceremonial magic, and general contemplation. Obviously, if the moon is out, take some time to gaze at it every Monday. Making luminaries or lanterns out of paper bags, mason jars, or tin cans is an appropriate Monday activity. Making pies or cakes in round shapes is also fitting.

A good Monday-themed recipe is this one for Mild Tofu Curry. Tofu is very lunar, as is white rice.

Tuesday

Ruled by Ares the god of war, Tuesday is active and masculine. It's a good day to wear red. Burn a red candle -- the Christmas ones that are scented with cinnamon are perfect because cinnamon is sacred to Ares/Mars. Scents he likes are myrrh, cinnamon, and cypress. I often wear my Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. Dogs once again have their day on Tuesday as it is sacred to dogs and wolves. The most appropriate Tuesday music would be vintage war themes or heavy metal. Tuesday is good for collecting wild medicinal plants or for going to the dentist or having surgery. In general, it is the day to do chores that feel like a battle. It is also a good day for mentally confronting and working through one's own regrets and bad karma. Working out/exercising on Tuesday should not be missed. A good craft for Tuesday would be this origami throwing star.

A good recipe for Tuesday would be a bold, spicy, garlicky salsa. Garlic, hot peppers, and coriander/cilantro are all sacred to Mars/Ares.

Wednesday

Ruled by Hermes/Mercury, Wednesday is complicated and contradictory. Other Wednesday deities include Thoth and Wotan, from whence Wednesday gets its name. Wear gray, dusty blues (such as denim), taupe, and multicolors/patterns. Burn a gray, brown, or taupe colored candle. Scents of patchouli and frankincense are Mercury-appropriate. Music could be anything complex and multi-layered, from J.S. Bach to modern day trap beats. Wednesday is a great day to go to the library or for reading in general, writing/publishing blogs or submitting manuscripts to publishers, and talking to far away people via phone or internet. It's also a day for memory-building exercises, quizzes and games. Don't miss your language learning session on Wednesdays, for instance, via the free Duolingo app. For the tinkerers, machinists, inventors, and music engineers of the world, Wednesday is basically your day. My husband actually made a bucket air conditioner like the linked one five years ago when we lived with my parents and were confined to my stuffy old childhood bedroom. It really cranks.

Dill Potato Salad or Dill Potato Soup would make good recipes for Wednesday. Dill and celery are both sacred to Hermes.

Thursday

Ruled by Jupiter, Thursday is a happy, joyful day. Wear any blue from sky to royal to purple. Sage and cedar incense suit Jupiter the best -- think fresh and bracing aromas. Burning cedar or sage scented candles, or blue-colored candles, or both are Jupiter-appropriate. Music is anything bold and happy, such as Copeland's Appalachian Spring. Buying gifts, including those for oneself, is a good Thursday activity, as is doing one's banking or giving/receiving consultations. Thursday is an auspicious day to begin any new project or endeavor. Thursday is also well-suited to intellectual pursuits and the higher mind. Crafts might include making paper airplanes or making a mobile, or any hands-on way of honoring the spirit of air, such as flying kites.

Spiced almonds are decidedly Jupiterian -- almonds and aromatic spices are sacred to Jupiter.

Friday

Friday is ruled by Aphrodite, and is the day of friendship and love. Wear green or pink. Rose incense or floral scented candles are perfect for Fridays. Sandalwood also works. Music is anything easy on the ears and pleasant, for instance certain strains of jazz like Brad Melhdau's transcendently lovely Ode album. Friday night is the best night for dates, family time, and friends. Because Aphrodite is the goddess of the home, I believe Bastet shares her day, and it follows that pampering and caring for domestic cats is the perfect Friday pursuit. One could combine Friday activities by burning a floral candle, listening to pleasant music, and doing light chores or homey crafts such knitting or mending. Friday is an excellent day for cooking and baking. Propagating and planting in the indoor or outdoor garden are also Friday-appropriate. Almost any art or craft is congenial to a Friday schedule, though crafts that involve home decorating do the double duty of honoring both Aphrodite and Lady Bastet.

Chocolate covered cherries or strawberries, whether bought or homemade, honor Aphrodite. Cherries and strawberries are ruled by Aphrodite/Venus. Nobody is certain who is certain which deity (outside of the ancient Meso-Americans) rules chocolate, but my instinct is that chocolate in the form of candy is ruled by Venus.

Saturday

Saturday is ruled by Saturn as is the day of endings. Black, dark brown, or blue-black is the best color to wear. Candles should be black or brown. Cypress or myrrh incense is a good choice. Heavier scents that would not do on other days are fine for Saturdays. Saturday is a good day for white tornado/take-no-prisoners style house or office junk eliminations. It's a good day for visiting the graves of loved ones, hosting memorials, or generally memorializing past people and events. Hard work and odious tasks, such as filing a tax return, are best saved for Saturday. Saturday is also a good day for pruning plants. The music of Saturday is slow and graceful, for instance, processionals such as Pomp and Circumstance and Pachelbel's Canon. Hard work is more appropriate to Saturday than crafts, however, planting an indoor herb garden with bottles that would have otherwise ended up in the bin or the landfill is a Saturn-suitable activity.

Foodwise, simple flax-seed crackers are a Saturnine food, not only because of their dry, minimalist nature but also because flaxseeds are sacred to Saturn.

Does this post inspire you to devote some time to honoring the planets? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town.

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kimberlysteelemusic

The question "Why won't God heal amputees?" is a rhetorical one and is meant to shut down discussion. The forgone conclusion is that God cannot heal amputees because God does not exist. I know this because as of five short years ago, I was an atheist. I understand where atheists are coming from. My husband, raised in a strict, apocalyptic Christian faith, is still atheist. I was also raised in a Christian household and confirmed at age twelve, however, the Christianity of my upbringing was nowhere near as strident or as well-observed as my husband's. For him, I believe atheism is a reaction to the way he was raised. As for me, I experimented with Wicca in high school and college and was a full blown atheist by the age of 25. I was atheist all through my thirties, quoting Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. It was only at age 44 that I started to emerge from atheism, because of the example of one John Michael Greer, who presented a sane, rational example of devout, non-Christian, non-Eastern religion in the form of Druidry.

At any rate, after only three years of religious practices of daily discursive meditation, prayer, the Druid Sphere of Protection, and divination, I consider myself as religious as they come. What an odd state for a former atheist! Being raised in a materialist Christian household of the type that is quite common in the middle and upper-middle classes, I feel obliged to try to answer the question "Why won't God heal amputees?"

Why won't God heal amputees?

1. Because Meat World sucks. HARD. What's Meat World? Meat World, my friend, is the material plane. It is absolutely awful here. Yes, it can be a place of stunning beauty and kindness, but most of the time, it's harsh and brutal. For instance, there once was a mallard duck who was raped to death by a gang of male mallards, after which she was pulled apart by raccoons and hawks, feasted upon, and finally done away with by maggots and ants. Did she deserve it?

No. Did the amputee deserve it? I'm going to say what any rational person would say -- I have no flipping idea, and if he did, it's not my place to make that judgement!

Let's look at how a Christian would answer this question... "The Lord works in mysterious ways." To that, I say NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The problem with a Christian excusing their God's capricious cruelty is that many of them presume their dogmas contain everything one needs to know about the world. I am not making excuses for God's cruelty if that is what is really going on here. What I am saying is I don't know.

Now let's take a look at how atheists answer the Did He Deserve It? question. They are going to say absolutely not, the event was random and chaotic as goes the world we live in. With this equally thoughtstopping answer, any further curiosity as to the forces working in the amputee's life are summarily dismissed.

Instead of looking at the amputee's plight as a binary -- it's either A or B -- maybe we can try looking at a third possibility. As horrific as it is to have a limb amputated, there just might be lessons to be learned not only for the amputee who has no choice but to live without his limb/limbs but for the people around him who have the choice either to act as harmers or helpers. It's almost as if the world sucks because it is a school or testing ground.

A matrix, if you will. Speaking of matrices, remember that part of The Matrix when Neo and Agent Smith have a chat about the state of the world? Agent Smith said that a perfect Matrix where nothing bad ever happened had been tried and that the experiment utterly failed.

The reason we have amputees, guinea worms, and pedophiles is because we are all being tested at every moment of material existence. Those of us who are lucky to have no encounters with amputation, guinea worms, or pedos have a duty to help those who have been harmed by the aforementioned terrible things as well as all of the other afflictions of the material. What we are not to do is gloat about how sweet we have it in comparison or the opposite, to pretend that nobody has it worse than we do.

We humans begin to fail the tests of the material plane the moment we hoard a bunch of goodies for ourselves and refuse to share what we have, whether that is in a small way such as getting mad that a family member wants a bite of our food or a large way such as holing up in an environmentally-devastating, fully gentrified McMansion while virtue signaling to all of the rich neighbors with a shirt that claims Black Lives Matter.

Every moment of our material life represents an opportunity to make the best of what we are given, and that's true for McMansion dwellers and guinea worm victims alike. Is it fair? No, or at least's it isn't fair on any level we can possibly understand. The atheist rejects such an explanation because atheist thought always has to run one way or the other towards the ends of a binary: If God exists, and the world is a testing ground, then God is cruel and I've already failed! Might as well do whatever I want! If God doesn't exist, then it explains everything, because everything gets to be chaotic and random and I can do whatever I want because I'll never be judged by my actions by a superior being!

Yes, some gods are cruel. Some are dying out, like the Christian one (my opinion, anyway), and other gods and demons have often sprung up in their place to grasp the consciousness of would-be Christians. The unseen world is an ecosystem, just like the visible one is an ecosystem. The ecosystem self-regulates and balances in a way that we do not yet understand. Humans don't understand ecosystems. We are easily terrified by nothingburger viruses, dumb enough to use RoundUp in our lawns, and have yet to create a working biodome. Though our scientists like to think they understand how nature works, the proof is in the pudding that they don't. We know even less about the unseen world than we do about the material one. Our scientists are so arrogant and dimwitted, they can't be bothered to study occult phenomena that practically smack you in the face, such as the etheric value of food in relation to the way it is prepared. If we take the arrogant attitude of knowing it all, for instance by trying to micromanage the weather via nanotechnology, we see disastrous results. Dumb humans attempt to force an ecosystem they don't understand into a proscribed mold. The unseen ecosystem also cannot be understood by trying to force it into a proscribed mold, and one of the proscribed molds it is shoved into is the atheist's "it's all chaos and coincidence" theory. The other is the monotheist's "it all works the way God says it does in my religion's holy book."

2. Because God isn't what you think it is.

There are many atheists who are natural mages/witches of exceptional natural talent. I was that atheist. Some of them have figured out that they are naturals and have proceeded to become bad karma grenades, flinging around their bad intentions with glee and never putting two and two together when blowback hits them with a rare cancer, severe depression, or a bully-terrorized child.

I am a natural witch, and it's not just the hair or the black cat that makes me that way. When the gods took me on a few years ago, they had plenty of raw material to work with, but they also had to school me repeatedly on why it's a bad idea to do hostile magic. Every time you wish someone would suffer and/or die (including when you do it subconsciously), you are flinging around hostile magic. It is only when you wake up and say "I don't do that anymore" that you have a chance at a worthwhile deity working with you. If you enjoy flinging around hostile magic (including subconscious hostile magic) and have no plans to stop, you can still work with non-embodied entities, but you're more likely to get the attention of demons, and at that point, the joke is on you, Dr. Faust. If you fool yourself into thinking the entity granting you favors is a god, by all means, go right ahead. Some people can only learn the hard way and if you're that person, I wish for you to be blessed because you'll need it. The sad part is that if you are naturally talented as I was/am, if you go the cacomagic route, you'll miss out on forms of happiness that are deeper that anything that could be granted via material prosperity or ego gratification. If you can put your pride and your preconceived notions of what God is supposed to be aside, you are suddenly in the position to listen to what God has to say to you.

I believe in many gods. I have had the honor of talking to them. I talked to one today. It was my day off. I stole the opportunity to take a long, solitary walk down to one of my town's many forest preserves. While I was on my walk, I talked to one of the Greek gods. We had a brief conversation about the folk tunes I have written to accompany the Orphic Hymns. I also talked to three different dryads or tree spirits. It's not a big deal and I'm not special. Anyone can do this. This is my normal now. I'm far less crazy than when I was atheist, calmer, and more easygoing.

If you've ever had a close relationship with a pet, you're already aware that it is not difficult to communicate with a non-human entity. The difference is that we cannot physically see gods, goddesses, and dryads, or at least I cannot see them. I'm occasionally clairaudient, meaning I can hear birds chirping in the middle of the night that aren't technically there or a voice will make itself heard randomly -- this happened when I was fifteen when I heard a ghost exclaim "Oh my lambs!" in a retail store I was working in at the time -- but I'm no clairvoyant. I can feel the presence of non-corporeal beings though, and because of my Druid practices, I can discern the array of feelings in order to identify what is going on around me. Occultists call the unseen world the subtle planes for a reason. I don't want to freak you out, but you are surrounded by an array of ghosts, spirits, elementals, manatus, gods, and potentially demons right now. If I was in the room with you, it's likely I could communicate with one or two of the beings around you. If you're sensitive, you can sense them wherever you are, like on the train or in your apartment. Most of these creatures are harmless. Just as we tend to see more squirrels, sparrows, and raccoons out here in the suburbs and people in the city encounter rats, cockroaches, and pigeons, certain non-embodied entities go with certain territories. Some of the entities are parasitic and riding you and/or someone you know. You're more likely to have a direct experience with a fairy or an elf in the hinterlands, the more remote the better. You can absolutely attract "good" entities to your domicile. Cultivating a garden, whether outdoors or indoors, is an excellent way of doing this.

Or you can be like the atheist and the Christian, clapping your ears and screaming LA LA LA when someone mentions the inhabitants of the non-physical planes. The Christian believes in a boring universe that in my opinion does not reflect reality. This boring universe is divided into three parts: Meat World, minus the unseen ecosystem, Heaven where all the good repenters go after they die, and Hell, where the majority of the unsaved will burn, including those who lived upright and charitable lives while believing in the wrong gods. The atheist believes only in the humanity-dominated Meat World and an endless gaping void afterwards.

I reject both of these outlooks. I think the reason so many people throughout history have believed in gods and spirits is because gods and spirits are present and accounted for, we just lack the ability to see them. Atheists especially like to think humans are the smartest creatures on the planet. I used to share this belief. We're not the smartest beings on Earth and we never will be. Atheists also think that if a creature is hyper-intelligent, then it must be physical and from outer space. The atheist lacks the creativity to entertain the notion that perhaps some beings are far smarter than humans while also being body-less and from Planet Earth.

The Christian dismisses the idea of non-embodied intelligences so she can return to the comforts of her usual submission programming. God is what the Bible says. There aren't potentials beyond what the Bible describes and the condition of being saved is that you squelch any disagreement with Christian dogma. Furthermore, your job in life is to go out and recruit others to believe in your God exclusively because the Bible instructs you to do so. You are to remain unconcerned about the ethics of forcing conversion to your faith because you must convince yourself they are damned without it. I have only met a handful of Christians who didn't have these sleazy sentiments lurking within them. I would like to be proven wrong about Christians. Actions speak louder than words. By their fruits I shall know them. I hope that in the future, Christians devote more of their energy to emulating Christ than to their current routine of being confused in all things except the drive to gain more converts to their confused cause.

I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or at least if there is an omnipotent God, I highly doubt there would be a book that could inform my tiny human brain about things he said. I vastly prefer to strike up relationships with gods who never claimed omnipotence if they will have me. I believe in Jesus Christ, but I also believe in Allah, the Buddha, the entire Greek pantheon, and too many more to mention. I think people who are like my former atheist self find themselves unable to talk to gods because they are a combination of too arrogant, too preconditioned, and to blind to know what to look for.

When I was an atheist, I remember the desperation I sensed in the faithful, including that of Occidental exotic fetishists who obsessed over various gurus or fawned over the Dalai Lama. Their supposed inner peace proved only that religion truly was the opiate of the masses. To be atheist is to declare oneself an island separate from "all that nonsense" which starts looking like mumbo jumbo if you achieve the goal of lumping it all together in one steaming pile of woo. Never mind the series of odd synchronicities in the lead up to Trump's election. Never mind the kid in Dr. Ian Stevenson's patient archive who remembered every detail of being a fighter pilot in his past life to the point of knowing his old Air Force buddy's names. Nothing to see here, folks...

3. Because of Reincarnation and That Old Chestnut, "I Could Be Wrong"

The gods I believe in don't seem to be spontaneously healing amputees, though I think that many people who are amputees now will not be amputees in their future lives. I believe I was an amputee in one of my former human lives, though I'm not sure why I was an amputee in a previous life. John Michael Greer says that in his ecosystem-centric view of the Universe, one shared by many occultists like him, people who are human in this incarnation have been through billions of years of incarnations as gradually evolving animal forms on Earth. We became human at a literally glacial pace, and every human soul has spent quality time going through various animal incarnations, all the way from single-celled parameciums to fuzzy mammals. Becoming human represents a jump in intelligence along with specific challenges in order to proof us for the next phase, which is the non-embodied state Druids call Gwnfydd, "the luminous life". After that, there are more complex states we all have the possibility of achieving.

I haven't the remotest idea what they specifically entail because I am not a god. Supposedly I can also screw up and end up going through my animal lives again -- this is the karmic equivalent of having to repeat kindergarten. If I make an absolute mess of my lives, I have a shot at being stripped down to my basest non-physical elements and being swept away by a passing comet, never to return to this solar system again. For me, this seems like a decent incentive not to go down the Chairman Mao or Jeffrey Dahmer route and to attempt to continually refine my compassionate and thoughtful parts instead.

But I could be wrong. Who am I to say how the Matrix works? I know at this point you were waiting for me to take some cheap shots at Eastern religions, and here goes: Buddhism and Hinduism were both extremely wrong when they created caste systems around their beliefs in reincarnation. I've never understood how two religions that fully acknowledge karma can invent a giant civilizational bad karma generator in the form of a caste system. Just... dumb. Institutionalized snobbery does not belong to god, that's strictly the domain of the other team. I know a very smart vegan guy who once said of children who die of horrific cancers that they "probably raped a thousand women in a former life" to me while I was an atheist. This didn't sit well with me. I suppose there wasn't time for him to communicate the short novel I've gone into above, but the problem with his statement was the missing idea that he could have been wrong. I'll never know because I walked out of the conversation that day, condemning him as a fool. I don't think he is a fool anymore; I do suppose he had a point but I wasn't ready to hear any part of it.

I can only speak for myself, but I think the moral of the story is that I should strive to be the most balanced, kindest, and thoughtful person I can be every day whether I am faithful, faithless, or somewhere in between. That's not the easiest prescription when in Meat World, especially when times get tough. Nevertheless, I am going to try and I hope you will too.

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town.

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kimberlysteelemusic

The meme above popped up on social media a few weeks ago, and like many pictures, it is worth at least a thousand words. I wasn’t able to find the artist for proper accreditation. My apologies in advance if this is your artistic creation — the first place I saw it co-opted without any discernible permission was Facebook.

As I’ve said, this meme packs a few tons of baggage. First and foremost, it reveals the transparent longing of feminist women for power. It also reveals how profoundly naive they are to the concept of blowback.

I have a natural talent for cursing that I no longer use. This talent was remarkable enough that I used to feel I was powerful because of it, and I suppose in a way I was powerful. I don’t curse anymore because cursing is a Faustian bargain. To be good at curses, you must dwell on the plane of curses.

Trigger Happy, Trigger Sad

A feminist ex-friend of mine became triggered when I mentioned that quote from Faust that John Michael Greer often drops in the context of dwelling on the lower astral plane. Let me give you a little backstory. My ex-friend, a long-time vegan, has been obsessed with Donald Trump since 2015, when he began to present a palpable threat to Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the presidency. She fancies herself a born witch, whatever that means, despite being technically atheist. Many of my vegan feminist ex-friends fancy themselves as witches, despite a near complete ignorance of magic. For them, they are witches because they say so and occasionally costume themselves in a manner that suggests sitcom, nose-wiggling witchcraft. My ex-friend had posted her umpteenth Trump-deranged rant, but this time it was wishing disease and death on Trump and his family. I responded (responding was my first mistake, never engage a TDS sufferer) with this quote from Mephistopheles:

“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

My ex-friend is an anxious person. She does not sleep well if she sleeps at all. She is one of the kindest and most hardworking people you’ll ever meet as long as you aren’t Donald Trump or one of his supporters. Before the advent of Donald Trump as president, she was easily able to keep a level head.

Now she posts about Trump approximately eight to twelve times a day. Nobody needs to send her a demon. She is already infested with them. Perhaps, like me, she has the uncanny power to curse. Her curses may not be working on Trump himself, but that malevolent energy lands somewhere. Curses, contrary to what atheists believe, do not occur in a vacuum. What she has failed to understand is that she probably has hexed a Trump supporter successfully even though she could not get to Trump himself. I’m nearly certain that in flyover country or perhaps in her own neighborhood, a Trump supporter has received a chunk of what she wished on Trump and all of his supporters. Perhaps the recipient was the young man at the now-defunct car dealership on Auto Row in the town where I work who is scrambling to make ends meet, his debts closing in around him like the jaws of a trap. Perhaps it was the woman who died alone of cancer in a nursing home in April of this year, unable to see her children and grandchildren during her last moments because of COVID lockdown. Perhaps it was the eighteen year old kid who died in a car accident Saturday on Route 38. They were all Trump supporters, so surely they deserved it, right?

I understand the foul place where she lives because I used to live there too. There’s no getting out of it unless you:

A. Understand that wishing harm on others has dire consequences for you and the people around you.
B. Solemnly resolve not to do that anymore.

Shamanic Shysters™ Inc.

My ex-friend is at least not so tacky as to label herself as a shaman after taking a few online courses. She does not go the full monty like some by prancing around making sigils to hex Trump. Imagine the actual shamans of North America’s past rolling in their burial mounds if they could see the for-profit workshop shysters pushing a two day Shamanic Dreamwork™ course on gullible rich housewives! The idea of becoming an "accredited" shaman in two days would not be nearly as offensive if these weren’t the same desperately affluent people throwing hexes at Trump and his supporters. I wrote a song once that asks “Why do you hurt when we all want to heal?” Did I miss a memo or are shamans supposed to be healers, whether we are talking about shamans past or shamans present?

Like Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an amateur hour atheist witch might have some beginner’s luck, but it is not without blowback. I don’t think it is a coincidence that every leftist I used to pal around with is a barely-hidden smoking crater of depression, anxiety, and anger. Directing that anger at Donald Trump feels good to them, but it has time and time again proven to be an exercise in pointlessness. Trump would be on the brink of being deposed like Jimmy Carter was in 1979 if only the Left had built upon their few remaining strengths instead of throwing their force into nastiness, spite, and literal black magic rituals.

They see themselves as reserves of deadly power and technically they could be correct. Their bad intentions most likely reach the less fortunate Trump supporters by way of synchronicity and karma. Unbeknownst to them, they bring the same bad intentions to themselves and their networks. Meanwhile, they remain serenely convinced by their delusions of grandeur and impenetrable, obtuse classism. They are too cowardly to assess their own weaknesses and would prefer a Maoist genocide to looking honestly at their own privileges. I used to be good friends with these people and now I back away from them in hopes they have forgotten I exist.

Special Just Like Everyone Else

Would-be shamans and witches see themselves as unique but nowadays, they are as ubiquitous as strip malls and bad drivers. You can identify them by their sense of self-importance. They are the ones who claim to be empaths and sensitives. (There is nothing empathic or sensitive about throwing your bad intentions at someone who disagrees with you.) As for their uniqueness, they dutifully and consciously parrot the talking points put forth by CNN and the New York Times. They are unable to tear themselves away from Facebook and Twitter despite the increasing irrelevance of both. Cancelling the cable TV subscription has never crossed their minds. Their inner dialogues have been overtaken by lush fantasies about Donald Trump experiencing misfortune. They are completely blind when misfortune arrives on their doorstep -- their atheism convinces them of their own innocence in matters of spirit. Yet ignorance of the law excuses no one...besides, aren't they the ones always talking a blue streak about justice?

Protecting Oneself

We are not living in easy times, and that is why I believe it is an excellent idea to protect oneself. I'm not talking about insurance, not because I don't recommend it but because I have no expertise in the field. I am talking about magic. Every human being on the planet right now is being targeted by malevolent magic. If you have not been targeted directly by another human's bad intentions (unlikely), you have likely been targeted indirectly via a smartphone, a magazine, or the hypnotizing force of the television. In this age of impotent religions that have discarded the best parts of their ancient routines and rituals for New Age nonsense and mind-emptying Eastern belly button contemplation, you have to take daily measures to shield yourself from the onslaught of psychic crap everyone is neck deep in right now. I am suggesting that everyone over the age of puberty reading this takes up a daily Sphere of Protection or other form of magical banishing ritual, and if you aren't suited to magic, to take up daily prayer to one or more patron gods. I am also suggesting that every person of every age learns discursive meditation, another everyday practice.

The best way of fighting the hexers and the cursers is not to go medieval on them and round them up Inquisition style to put on the rack or in the iron maiden. That approach has been tried before and proof abounds of its ineffectiveness. To defeat those who are mired in their own bad intentions, we must fix our own intentions first. When we become completely unlike them, we become unassailable. The Sphere of Protection can help with that; so can prayer. To combat their thoughtlessness, we become thoughtful via discursive meditation. We defeat their inability to discriminate by setting sensible limits for ourselves. They are determined to fall to the babbling, torturous, depraved, idiot realm of the demonic, so we must be determined to rise to greater realms of complexity, coherence, and beauty that are possible for the human mind and soul.

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town.

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kimberlysteelemusic

Once upon a time, my husband and I were yuppies with yuppie aspirations. He had an executive job and spent his weekends golfing. I planned on owning a large house and going full throttle entrepreneur. Meanwhile, at my husband's work, there was a mentally handicapped guy who my husband's evil coworkers liked to torment. Let's call him Mikey. Mikey was a janitor. My husband was the only male person in the place who refrained from grade-school level bullying of Mikey. The cretins and literal whoremongers (while married with children) my husband worked with played pranks on Mikey, for instance, by glueing coins to the floor.

If there is a hell, my husband's coworkers will be burning in it for a not-short amount of time, and I don't think this is a simple matter of me being humorless. They also liked to torture Mikey by accusing him in a roundabout fashion of "funny" habits, such as compulsive masturbation. Mikey's odd reply to their taunts was "I don't do that anymore." This, of course, was as good as an admission of guilt in their small minds, and would set them into hysterical laughter.

My husband's executive job went away through no fault of his own -- the company went under because of bad business decisions and two or three terrible managers. My aspirations to own a large house and expand my business became deflated by reality as I struggled to support us during nearly three years of my mate's intermittent unemployment. The phrase "I don't do that anymore", however, stuck in my mind as something important.

The Trouble With Christian Repentance

The problem I have always had with the Christian notion of repentance is this idea of living a wholly awful life, perhaps one similar to the pathetic managers and salesmen at my husband's former job, and then being able to suddenly repent at the end of one's life and go to heaven. The concept of Christian repentance was repugnant enough to make me an atheist for many years, as other religions were just as baffling in different ways. Christians like my in-laws (RIP) were brimming with hatred and fear. The Apocalypse for them was always two weeks off into the future. God would come and sweep them away to a bliss they had done nothing to earn while on this plane. My in-laws were Bible bangers who believed the Earth was created in one short week around six thousand years ago. My father-in-law's Biblical literalism, his misogyny, death fetish, plus the unfortunate time when he openly tried to hex my husband's car tires so they would blow out on the road and force us to believe in his God, motivated me to completely avoid him for the last five years of his life. He convinced himself he was going to heaven because he was right with God. His life wasn't easy, but in my opinion, it wasn't an excuse for the way he treated others. It struck me that if those were the people who were convinced they would go to heaven, it made perfect sense that heaven did not exist.

I always was a bit of a freak: long before I believed in reincarnation, I stopped fearing death. I have imagined myself dead, thought about the ways it could happen, plus I love horror movies. As an atheist, I imagined being swallowed into the great black void of space from whence I had come. I never imagined an entire spiritual ecosystem where my current incarnation as Kimberly Steele was one of many. I never anticipated past life memories of being a widow on a yacht or a singing court jester. Yet the funny thing is I had these memories long before I dived into the occult four years ago. I had memories of the yacht when I was a suicidally depressed twelve year old and the court jester came to me at age fifteen. I didn't know who these people were at the time. Now I know.

There is no black void. There is an ecosystem, and because our human brains are not that big or great, we barely have the faintest clue about how it all works. No wonder it seems unfair! The one thing I have gleaned is that it is a great big school or testing ground, and at every single moment we are being proofed. Every second of our lives on the material plane is an opportunity to make the best out of what we are given, and no, I don't mean taking all of our energy and dumping it into getting a bigger house. To a huge degree, spending one's time chasing the McMansion lifestyle equals failure.

The cold fires of my depression were fueled by regret. My young life was filled with regret and guilt for the stupid and awful things I had done, yet it rarely helped me to become a better person. Instead, I wallowed in my misery.

To pull myself out, I had to do a few things. One was ceasing to care what others thought of me. Another was learning to be kind and gentle with myself -- I am the sort who gladly works herself to death and nearly died at the age of 27 because of it. The third, and arguably the most important of all, was to say "I don't do that anymore" when confronted with a regret.

Christian repentance is hollow because the resolution to be a better person is weak. Christianity has been plagued with this issue almost since it began. Martin Luther's Reformation had its roots in outrage over the Catholic doctrine of Indulgences, which was a way of buying one's way out of being punished for one's sins. Protestant hypocrisy one-upped its Catholic counterpart in the form of Calvinism, which pushed that certain people were chosen by God to be saved and the rest were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. In far too many stripes of Christianity, there was every reason to go back to one's old ways. The rich could buy their way out of hell and anyone who subscribed to Calvin's way of thinking didn't have a choice one way or the other. This, plus a convenient Satan readily available to blame for one's own mischief, began the legacy of slipping and sliding around the heavy, onerous burden of responsibility for one's sins.

To make amends, Christian repentance involves plenty of beating oneself up for being such a stupid sinner; the Flagellants spring to mind. There's lots of room for self-harm and self-destruction as one grovels in front of an angry God. What is missing is responsibility and being willing to accept the consequences of one's actions. Repentance without responsibility isn't repentance at all. It's a temporary distraction so the sinner can go back to sinning and still believe she will win whatever game she thinks she's playing in the bitter end.

No More Games

"I don't do that anymore" is far more potent because it isn't an excuse. Instead, "I don't do that anymore" is an affirmation. It does not wallow in regret. It makes a bold statement: I did that behavior, I am sorry I did it, but I will never do it again because I DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE. It creates a new track in space. Though it acknowledges the old one, it does not return to it, because it burns the path of a new and better trajectory. Instead of backsliding and expecting rewards despite continuing an unexamined life of bad behavior, it wholly rejects bad behavior and moves on towards the path of goodness. "I don't do that anymore" is true repentance. It takes Occam's razor to the faux repentances of various religions and strips away the bullcrap of ego-stroking and wish fulfillment. It forces one to keep the original promise.

I used to spend a decent chunk of my time marinating in hatred over real and imagined wrongs people did to me. Years ago, I had a boss who did a bunch of stupid, unjust things as bosses tend to do. Being fairly stupid myself, I threw a curse at this person. I have always been good enough at cursing that if the government had somehow been able to find out how successful I was, they would have sent CIA goons to my door in order to kidnap me and enslave me as their political weapon. Bad things reliably happened to the boss as they often did when I threw curses. I did not put together my own life disasters and misery at the time (blowback) with the hexes I threw at other people, all the while being atheist and a non-believer in the entities behind curses. Here is the secret I learned about curses when I was actively throwing them: for some of us, they are easy. They work. Stuff you would not believe is possible happens to your enemies. Cursing people in this way is the way to commit the perfect crime: no fingerprints, no hired guns, just ice-cold revenge. The problem with curses is their cost. I thought I could throw a curse without suffering for it, but that isn't how it works. Many would be witches and mages think they can throw a curse (usually against Trump and his followers) and come away with their hands clean. Nope. They can carry on with their curses and as long as they believe they are free from karma, they hilariously don't connect their depression, health problems, and the disasters that befall their families as related to their Nightly Hex Amateur Hour.

The reason cursing doesn't help the curser is because it places the curser on a lower realm of the astral plane. Cursing demotes you by a few astral neighborhoods every time you do it even if you live in Chelsea or Echo Park on the material plane. When I was cursing and hexing on a regular basis, my dreams were plagued by entities that chased and harassed me. What did I expect? There's an old Chinese proverb about going to bed with dogs and waking up with fleas...

Only now that I don't do that anymore am I happy and free, because I don't wish for my enemies to be cursed. I wish for them to be blessed, because not only do I want the good to ricochet back in my direction... they need it!

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town.

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kimberlysteelemusic

Watch on YouTube

Save Our Children protests are getting bigger all the time. The connection has been made between the pandemic and its wag the dog aspect. And the Left remains clueless and paranoid about putting kids back into schools and opening up restaurants and small businesses, garnering more ire from common people, as if they needed more. Notice how many are calling for the death of pedophiles and directly associating them with Hollywood. This is a powder keg.

The Professional Managerial Class (heretofore referred to as the PMC) has committed suicide, it just doesn't know it yet. This turn of events baffles me as much as anyone else: Why did they do it? Are they ever going to realize what they've done? The Coronapocalypse was the instrument of self-strangulation, and since it wasn't adequate to the task, the victim employed arson, rioting, looting, and murder in order to complete the job.

If we compare the PMC's condition to acute anorexia, it is a case of preferring the condition of death to that of being fat. In the PMC's case, the excess weight that must be ruthlessly cut is populism, and in the US, evil flab is represented by Donald Trump.

Not Ready To Die

The PMC is still living in a fairy tale they don't understand is over. For instance, there's a woman I know who is a perfectly pleasant snob. She lives in a gargantuan house on an estate size lot. Her husband is the money of the family. Almost all of her energy goes into scrubbing every surface of her mammoth home (her kids are grown up) and tidying for imaginary guests as she is largely antisocial. She is not formally diagnosed with the disorder as far as I know or care, but I suspect she has OCD in the form of compulsive cleaning. Her husband's career is tied to the success of the travel industry. In other words, they are in the unenviable position of an endangered species.

There's a PMC couple living in on the West Coast with two children. The husband is in asset management and his wife is a nurse. Family money is in play as one of the grandparents heavily subsidizes all of children and grandchildren. The kids have turned out to be disasters in most respects. The nurse is only person in her extended family who doesn't have a raging addiction to alcohol or worse, and she struggles against the tide of disaster that is the family she married into. Her husband cannot cook, cannot fix the sink, has never built so much as a wooden box, and doesn't know how to operate a lawnmower despite the fact his house sits on a lawn. To top it off, he is recently unemployed and there is no job for him to which to return. Unemployment subsidies will run out shortly and she is pregnant with her third child.

Another PMC I know depends on stock market dividends to survive. At least he can cook and fix a leaky faucet.

The PMC's mistake is the notion they can subsist on the post-COVID government gravy train forever. Because they live in an artificial, fragile bubble, they don't understand the value of practical skills or prepping. Until COVID hit, preppers were looked down upon as deplorable conspiracy theorists. When the S did hit TF, the inept former non-preppers hoarded toilet paper.

The PMC has no idea how to live simply, modestly, or sustainably. They don't grow tomatoes. They don't save seeds. They don't fix their own sinks. They're in trouble, but it is hard to pity them, because:

1. They are squarely to blame for the current predicament
2. They don't exist in a vacuum

Be Very, Very Afraid

By deliberately crashing the economy via the COVID overreaction and then extending the destruction via mask wearing, social distancing, and the endorsement of riots, the PMC has waged a terror campaign in order to maintain its rapidly-diminishing chokehold upon Western civilization. The PMC thought it would usher in the era of fully automated luxury communism via its mighty plandemic and wound up conjuring its own end in the form of a fetal Dark Age.

Destruction being what it is, the consequences of PMC clownery fall upon everyone. Make no mistake: the person who still pushes mandatory mask-wearing and the illegality of hugs and handshakes is directly responsible for the millions of businesses that have gone down the tubes and for the untold numbers of addicts who have relapsed, children who have been trafficked, and depressed people who have killed themselves out of despair. They have yet to deal with the full load of bad karma they've brought down upon themselves. There is just too much of it to arrive at once short of a large asteroid hitting the Earth.

There are five main industries the PMC has destroyed. They are travel, insurance, entertainment, education, and medicine. In an odd act of non-NIMBYism, the PMC brought the consequences of its actions into its own association-maintained backyard. That's why it has mystified me. I'm not shocked the PMC became literal terrorists and burned down buildings and killed people (Antifa and BLM). I just didn't think they would end themselves like this.

Travel

Travel is one industry that I believe will return within a decade, though I suspect it won't be in such a grandiose form. Airlines were already prone to bankruptcy before the Nothingburger Flu got blown out of proportion. What happens now after hotels in big cities can be commandeered at any time by maniac mayors as addict asylums? What happens to luxury stores when nobody wants to shop there because their contents are considered "reparations" by crazed BLM lunatics, to be reconnoitered by lethal force if necessary? Much of the travel industry existed based on the pretense that businesspeople needed to put their butts in chairs for endless in-person meetings. That is clearly over. The salt in the wound is travel being harder and knowing you can be kicked out of the country (or worse, be quarantined inside it) the next time a severe flu season is used as an excuse for political power overreach.

Insurance

The insurance industry only works if there is an economy to support it. When everyone and their uncle has an insurance claim because of an omni-disaster, the insurance company cannot pay claims. For instance, in Minneapolis where Democratic leadership enabled rioters to burn, loot, and murder with impunity, business owners are quickly running into brick walls when they try to get the money they paid in for that "just in case" scenario. There are only so many GoFundMes one can employ to save a repeatedly looted and burnt business. Like the salon owner who allegedly set up Nancy Pelosi by catching her without a mask at a government-forbidden hair appointment, at some point you have to cut your losses as a business owner and try to make a living far, far away. If every city in California wants so badly to become the next Detroit, the rest of the country cannot waste its time trying to stop it.

Entertainment

The moment of peak cringe for the entertainment industry is hard to pinpoint. I think the goofballs under the leadership of Gal Godot who banded together to sing Imagine, a song about opening borders and giving away everything you own, represent the moment where Hollywood died. I expect to see a gutting of the film and TV industries in years to come. Legacy TV and film producers, including the Disney sacred cow, can expect relentless scrutiny for pedophile activities. Heads could very well end up on pikes because of Pedogate. Professional sports killed itself via wokeness and has become a meme. Oprah, Ellen Degeneres, and Jimmy Kimmel, once adored, are now hated. Netflix has impaled itself on the Cuties stripper pole. Nobody in their right mind trusts CNN or MSNBC. John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are suspected of the nastiest forms of pedophilia, thanks to Chrissy Teigen's creepy tweets revolving around getting her "pedo on" and admitting to feeling like a criminal when she watches Toddlers and Tiaras. Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen for suspicious reasons that could have to do with being accused of being a pedophile by multiple sources.

Education

This is an area where the PMC has taken a hot, steaming dump in their own living room. What does a PMC university administrator do if pensions dry up (say the university ceases to exist and its assets are sold) and they are reduced to depending on Social Security? What do tens of thousands of them do if half of all colleges and universities go out of business in the next ten years?

What has gone unsaid for many, many years is the hard fact that most Americans don't go to college in search of an education. They go so they can gain the prestige of supposedly possessing an education as indicated by a diploma. They go in order to get laid. They go in order to find someone to marry, hence the saying "She went to college for her MRS degree". They go to college in order to experience friendship, and for some that means partying and experimenting with substances. But they absolutely, positively DO NOT GO so they can be locked in a small room in solitary confinement while connected to the outside world solely via a Zoom conference and a crappy mandatory food plan from the cafeteria.

Medicine

In the US, healthcare represents 17.7 percent of the real economy. Let that sink in for a minute. Heathcare is a racket. It is founded in blind superstitions, one of which is the belief that science in its current form is infallible and incorruptible. It is only within the last decade that a significant group of Americans have routinely dared to question their doctor's advice. Documentaries like Forks Over Knives and What The Health were the first foray into questioning the medical profession's conflicts of interest via its payouts from Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Agriculture. There is still a long road to travel. On average, US medical schools offer only 19.6 hours of nutrition education over a four year university stint, according to a 2010 report in Academic Medicine. The cost of seeing a doctor for pinkeye or a routine UTI remains outrageous despite Trump gutting the Obamacare mandate. Personally, I have not had health insurance for several years and have only been able to afford it for a two year stint when my husband had employment with a company known for its great insurance benefits. In the US, one can only afford to see a doctor regularly if they are rich, which kind of defeats the purpose of health insurance, doesn't it? People like me learn to do whatever they can not to catch a cold -- we literally cannot afford to be sick. But I'm not certain I would see a doctor even if I had cancer, because I don't trust the lot of them as far as I can throw them.

So when hospitals locked down over a flu that supposedly overran them with patients, we were all left to ask why so many nurses, doctors, and other people in medical scrubs had time to choreograph and film viral Tik Tok dance videos, including one where they apparently danced while hoisting the corpse of some unfortunate soul? Why should we trust mouse-find-cheese executives in scrubs whose perks come from sleazy Big Pharma reps in expensive suits? I know nurses who were laid off because there aren't enough people in the hospital to justify them being there. Fake hospital footage from Italy was used in March to frighten Americans into believing New York was experiencing the Black Death 2.0. Yet we all know someone who put a cool million into battling cancer and died the most horrible of deaths anyway. The idea these medical "professionals" would like all of us to wear face coverings forever and for always strikes me as suspicious. Aren't they supposed to know more about the human immune system? Or are their motives purely political?

This article raises more questions than it provides answers, and for that I apologize. I am lucky to have reached a point where I am not worried about the future, not because of my advantages imaginary or otherwise, but because I legitimately cannot see a point in worrying about the things over which I have no control. I think we are in line for a hard economic and social reset that has already begun to happen, but how this will affect me or anyone else remains a mystery.

Your opinions and speculations are welcome. I thank you in advance for refraining from profanity.

Here we go again, folks... hard to believe it's already Monday and nearly the middle of September. As they say on Game of Thrones, Winter is Coming!

Submit your question or request for a general "what's up this week" reading and I will be happy to oblige!

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills -- but if you want to donate for it, I'll happily buy myself a book, a snack, or a cup of tea while on the town.

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kimberlysteelemusic

The Indian Chief known as Jack Fiddler lived in a time of scarcity. He was the leader of a tribe called the Sucker in what is now northwestern Ontario, Canada. Near the dawn of the 20th century, the fur trade had decimated the animal population of northwestern Ontario. Hunters and trappers exhausted the forests of their fauna. Trade fell off and people went hungry.

Wendigo became a regular infestation in the area -- that is to say people from Jack Fiddler's tribe and the surrounding tribes regularly went rogue and became insane cannibals living on the fringes. Fiddler, as the resident spiritual healer, reported that he had "defeated" fourteen Wendigos. When his own brother turned Wendigo after a trading expedition ended in starvation, Fiddler had no choice but to euthanize his own sibling. Canadian legislators pegged Fiddler as a mass murderer and put him on trial. Jack Fiddler briefly escaped captivity and hung himself on September 30, 1907.

In the old tales, the Wendigo could not be cured and transformed back into a human. In order to stop a Wendigo, a shaman like Jack Fiddler had to kill it. The Wendigo was like the zombie of modern myth: it was a parasite that could only be killed by eliminating the host. The Wendigo (nowadays labeled as a sufferer of the phenomenon known as Wendigo psychosis) was a material plane menace brought on by starvation's effects upon the brain.

Canadian prosecutors were quick to shunt off Jack Fiddler as the "real" enemy. The Wendigo went unchallenged. Consequently, Fiddler's Wendigos still continue to exist in the most literal sense: my little area of the Midwest spawned Henry Holmes, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, just to name a few.

Another, less obvious form of Wendigo rides the back of entire populations. The Wendigo is more active than ever before, igniting the ill-conceived fury of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, chewing on the fragile psyches of the deranged men and boys who call themselves incels. Not every person the Wendigo infects is prone to monstrous behavior: there are compulsive shopping Wendigos and anime/manga Wendigos, home decorating Wendigos, political correctness Wendigos, and cleanliness Wendigos. The common element of all Wendigos is that they isolate and destroy their hosts.

Excalibur

The sword that kills the Wendigo is gratitude. The concept is simple, but that does not mean that it is easy. When all traces of ingratitude are rooted out, the Wendigo dies.

Of all of the ancient skills that modern people of the West have lost, the first and foremost is gratitude. Nobody knew in 1780 just how rich the common man would become because of petroleum wealth. There was no such thing as a poor and simultaneous overweight person when the USA was young. Such a concept wasn't conceivable.

If we were to hand out Ingrate Awards, the spoiled dauphins and princesses of Antifa and BLM would be first in line. The God complexes of BLM members know no bounds: not only do they seek to redistribute wealth (i.e. hand out the money stolen from people they don't like to people they do like), they hope to erase the complexity of history so that it cannot dare to reflect badly upon them. Antifa is a nearly identical group of spoiled, mostly college-educated crybabies who prefer to dress their brand of violence and looting in ninja thug costumes. Scratch the surface of a BLM/Antifa member and you have a colossal ingrate who dwells in a living hell of I WANT. Each one of them is a screaming, thinly-disguised inner child who sincerely believes the next tantrum will be strong enough to bring the longed-for Apocalypse.

We cannot force demon-obsessed, overgrown children to be grateful, and even if we could, the methods we would be obliged to use would make us just as awful as they have become. The only place we can start is ourselves.

Gratitude is a form of mental alchemy that sublimates and frees virtue while trapping and banishing vice.

Gratitude starts with small stuff. The process is slow but powerful, much like drops of water that eventually carve a river through a mountain range. There is always something to be grateful for, even in times of hardship (and right now, we are experiencing "interesting times" in the most Chinese curse form of the term) and famine. Back in my college days, I became intensely irritated at a professor of mine who happened to be a devout Christian. He wanted us to understand the story of Job. At the time, I thought of Job as a Stockholm Syndrome masochist who, like a battered woman, kept returning to his abuser. The Bible does a fine job of presenting God as a sadistic creep, and the whole "everybody came back to life and was happy in the end" conclusion of the story does little to ameliorate the depravity of its moral. The flaws in the story of Job obfuscated the idea of being stripped (and beaten) down to only one's purest love of the Creator.

Just as Job always found something to be grateful for, and in the end the only thing he had left to be grateful for was his love of his god, we mere mortals can find much to be grateful for, thus partaking in the sublimation that is gratitude. I have memories of a past life where I starved to death as a child. I don't think this is out of the ordinary in the slightest: we all have past lives and due to the nature of the world, we have all starved at least once. Gratitude is the graceful acceptance of limits. Sometimes the limits are an early death. The material plane is a brutal testing ground. You can choose the Luciferian bull in a china shop route and become a one man army against the predicament of it. Hulk smash! Conversely, you can try the other, subtler route and seek to understand why the material plane is the way it is.

When I first accepted that I have lived many lives, I had to come up against the notion that the poor, the deformed, and the unfortunate "deserve" their outcomes. The issue I take with religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism which would assign people their lots in life based on the castes into which they are reincarnated is that old chestnut of mine: I COULD BE WRONG. Just as it offends the crap out of me that some Christians assume theirs is the one and only true God and that everyone else is going to hell, the ignorance of some Hindus and Buddhists who shun slaughterhouse and funeral workers as Untouchable strikes me as equally abhorrent. I still believe I've lived a ton of lives -- I have memories of being a cat several times and a goose before making the human jump -- but I could be wrong, so it makes more sense to do as Martin Luther King Jr. advised and to judge my fellow man upon the content of his character.

Understanding the material plane is full of obstacles means the one way we can help ourselves is to do unto others. There is no better example of what not to do than BLM/Antifa. In this way, ingrates are helpful because they demonstrate what we should be doing by never doing it.

To cultivate gratitude, I have a few suggestions:

Say thank you, not f**k you.
Forgo a perk and give it to or share it with someone else.
Clean or restore something, such as an item or a space, then thank the item or space for its gifts. If you want to get fancy, light a candle or burn incense in thanks, but it's the thought that counts.
Let go of a spite. Look at an event in your past where you felt wronged, think of the person or circumstances that you felt caused it, and say "I forgive them and I let it go."

Solve et Coagula

Now let's look at the process of being grateful. It is possible to be grateful for being detained at a long stoplight. Let's say you are driving to work in your car and you end up at a lengthy stoplight. By invoking the spirit of gratitude instead of reacting like the typical commuter by getting pissy, you unleash two different virtues. One of these is patience. The other is the appreciation of one's situation: a working car, a job to which to commute, and functioning infrastructure are not things that a child soldier in Sierra Leone can boast of enjoying. This does not mean that your situation cannot be improved. Nevertheless, there is always room for gratitude and by invoking it, you attract more reasons to be grateful to yourself as gratitude begets gratitude.

At the same time, there are two negative emotions you can harness at the stoplight. The reason you won't act out in frustration by swearing or otherwise getting angry is because of certain negative traits in your personality. One is egotistical laziness: you don't care if you're late and nothing can make you care -- you are too important to fret about such trivia. Another is that you hate those fidgety, hair-trigger, power weekend types who tailgate other drivers because they are anxious to get to their next exercise in empty-headedness. The two negatives of your laziness and hatred bind together and become lessened as a result.

Generosity is sublimation. That's the secret of it. The more you give, the more you will get, and what you get back will always be in a far larger proportion to what you gave, though not necessarily in the same form. The most generous character of all, Jesus Christ, sublimated himself right into heaven. On the smaller scale, the most generous people are always the happiest because generosity has a way of taking over the soul.

The Wendigo cannot survive this form of onslaught. To defeat the Wendigo in others, we must become the anti-Wendigo. The Wendigo is always hungry. We take only what we need and are then happy, grateful, and full. The Wendigo wants to take what others have. We are content to make do with what we are given, even if that's next to nothing. The Wendigo is blind with desire and hate. We make every effort to unveil our desires and examine the roots of our hatreds.

The Wendigo is infectious but the remedy is lies within.

Profile

Kimberly Steele

Buy Kimberly a tea

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 3rd, 2026 04:17 am

Kimberly Steele

Recent Entries

New Studio Version of the Orphic Hymn to Athena at Bandcamp!

Election Reflections

Ogham Readings on Mondays

The New Normal

Ogham Readings on Mondays

Ogham Readings on Mondays

A Bridge Over Fear

Chord charts to three of the Orphic Hymns

Honoring the Planets In Ways That Don't Involve Money

Ogham Readings on Mondays

Answers for Angry Atheists: Why Won't God Heal Amputees?

Ogham Readings on Mondays

Feminist Witches: The Thirst For Power

Ogham Readings on Mondays

The Power of "I Don't Do That Anymore"

Ogham Readings on Mondays

The Left Really, Really Needs to Worry About Pedogate, Con't...

The Suicide of the Professional Managerial Class

Ogham Readings on Mondays

How To Kill A Wendigo: Part Two: Sublimation

Profile

December 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags