Chasing the glass slipper

This week the last month has caught up with me. I have not had the presence of mind to do much more than sleep. I blame the kid hacking his way through the physics midterm. Though I suspect that it is a combination of things starting with allergies. I have no reason to believe that it is related to our current pandemic. If only because I think I get a pass from the last one.

In the early part of the 20th century two of my paternal great grandparent came from Hungary to the United States. My great grandfather was part of the aristocracy and grew up incredibly wealthy and pampered. That part of the family saw the writing on the wall and sent their young to America just ahead the first world war. They set him up quite nicely and intended for him to return after this had passed. About the same time a young peasant woman who had worked as a pastry chef since childhood loaded herself on a boat by herself and headed to America in search of a better life. They met in a small town in Illinois where many of the recent Hungarian immigrants gathered. They met fell in love and got married. He was promptly disowned for marrying so far beneath himself. My grandfather was born shortly after. About this time the world saw the first pandemic of the Swine Flu. Only they didn't know it then. It killed the wrong set of people for your average virus. It was killing 20 - 30 year old ranchers, not the just the young and the old. It took them almost half a century to put the mystery together.

My great grandfather had bought a ranch and settled into the life of the gentleman farmer in the midteens. He caught influenza in the winter of 1919. My great grandmother nursed him back to health along with taking care of my grandfather who was an arm baby at the time. During a particularly bad storm he went to do something on the ranch and was still weak from the flu. He caught pneumonia and died shortly there after.

Neither the peasant woman or the baby that she nursed were impacted by the disease. There is something to be said for incredibly tough peasant stock. I figure that there might still be a little residual mother magick laying around for this one :)

My great grandmother was of very tough peasant stock. She survived two husbands (that she got disowned for her peasant status) and countless other hardships. I suspect that I come by my magickal inclinations honestly :)

So this week as I lay around contemplating my belly button in between fevered bouts, I started to ponder the papered versus the tough stock magickally. The good Frater is what I would consider classically trained, thorough and methodical. I tried that route and honestly the glass slipper just didn't fit. My magick is much more catch as catch can. While I have many certificates suitable for framing I do not work well as a papered ceremonial magickian. Like the sisters in the original Grimms fairytale, I would have to shave off way too much of me to make it work. It has been very recently that I have learned to embrace those differences. I just don't work the same way that he does and that is OK.

When we first got together we sort of looked at each others magickal style like alien archaeologists. He had been doing it much longer and I typified that as better than what I did. I have great magickal instincts and a great deal of stuff just works better when I don't think about it too much. It took a long while to realize that we do not work the same way and likely never will. While we have incorporated parts that we like from each others style, there are just things that will never fit. And that is just peachy.

When we did the Enochian stuff, he did the more ceremonial parts and I specialized in the calls. I speak enough languages that it is not hard to get emotion behind words :) We switched it around a few times but it just worked better that way. When we got down to the business of skrying it was completely from two different views. That difference provided a certain ying and yang to the process that worked well for what we were doing. It also gave us valuable insight into each others internal process. I highly recommend it for couples who move in different ways.

So after long hours of pondering my naval, I have determined that we as magickians just need to stop chasing that glass slipper. We need to make our own slipper that embraces our unique styles. In the beginning I was upset when my first few LBRPs did not feel like my mentors who had been doing this for 20 years. Then I switched to why my maigk didn't move like the good Fraters. Eventually I got over myself and just learned to embrace it :) While I have known this for a long time, sometimes it takes a while to sink in :)