On the future

Just lately I’ve been re-examining my magical practice within the context of my Saturn-influenced Judaism, and I’ve come to the conclusion that most things that people try to accomplish with magic are achievable merely with discipline and time.

A very Saturnine observation.

I tend to come to magic in times of crisis. During my annus horribilis of 2018 I found my old Haindl deck and started reading tarot obsessively. I even briefly read it for money over the phone. The company I worked for also ran adult chat lines, but the tarot paid better.

I suppose in times of crisis one wants to be able to predict and mitigate for the future. But of course, in times of crisis, you’re also liable to make unwise decisions.

Writing Hive was also, to some extent, about predicting and mitigating for the future, as much science fiction is. Today I picked up two books I’ve been meaning to read: Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which takes place next year. She wrote it in 1993, envisioning a drastically bleak California just 31 years away – extreme, but in some disturbing ways, not unrecognisable.

One of my beta readers commented that Hive seems to be set too close to our present time. Perhaps in retrospect I could have postponed the bleak future that Hive presents beyond the 37 years given…yet look at our present time.

It’s nearly March. In less than a month, it will have been a year since I had to leave my house for a few months. Could I have foreseen it? When we moved here from Oxford, the four adults and at the time two children, my partner contracted with a deity to help find us the right home. A few days before our temporary departure, as tensions mounted and our sense of safety around our blended-family housemates evaporated, he performed a ritual to the same deity to void our contract.

Did magic bind us to our housemates for longer? What would have happened with mere discipline and time?

It’s been nearly a year, and things are starting to feel better. The looming crisis of the future is subsiding, and in its place I can see plans, ideas, and goals. Things I can accomplish for myself and my family, given enough discipline and time. And I feel less and less like playing the probability game that is magic. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or just a thing?