Happy Midsummer, or Lammas, or Lughnasadh, or whatever else today is called in your tradition. If today isn't particularly significant to your practice, then happy August 1st.
My practice is currently reaching the starting/ending point of many cycles. September 3rd is a significant day for me and a particular goddess, whose life-death cycle then begins anew on the Autumn Equinox. Then, we're only a couple of months out from the beginning of the Dark Season--both spiritually and literally, as we'll be turning the clocks back an hour in early November.
To make a long story short, I am approaching a period which will entail many symbolic deaths. Death of a goddess, death of the Light Season, and potentially the death of much of what I've been working on for the last several months. So I am dedicating the next month or so to preparing for what I've got coming.
The past year or so has been extremely tumultuous for me. I've had to restructure my entire way of life several times over, and for a couple months I was at probably the lowest point I've ever experienced. Above all, it's been a period of transitions, some of them more extreme than others. Nearly my entire spiritual practice was shattered, and I've had to rebuild essentially from square one (though thankfully I wasn't alone in building everything up this time). On top of that, I've had to completely reprioritize my methods of caring for myself, both physically and mentally. I could barely haul my ass out of bed in January, let alone keep up with routines and appointments or even my own sanity. So as the Dark Season looms once again, I've had to reckon with the real possibility that I'll have to start all over again. I guess, in a sense, all that makes this post the sort of spiritual successor to this article I wrote a few months ago while still very solidly in the throes of everything being a mess.
I've had strong habits and systems to lean back on before, but this past winter knocked all of them out of whack. I need to make sure that doesn't happen again. That's sort of what I've been doing all spring and summer--forming better, more sustainable habits with built-in flexibility that will help me get through rough patches, and hopefully even another extremely dark period if it comes to that. Hopefully it won't, since I'm packing more heat than I was last year, but you know, never hurts to be extra wary.
Here's a (non-exhaustive) overview of what I've been working on:
- I've started using a habit tracker/digital to-do list again! In the past, I never really found one that stuck with me, and I cycled through just about every app that you're probably about to try and recommend me right now. But I've come back and settled on Habitica for now, and I've been using it for the last month or so and it seems to be sticking this time. I'm really taking advantage of the tagging system for to-dos and daily routines, so that I can keep my personal stuff, self care stuff, creative stuff, and work stuff all in one place, rather than in a bunch of separate to-do lists scattered across various mediums.
- Up until around September 2022, I had a really extensive daily prayer routine. This got totally thrown out the window due to just how extremely busy (and then unbelievably burnt-out) I was, and I never even thought of trying to pick it back up for over a year. Then I realized that part of the mental barrier for me was that I was keeping all my prayers saved on a Notion file, which meant I'd have to tab through several Notion pages to make it through all the prayers I was doing on any given day. Fuck that. I'm currently repurposing an old hardback journal and handwriting the prayers I want to reintroduce into my routines, and I'm keeping that journal on my bedside table.
- Doing my damnedest to get (and keep) my financials in order. I always stayed on top of my credit card bills and whatnot, but now that I've got a big-kid job, I've also got big-kid accounts to keep track of. This mostly just invovled enrolling in e-statements for everything, partially to save paper but mostly so I could actually save them all in one place instead of having lots of paper statements floating around. I'm also in the process of opening a retirement account, which--given my age and the current state of the world--feels a bit like drops in a bucket, but y'know. Being financially responsible and all that.
- Probably the biggest and most daunting task of them all: killing the social media brainrot and doomscrolling impulses. Holy shit, you guys, I have no idea how I let it get so bad. I've set app timers on my phone for the worst offenders, and I still regularly hit my limits on them before the workday is even over. I left a lot of spaces that were no longer right for me, because they enabled me to be a terminally-online argumentative asshole. I'm really only active on the Fediverse and a select few Discord servers anymore. I still have an Instagram, mostly to keep up with friends from college, but I've set a timer on that as well because of those blasted reels and their doom-inducing comment sections. It's been weird coming up with things to do to replace the impulse to constantly be checking my phone or refreshing tabs on a browser. It's been even weirder trying to sit with the boredom I experience when there's truly nothing else to do. But I seem to be on the up and up, so I'm refusing to give up now.
I'm not entirely sure what's driving me to post this all publicly online, aside from maybe as a record of how much work I've put into this shit, if I ever find myself wanting to fall back into my old ways. It's not all immediately spiritually-related, though a lot of it is, and honestly at this point it's pretty tough to make a real differentiation between the mundane and the spiritual in my day to day life. I guess the start of the month served as a reminder that we're nearly two-thirds of the way through this year already, and that the Dark Season and the wonderful world of seasonal depression are both just right around the corner.
I think I'll be more prepared this time. At least, I sure hope I will.