brightgnosis - Tumblr blog

[brightgnosis]

TikTok Repost: September 22, 2022

My Brother in Law took care of the garden while we were at the Bluegrass Festival for a week. Still a lot to take care of after I got home, though!

«Oklahoma - Region 2» ⬩ «Grow Zone 7a» ⬩ «Heat Zone 8»

[brightgnosis]

The sacred spiritual bath always includes water and prayer- and sometimes flowers or plants.

From Spiritual Bathing: Healing Rituals and Traditions From Around the World, published 2003; Rosita Arvigo and Nadine Epstein (My Ko-Fi Here)

[brightgnosis]

ROUND 2 ALREADY HERE WE GO!

ETA: We're good. The wall cloud above us wasn't very fun looking, and I definitely wasn't happy with being directly under an updraft (literally my least favorite place to be. Feeling a wall cloud sucking things up is always eerie as all hell). But I got an all-canned Shephard's Pie in the Oven now and things seem to have calmed down for a bit.

Man ... May is definitely going to be fun, if this is what the ass-end of April's acting like already.

[brightgnosis]

Nothing beats boxing yourself into a hoarder's pantry to take inventory and then suddenly having to emergency abandon ship for a Tornado Warning- then finding out your area's fine, but the area where the Farm is, is probably Very Much Not 🤣😭 Guess we'll find out if the farm got hit Wednesday.

"This is a particularly large and dangerous Tornado" is generally not a phrase you actually see on Tornado Warnings often, though. So, us ... Yeah. This bodes well for May.

[brightgnosis]

I truly encourage you to add things that simply bring you joy to your list of things to do that day.

it doesn't have to be big, it can be as simple as making your favourite drink or food for lunch or spending some time on a hobby or watching a show you enjoy.

adding things to look forward to and giving yourself time to experience those things is just as important as doing every other thing on that list.

you're allowed to plan to do things for no other reason than it makes you happy.

[brightgnosis]

girl typing a very specific question into google search bar, scrunching her face as she takes time to make sure she hasn't made any spelling errors, hitting enter, shaking her head as google only presents her with unhelpful websites that don't answer her query at all, moving her cursor back to the search bar and clicking on it so she can carefully write 'reddit' at the end, hitting enter again, sighing with relief as she finds a link to a reddit post asking the exact question she needed answered posted in a subreddit for a very niche topic, finally moving her cursor to click on the link, wondering why she didn't go straight to the subreddit earlier, only to be met with a deleted comment with a reply from the OP stating 'that was very helpful, thanks', sighing with frustration as she moves her cursor back to the search bar so she can copy the link and paste it into the wayback machine,

[brightgnosis]

I love it when the edgelords try to follow me.

[brightgnosis]

To bless a spiritual bath or make water holy for use in a spiritual bath, it needs to be consecrated in some fashion […] There are many ways to bless a spiritual bath. Try one of [many traditional methods], or simply say a heartfelt prayer of your own […] that is most meaningful to you.

From Crossroads Mamas: 105 Spiritual Baths for Every Occasion, published 2012; Denise Alvarado and Madrina Angelique (My Ko-Fi Here)

[brightgnosis]

theory aside I believe it is important that your witchcraft be, first and foremost, Cool As Fuck. it needs to slap. if you don't have something that you're like "yeah this is just plain awesome" what are you doing. live a little

[brightgnosis]

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

[brightgnosis]

It is important that you love and accept yourself and the sacred vessel that you are.

From The Way of the Water Priestess: Entering the World of Water Magic, published 2021; Annwyn Avalon (My Ko-Fi Here)

[brightgnosis]

it's so funny how half of us are like "food is sacred and the kitchen is holy ground. to break bread with others is inherently sacrament" and the other half of us are like "my villain origin story is someone looked at me when i was in the kitchen"

[brightgnosis]

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

[brightgnosis]

Nothing to see, here. Just two loving Khajiiti parents and our wonderful Nord daughter (aka my Husband and I, and @resolvedbrunette) having family time in ESO. An absolutely completely normal family. Promise.

[brightgnosis]

I went out to the garden after dinner. Deadheaded the Rose bush my Husband bought (the dual graft Burgundy and White Icebergs), plus sowed several of the flowers I've been meaning to sow the last couple of days and just keep not getting around to.

⇛ Put the Oriental Poppy (Color Mix) and California Poppy (Thai Silk and Watermelon Heaven) in the front garden, in the box by the fence; the same one where the Absinthe Wormwood and Mugwort are.

⇛ Put the Cosmos (Apricot Lemonade, Cupcake Blush, XSenia, and Summer Dreams) in the front garden, in the box by the Garage. Or half of it, anyway. The other half is taken up by the Chamomile and Yarrow- which I planted some Calendula (Pacific Beauty) on that side tonight as well, behind those.

⇛ Seeded the Woodland Flowering Tobacco in the old Mullein pot in the back corner, as well as the pot up by the John F. Kennedy Rose. I also put some of its seeds in one of the pots on the back deck by the Woodland Sage (April Night (?) and Rose Marvel) and Scarlet Sage we planted for the Hummingbirds.

Speaking of: My Father in Law thinks the Hummingbird feeder is under the Kitchen sink, so I'll look for it there tomorrow- and if not then I'll buy a new one. Because he said that's the last possible place it could be.

After it rains this weekend I'll probably go out and seed the Sunflowers, Okra, Peas and Beans, and Carnations. But tonight it was just lovely enough to sit out there and seed a few while the breeze carried the scent of Honeysuckle and impending rain around.

I missed Spring so much.

[brightgnosis]

saw this on twitter and wanted to save it here

[brightgnosis]

Ethos governs how the Beloved-of-Art is cognized, summed, encountered, and reified. It is always present as a first principle, whether conscious or not, and whether acknowledged or not [...] It is often the case [however] that magical aspiration and ethos are unknowingly in conflict, and sabotage the work. Praxis, which arises out of Ethos, governs the active cultivation and nurturance of the bond with the Beloved, but alto its strengthening or weakening. In addition to rigor of exaction and breadth of inspiration, praxis must be sincere, devoted, and in accordance with the guidance of the Heart.

From Thirteen Pathways of Occult Herbalism, published 2017; Daniel Schulke (My Ko-Fi Here)

*I love how different this is from Josh Williams' edgelordic bitching about Ethos and Morality. Bless Schulke for not having his head up his ass and actually understanding Ethics and Morals and how they actually work.