The magic of diligence

Declarations + dedicated practice + more-than-human collaboration

Dec 11, 2023

Dear readers,

In Part 3 of the Making December Magic series, I shared about my word of the year for 2023 - enchantment - and how, looking back, the year was also filled with diligence and dedication. Today’s installment is a bit of a sidebar to the Making December Magic series - there are no instructions or exercises here - but essential to the process. Today I want to share a little bit more about the magic of diligence, in the lead-up to the next installment on the solstice spell (which is for me, the pinnacle of the process). Our words are spells, but the rest of the spell is what we do to make it happen, and what seen and unseen forces do to collaborate with us.

I talk a lot about making magic, and practice making magic. For me, making magic means honoring and working with unseen realms and larger forces, and making our actions and intentions clear with our hearts, minds, words, and bodies, making our intentions and wishes material and actionable, in collaboration with the unseen and larger forces. I practice magic through spells, prayers, rituals, and through the mundane activities of my daily life. For me, the unseen realms are my dreams, ancestors, nature, astrological energies, and mysteries that I cannot see, fathom, or explain. I make space for the mystery and unknowable and unnamable to be a part of this.

A big part of magic is showing up, again and again. And there is magic to that.

The spot in my kitchen where I do the majority of my writing, which is not ergonomically sound and I may need to work on that in 2024 ;)

In 2023, one of my big aspirations was putting more writing out in the world. I cast my solstice spell, I put this on a vision board, and,

I wrote the heck out of the year.

I wrote almost daily. I started this Substack. I set a weekly publishing goal and met it. I set reachable goals, and stuck to them.

Some very essential parts of myself were once new year’s aspirations. I became a vegetarian when I was 15 on New Year’s 1995. My mom thought it was “a phase” (it has been a long phase, approaching 29 years :).

I started a daily meditation practice on New Year’s 2008. I had a few failed starts in the years before that. This is a helpful reminder that sometimes things don’t take on the first try, but if an aspiration or intention is still alive, we can carry them over and forward and keepy trying. But ultimately, having a daily meditation practice just requires diligence. It requires showing up every day and making it a part of your life.

Which is also to say, I have been working with New Year’s magic since I was a teenager in the mid-90s. Very significant parts of my life have been shaped by declaring them on this day.

New Year’s itself is the flip of the calendar. It takes on the significance that we bestow it. For me, the solstice has become a bigger part of my practice, the main part of my celebration, in the spirit of honoring and celebrating natural cycles. There is also power in the collective honoring of these days as fresh starts, as a chance to begin again and start anew.

The magic isn’t only in the declaration. The magic is also in the doing. The magic is in the action.

The magic is in waking up and meditating first thing every morning.

The magic is in making it a habit.

The magic is in the diligence and dedication.

What we practice is what we become.

What are you practicing? What are you becoming?

Full disclosure: diligence is not always easy for me. An area where I struggle with diligence is phone usage. When I go back over my past few years of December magic, reducing phone usage is a recurring theme. And one I feel like I always need to work on.

I know I am not alone in this. I know these devices are built to be addictive - and they are.

Repeatedly, I set the intention for what adrienne maree brown calls “attention liberation” (a phrase I love). It goes well with attention attunement.

As I already noted, sometimes an intention takes a few years to stick.

What I do know is that I feel fortunate to be a Xennial who spent my childhood and some years of early adulthood free from social media and smartphones. I remember what this was like. And I know those years - especially the ones where I lived without internet at home, during most of the the 2000s - were some of the most creative of my life.

So this year, again, I want to dedicate myself to attention liberation for the sake of my creativity.

So be it. See to it

The great science fiction author Octavia Butler said:

“SO BE IT! SEE TO IT!”1

She wrote this in one of her journals that is in her archives, in an entry about being a bestselling writer (I highly recommend reading the whole entry).

SO BE IT - the words you declare, the spell you cast.

SEE TO IT - the actions you take to make those words a reality.

Our intentions and aspirations are only as good as our actions take us.

When I look back at what I did in 2023 and how I showed up, it was a lot of dreams and magic,

AND,

it was rooted in daily action, continually showing up, practicing, putting myself out there.

So, beloved reader, make your declarations. Your aspirations and intentions. State your dreams clearly out loud. Call in what you want.

AND.

Make it happen. SEE TO IT. Show up, every day. Make it a practice, a habit. Make them part of you, with the magic of your diligence and dedication.

But also, remember that we are not - we are never - acting alone. We are always acting with. The universe - more-than human nature, unseen forces, the wider whole of which we are a part2 - is always collaborating with us. Stay humble, and know that you are not doing this alone. You don’t have to do it alone and in fact are not doing it alone. Even when it might feel like it.

I share all of this ahead of the solstice spell post that will be forthcoming in the Making December Magic series. Our words matter. Our declarations matter. And, our actions make them happen. Our collaborations make them happen. That is the magic of diligence.

With love for the beauty of your dreams,

Stephanie

Enchantable

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