I’m sitting down to write this as I take perhaps my first deep breath since January. Life has been a whirlwind. The Wheel of Fortune has taken a full, speedy revolution in 12 short weeks. If you’d asked me six months ago where I’d be now, I would’ve confidently responded: In the Yarden, in Queens, enjoying the beginnings of spring in the home I have come to love more than any place I’ve ever been. But, as you may suspect, I am not writing to you from the Yarden, or Queens, or even an apartment for that matter. I am writing to you from the first dining room table I’ve ever had in my adult life, in a big beautiful old barn, in a storybook village in Upstate New York. I am writing to you from what has been for two months, quite a gorgeous but unsettled place.
My husband and I have been dreaming of upstate life for years — a seemingly far away goalpost that we hadn’t yet mapped the route to. We didn’t know when, we just knew it had to be before having children. Over the last couple of years, we’ve found ourselves more comfortable, delighted, grateful, and content than we’ve ever been, and also keenly aware that there was a time limit on our sweet little life as we knew it. We didn’t know how, and we didn’t know when, but we knew we’d find ourselves up here someday.
When Bakara sent me the listing for a big red barn in the town where she and EM had recently moved, I didn’t actually imagine this happening. It was fun to ponder the possibility, but I didn’t seriously think we would do it. How could we? We were settled into a very lovely life and moving is truly the 9th circle of hell (with a hefty cover charge, no less). But soon, unexpectedly, something shifted and I just knew. I studied the big red barn’s active listing and a defunct one from a past sale, obsessively piecing together 90% of the blueprint through context clues and a lot of girl math. At some point, without the consent of my conscious mind, I had a vision of myself, years in the future, standing at the kitchen counter warming up a baby bottle. We signed the lease a few days later, and suddenly we had three weeks to bid farewell to our sweet little life and start anew.
As god’s timing would have it, this was right before Tucson, so time-crunch be damned, off I went (and I’d do it again). That week in the desert, I lived in awe of all the wishes-come-true that brought me there, and bursted with excitement for the dreams that were just beginning to manifest. I felt a level of glee and anticipation too expansive for my body to hold. I cried a lot of joyful tears, I set aside time just to think about how thrilled I was, and spent hours and hours visualizing the new chapter that was about to begin.
Coming home from Tucson with two weeks on the countdown it became real. In just two days, with heroic efforts, we packed our whole life into boxes. Within a week I was on the Amtrak, headed back upstate not to stay, but to process our Tucson pallet. After pricing our gorgeous crystals and deeeeeep cleaning my big empty house, I went back to Queens for 72 hours to bid her farewell, and then, with a moving truck following closely behind, headed back upstate for good.
I knew this transitional period would be intense but I certainly underestimated just how unmoored I would be. The Wheel of Fortune has no emergency break and slows down for no one. Just a few days into starting a brand new life, the weekly stream of Tucson live sales kicked off. EM’s busiest time of the year + such a massive reconfiguring of my personal life was quite the concoction. Shout out to the sustained Chariot energy that overcame me. I put my big girl panties on and embodied a sense of fortitude, drive, and ambition that I haven’t seen in myself maybe ever. I performed highly in the face of overwhelm and grasped for dear life onto any sense of peace or groundedness I could find. I say all of this with nothing but enormous gratitude. I love my work. I love y’all. I love my new home. It has been hard to say the least, but even in the pit of my most overwhelmed and ungrounded moments, I knew that this was all in divine alignment with my truest most beautiful life. That doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it worthwhile.
Not for nothing, I’m in the middle of my Saturn return in my 4th house of home and family. So all of this is very… DUH.
As a creature of well-established rituals and routines, untethering myself from my home felt like cutting off my oxygen 20,000 leagues under the sea. My new home, Big Red, is gorgeous, glorious, and brimming with potential but it wasn’t home yet. It wasn’t warm, soft, glowy, or enchanted. I became enraged at the “color” grey, which I was suddenly surrounded by. Big Red and I didn’t know each other at all; I couldn’t relax within her, settle into her, or let her hold me the way I needed to be held. And one day, panic struck me.
How the hell was I going to teach a seminar on living a profoundly magical life when I was in survival mode? How could I talk to y’all about how easy and accessible it is to live into your magic, to find wonder and gratitude in the everyday when my everyday did not feel wonderful and my gratitude was anything but visceral, the way La Croix tastes like fruit, faint and dissatisfying (although I do love me some La Croix, okay?). How could I possibly practice what I preach while I imploded inside this transitional pressure cooker? And then I realized… that’s exactly the point. I couldn’t have made this offering from inside the twinkle-lit walls and morning-glory covered fences of my cozy, magical, established home in Queens. It would’ve been like preaching from a plush velvet throne in a gilded pulpit about how easy it is to be grateful, how effortless it is to feel good, while everyone craned their necks to see and shifted uncomfortably in hard wooden pews. Gag.
For a brief moment I felt like an imposter for daring to engage with this offering from a place of being so not okay. But that’s just it. So many of us are very not okay sometimes. So many of y’all look at the Saturday Sesh and say I wish I wish but my life is not so sparkly. How could I have possibly delivered this medicine from such a deeply unrelatable state of mental and emotional ease? I couldn’t have. The magic is in the mess. It’s not about being comfortable and already settled into the most deliciously magical life. It’s about a devotion to returning again and again. Returning to nurturance, enchantment, and okay-ness. Finding your way back when the tethers have been cut and you’re floating aimlessly and terrified through the liminal space. It’s precisely because of this unmooring that I am able to bring this wholehearted offering to y’all. It’s because I am starting again, from a much more relatable place, that I have something truly meaningful to share. This transition, the busy-ness, the exhaustion, the untethering, is exactly what equips me to deliver this offering in its fullest, most impactful form.
To be honest, I’m still figuring it out. I’m not quite back in full-blown Empress mode yet, but I can taste it, and not like La Croix, but like a plump cherry tomato still ripening on the vine. My mouth waters with anticipation and my mind is at ease with a profound faith in nature’s brilliant cyclicality. I see the glimmers. I’m treading new paths of nourishing rituals and routines that I never would’ve sought out before, because my old paths were just fine and I really liked the view.
Whether you’re returning or starting anew, the magician’s altar is ready for you. Take a deep breath, gather your tools and let’s make some magic, shall we?
Your fellow magician,
Ali