Believing in the deities that inform different religious ideals and practices is just that: believing in deities. Magic exists irrespective of worshipping gods and goddesses and you don’t have to do that to get the benefits of magic. While there are certain religions like Wicca that believe you can and should call upon the goddess or god to bless your practice, there is no preset witch condition that requires you to work with god/s in order to conduct magic. In the case of a religion like Wicca, you adopt the ideas and hold them to be truthful and sacred to you. If you are Christian, Jewish or other religions, you will have your own god/s that you pray to (or God, singular). This is your religion and the way that your religion makes sense to you through its spiritual ideals.

In witchcraft however, the practices and applications of magic don’t need a deity or god to be valid.

Deity relationships can enhance the work that you do with witchcraft by offering protection or guiding your practice if you believe in god/s. But your practice can easily be guided by your own intuition and experience without deity informing it.

Witch is a term that encompasses all kinds of ideas about deities and gods and doesn’t hold one singular one as self evident or necessary to be a witch. Being a witch is being someone who uses magic, not worships a god or gods though some witches do both. If you do worship deities or god, know that this practice can only inform and enhance your own experience of witchcraft and not change the fundamentals of it.

It’s okay to worship god/s just as it’s okay not to. No matter what your choice is, this doesn’t affect your status as a witch and witchcraft welcomes all kinds of witches into its fold.

All living creatures take breaks, take rests and ebb and flow with energy.

This is the natural state of existence beyond the capitalist authoritarian system that demands constant production for the sake of profit.

To inhabit a state of awareness that you are tired and need rest is radical activism in a world that seeks to deny you this rest. To honor your rhythm of rest is activism in a world that benefits from the exploitation of life.

To allow yourself the space to rest at the expense of profit is activism in a system that demands every moment of your life be monetized.

To play in a system that denies you this creative enjoyment of being alive is radical activism. To simply “vibe is a space of radical consciousness connected to life, our humanity that transcends all cultural conditioning and systemic demands on life.

To return to the state of rest is made impossible without exploitation. Only those with resources are allowed to engage in this kind of natural rest driven rhythm where those who might have the same amounts of “free time” are punished by the system for being able to pursue a rest based existence whether by choice or circumstance.

They are denied this and terrorized by the state for even giving the illusion of opting out of anti life profit production

Being exhausted, then, is to be expected. Allow yourself this exhaustion and do not judge yourself harshly for being in a place that cannot accommodate your own desires through your exhaustion.

It is by design that your only rest time becomes mandatory to perpetuate profit with little else left to create and sustain life. If it were possible to deny you more rest the system would and has done so. You are resisting the authoritarian profit machine by resting.

I started to think about the overlap between doing chores around the house like mending clothes, washing and drying the laundry, doing the dishes, tidying up around the house and how that intersected with ways that we might feel about other things in our lives. Does cleaning up around the house look like the way that we heal?

In many ways, mending the past is taking care of the chores that have piled up from things you’ve done that are now passed. Washing a stain from a bad day off your clothes, throwing away the food from that terrible restaurant experience, making your bed after being too depressed to get up for the past few days… these are all ways that we mend the past through chores.

And sometimes the pasts that we’re mending are psychological, are within us emotionally and those make it difficult to fully show up for our home duties. We don’t have the energy after feeling so emotionally distraught to wash the dishes or to shower. We don’t have the energy to change the sheets or sweep the floor. And these are all things that we know on some level but maybe don’t connect as a form of healing.

It makes sense to see chores as a form of healing or shadow work when you think about the ways that taking care of chores can change your mood. Think about the advice to go exercise when you’re feeling down or get some sunshine. The same can be said about taking a shower, making your bed, tidying up your space– these are all recommendations to shift the energy in your body, mind, and space to help boost your mood. And this is because we’re mending the past in order to create a present moment where we feel a little more connected to balance and harmony.

So maybe when we’re taking care of chores, we can see it as an investment not just in the physical space but also the emotional and spiritual one as well.

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