The Grimoire Day 13

Laziness reigns today after the quest for the $14 TV concluded yesterday in success.  Unfortunately, mental exhaustion from last week and trying to wash away same with ethanol on New Year's Eve seems to have left me, while not hung over, certainly dulled in both sharpness and brightness.  There is no magical way I know around the need for rest when you have burned out.

Day 13

Be mindful of your limits.  My culture is not; again, like the situation with solitary, transitory meals, almost seems designed to disrespect human capacity.  There is nothing wrong with trying to expand your capacity, when you can, but we seem, in my culture, to view exhaustion and toil as moral good.  It is not. 

I know many ways to draw upon energy, many energies on which to draw, and I suspect you will figure out, as you try, which ones are comfortable to use (I like sunlight and wind and the ground beneath my feet.  I also have really good natural capacities for dealing with disruptive, fractious and negatively-experienced energies [a fact that gets me into a lot of trouble].  I like flowing water, too.)  When you eat, you may turn your thoughts toward what you have eaten and write your intentions on what you choose to do with the energy that food gives you.  I like that trick a lot, perhaps a little too much, as I am a raging hypnophobe who had to take up running to deal with over 15 years of eating for energy-to-make-up-for-lack-of-sleep.  Also, if you have chronic digestive troubles, I am not certain this won't aggravate them - I'm sure there is a means by which you can adapt that technique to easing digestion, but I have never had to, so my thoughts on the matter are entirely speculative.

Anyway, we witches love to talk about energy and energies and we worker bees in our sundry hives love to talk about our energy levels, but one thing I don't hear very often, and only picked up on my own and shockingly late is that energy is not the whole story of how and what and how much we can do.  There is also the structure that carries the energy, whether this is your physical meat or the pathways that people imagine running through said physical meat, along which energy is meant to travel. 

Those fatigue.  And more energy is no more the solution to structural fatigue than more water is the solution to crapped out plumbing. 
I am rambling.  Here's what's to do about structural fatigue:  sometimes it is enough to simply rest.  Most of the time it is, it's just a matter of time and figuring out levels of restfulness (ranging from sleep and building gradually in activity levels and then backing them off when you start hitting real resistance seems to work, but I cannot know for you what real resistance and what levels of activity are going to work - do what you can and taper off when it gets to be work).  But, again, if you are a part of my culture, whether or not it is yours, that time is rarely available and our culture offers no notion of strategies to make what we have useful (thus we always return to work from leave more exhausted than we left).  So there is a thing that can help make the whole thing a little more - as much as it seems like heresy, or, at least as profoundly wrongheaded as offering tips on how to choose the safest crystal meth or black tar heroin out there (neither of which I have actually tried, so don't ask me) - efficient

This one is just a matter of visualization, and, in a way, a matter of throwing energy at a problem that energy doesn't fix.  Doesn't fix on its own, anyway, this is a matter of intention.  Framing things as a visualization is a weird way for me to do it, since I am far more tactile than I am visual, but what the hell.

You want to start by grounding, but, if you're the sort who starts throwing open the channels when you ground and picturing energy flowing through you, you may want to try and hold back a little.  This is more passive.  For me, it is like waves coming in on low tide.  Let energy in, but don't make it flow quickly or hot or bright or whatever you would do to raise up a good head of steam.  Keep it dark and cool and slow.

Follow the energy and feel where it goes.  Or see where it goes.  Or listen for the echoes (actually, that sounds kind of cool.  I ought to try that).  Get a sense of those pathways, and let your energies move through them passively.  Relax your body for this one. 

Once you've got it, make your intention to fill the cracks, fix the pipes, straighten what is bent.  Let this go for a while.  If you nap, that's pretty cool, and if you nap as a habit, this is a good meditation to get used to doing when you go for a nap.  I always feel funny when I try it for a night's sleep - any meditative state when I am sleeping tends to extend my consciousness into stages of sleep for which you really don't want to be conscious, because sleep paralysis is scary when you're consciously aware of it, but that may just be my own brain damage. 

Try to go for about half an hour or 45 minutes.  After that, slowly, over the next couple of hours, increase the flow of energy (this will happen naturally if you engage in any normal activity - just ease into it a little).  The whole cycle will take you about 3 hours minimum to get back to a semblance of full capacity, if you really need to get there.  Otherwise, keep yourself on light duty (not total rest, or you're likely to get restless) for the rest of the day.  Take a walk that ends about an hour before you go to bed.

That's what I've got today.  Off to take my own advice.