When You Stop Seeing Fireflies - On losing your magic, not beating yourself up about it, and finding your way back when you're absolutely knackered.
Let me tell you about a sabbat I missed (one of the good few, to be honest).
Not because I forgot. Not because I was ill, or travelling, or otherwise dramatically occupied. I missed it because it was a Tuesday, and I'd had a Tuesday of a Tuesday, and by the time I remembered the wheel of the year was doing something significant, I was already horizontal on the bed in a state that can only be described as aggressively done. The candles stayed in the drawer. The herbs stayed in the cupboard. I watched something forgettable on Netflix and fell asleep at ten.
Samhain, if you must know. The biggest one.
I woke up the next day with the particular feeling of someone who has let themselves down, which is not a great way to start a Wednesday. And then I made myself a tea and thought about it properly, and I realised I was being completely ridiculous.
This post is for the Tuesday version of all of us. The one who hasn't lit a candle in six weeks, or 6 months. The one who looks at the moon and thinks 'oh, it's full again' and then goes back to their emails or doom scrolling on Facebook. The one who used to feel the turn of the seasons and now mostly just feels tired.
We're not broken. We're busy. There's a difference.
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First: stop apologising to the universe
The universe does not keep attendance records. There is no cosmic register somewhere with our name on it and a column of missed sabbats in red ink. The wheel turns whether we mark it or not, the moon waxes and wanes on its own schedule, and the oak doesn't check whether we performed our Solstice ritual before putting out its leaves.
I know this sounds obvious. It is obvious. And yet a surprising number of people who are drawn to a magical practice also carry around a low-level guilt about not doing it correctly or enough, as if magic were a gym membership you're wasting. It isn't. Magic is not a subscription service. Missing a month doesn't cancel your account.
Granny Weatherwax didn't perform rituals to prove something to the universe. She did them when they were needed…”and witches do things”.
She also, it should be noted, spent a great deal of time doing absolutely ordinary things. Beekeeping. Delivering babies. Being extremely unimpressed by people who confused dressing like a witch with being one. The magic was in her, not in the props. It didn't evaporate when she put the props away.
Ours doesn't either.
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What's actually happening when the fireflies disappear
Here's what I've noticed, after years of having a practice and years of intermittently dropping it completely: the magic doesn't go away. The capacity for wonder doesn't switch off. What happens is that we get so close to our own life that we stop being able to see it.
It's like living next to the sea. If you move there, for the first few weeks the sound of it is extraordinary. Then one day you realise you haven't consciously heard the waves in a month. They're still there. You're just used to them.
Exhaustion does this. Stress does this. A run of bad weeks where you're just surviving rather than living does this. The world doesn't become less magical, you just lose the angle from which magic is visible. Which sounds poetic but is also just true.
Tiffany Aching, at her best, has First Thoughts and Second Thoughts and the occasional Third Thought. What I'm describing is what happens when we barely have the bandwidth for First Thoughts. The Second Thoughts go quiet, the Third Thoughts go offline entirely, and we’re left with a kind of grey static where the sparkle used to be. It happens to everyone. Even to Tiffany, more than once. She got through it by doing the work in front of her, which is not the most romantic advice but is consistently the most useful.
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The very small things that actually work
I'm not going to tell you to do a full ritual. If you had the energy for a full ritual you wouldn't be reading this. Here's what actually helps when you're running on empty and you want to feel like yourself again.
Go outside for five minutes with no purpose.
Not for a walk, not for exercise, not to get somewhere. Just outside. Stand there. Look at something that isn't a screen. The sky, a tree, a weed coming up through the pavement with complete disregard for its situation. Five minutes. That's it. You're already doing magic, you just can't see it yet from where you're standing.
Light a candle and do absolutely nothing else.
No ritual, no intention, no scroll. Just a candle. Let it burn while you have your tea or sit on the sofa or cuddle the cat or stare into the middle distance. The act of choosing to have light instead of not having it is enough. You don't have to build a whole ceremony around it. The ceremony can be just the candle.
Pick up one object and actually hold it.
A crystal from your collection, a stone or a shell you picked up on a beach once, whatever is on your windowsill that you've stopped seeing. Hold it. Feel the weight of it. That's all. You're reminding your hands what it feels like to pay attention.
Notice one thing you would have noticed before.
The moon, even through a car window on the way home. The smell of rain before it arrives. A cat watching something you can't see. The feeling of the wind on your face. You don't have to write it down or make it meaningful. Just notice it and let it register. You're keeping the channel open.
Give yourself a ridiculous amount of credit for tiny things.
You made tea mindfully. You noticed the moon. You held a crystal for thirty seconds. In the Tiffany Aching school of thought, knowing what you did and naming it is half the work. You didn't do nothing. You did small things on purpose. That counts.
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On missed sabbats specifically
If you missed one, or several, or honestly most of them this year (seriously: one year I burned 5 out of 8 sabba candles at once): the wheel is round. It comes back around. Samhain will be Samhain again in October. The Solstice will solstice again in June. You haven't missed them permanently, you've missed this year's version, and next year's version will be there, and you might be in a completely different place by then and do something wonderful.
And if you want to mark a sabbat you missed, you can just do it late. Quietly, by yourself, without making a big show of it. Light the candle. Say the words. The season has moved on but you haven't, and the intention you wanted to set is still waiting for you to set it. The universe, I promise, is not going to check the date.
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When it comes back
It will come back. I want to be clear about that.
Not because I'm being reassuring, but because it always does, in my experience and in the experience of every person I've talked to who has a practice they've dropped and picked back up. One day something catches your eye. The waves crashing take your breath away. The moon does something particularly good. You smell woodsmoke on an autumn evening and something in you goes oh, there it is.
We don't have to engineer it. We just have to not slam the door completely while we're in the grey patch. Keep a candle somewhere visible. Glance at the moon occasionally. Let the small things land when they happen.
The fireflies didn't go anywhere. We just got too tired to look for them. Rest a bit. Then look up. They're still there. ✦
With love and a very lived-in practice,
Francesca
The Quirky Witch ✦ thequirkywitch.com