I’m about fifteen years too late to start a magical blog.
A quick perusal of any list of blogs that once covered magic and occult topics – such as those that participated in Deb Castellano’s New Year, New You project – reveals a collection of dead links, abandoned spaces, and dried-up husks of forgotten passions, waiting for some digital psychopomp to come and usher them back into the undifferentiated light. The shine of unrestricted, self-published information seems to have largely worn off. The new frontiers have moved on to social media or multimedia formats. Why then the urge to start a blog at this late juncture?
It’s a medium that suits me. It lends itself to the slow digestion of ideas, the refinement of one’s own thoughts through the process of writing. Topics can be explored deeply and at leisure. A blog is also, selfishly, a medium that will give me a chance to work on my own writing. As with anything else, the way to improve is with practice; I can only hope my readers are willing to suffer through any bad prose I produce long enough for it to become good. I continue to maintain that the choice of blog-as-medium has almost nothing to do with the fact that I’m not social enough for social media and lack the charisma to pull off a podcast or a YouTube channel.
That answers the question of why a blog, as opposed to something else, but it has yet to address the question of why anything at all. As with any writing project, the question needs to be asked: “Who is this being written for?”
The first and most obvious answer in this particular case is… me. I find the act of writing itself to be an excellent way of clarifying my thoughts. There is an alchemy to writing, a solve et coagula that teases out common threads from disparate sources and weaves them into something more – a common, luminous core. In that sense, I would probably have written much of the content of this blog either way.
Given that I’m writing it, I don’t see a reason not to share it. Perhaps some small part of it will prove useful to other seekers – the resource I wish I’d had when I was first starting out on my own path. I’d like to think there is something of worth to be discovered here, though perhaps that is just the hubris common to all authors. Perhaps the chief value of this blog will be as a record of the evolution of my own ideas.
So that is what this blog will be: meandering digital footsteps that, hopefully, trace my path toward greater understanding. The little, glowing motes that I spin off as I voyage through the dark. Perhaps they can serve as markers for others who will come after – or for myself, to retrace when I’ve lost my way.
There is only one way to find out.
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