I realize the Sun won’t enter Libra for another month, but it sure feels like summer is on its way out. It was fifty degrees outside the other morning, and I’ve been hearing flocks of geese flying south most every day for the past two weeks. While the calendar can disagree all it wants to, I see autumn peeking its head around the corner.

I’ve got some mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, every week of 2020 has felt like a month, so any signs of progress are welcome ones. The sooner we’re out of this mess the better.

On the other hand, I feel just a little bit cheated. There are things I wanted to do, and ways I wanted to spend my time, which just weren’t possible what with the plague and the lock-down.

I know I’m sitting in a crowded boat, here. We’ve all been rocked by the sea and baked by the sun. Long stretches of dead calm interspersed by hurricanes.

And the sharks are circling.

Every year, right about the beginning of August, I usually do a kind of “mid-year review” of my life. It’s not anything involved or complicated—I just sit down, go over what I’ve accomplished, and figure out how I want to spend the rest of the year.

This year? With it’s unparalleled uncertainty? I’ve more or less had to do a “mid-year review” every month, so by the end of July there didn’t seem much point in making a big fuss about it.

And once my laptop made clear its intention to die, it really just reaffirmed my thinking.

There is something about this year so far, and what it has demanded, that I think might be worth reflecting on, though. Especially given what astrology has to say about the rest of it.

The most important tool a magician can possess is flexibility.

More powerful than any ritual implement, more valuable than any talisman, the ability to instantly adapt to changing circumstances is major “materia.” And in 2020, it’s absolutely essential.

I started this year with relatively few “fixed” goals. I wanted to get this site up and running and begin offering Tarot readings to the general public. I also wanted to get certain things growing in my garden, and had a couple of trips I wanted to take.

I’d say I managed to hit half of those targets, and I only did so because I leaned hard on electional astrology to work around the most terrible transits.

Most of the other goals I set, however, probably aren’t even fairly called goals to be honest. They were more like directions. They were broad changes I wanted to make to my life and reality in order to open doors later on. And most of those doors are, indeed, opening—albeit slowly.

It’s taken a lot of magic, and a lot of re-prioritizing, but this approach has generally been working out for me. Partly, I think, because magic works especially well with this mindset.

My thoughts on what magic actually is and how it works tends to be rather fluid. In truth, my ideas here change more often than the weather in New England, but I frequently see magic as “pushing probabilities.”

It’s a somewhat “chaos-magicky” way of looking at it, and I don’t always subscribe to the idea, but it’s usually the best way to describe how magic appears to work.

But working from this frame of reference isn’t the best way of achieving instant results. Magic of the “pushing probability” sort is best done as far in advance as you can manage. That’s because events don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen as the result of other, previous events.

The probability that some event will occur is fundamentally determined by the probabilities of all the events which need to occur previously. For instance, your odds of meeting a “special someone” on your vacation are zero if you never take that vacation at all.

The sooner you start pushing events in the direction you need, the more likely you are to achieve the goal you seek. And this is especially true if you can see (and enchant for) multiple ways in which the event can “come off.” In a sense, the more magical irons you have in the fire, and the longer they’re there, the better your results—and I’ve had some magical irons in the fire for a while.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you’re looking for a new job. You could enchant to get the one, specific job you sent your C.V. to, or you could…

1. Enchant to make new friends in your industry.
2. Enchant to meet a dozen people who work for companies which need your skills.
3. Enchant to learn new skills which will make you more competitive.
4. Enchant to be interviewed by a journalist for a trade publication.
5. Enchant to get your own article published in a trade publication.
6. Enchant to be selected to give a presentation at the next industry convention.
7. Enchant to start a successful freelance career.

I don’t want to go off into a big How to Magic rant, but I think there’s clearly a right way and a wrong way here. Looking for results in the long term can open far more doors for you than looking for instant success. And if you can figure out five or ten different long-term strategies to get what you want, you are baking flexibility right into your magic.

It’s like a genie offering to grant you a wish—the first thing you do is wish for more wishes.

Now, of course, 2020 is a special kind of monster. The astro-weather is not only abysmal, but “change” is the word of the year. And when you’ve got Mars in Aries for as long as we do right now, even the most flexible plans in the world are subject to cancellation or revision at a moment’s notice.

That’s just the nature of the time we are living in. Nothing is guaranteed except that there are no guarantees.

Except that as fall approaches, I’m going to spend as many days as I can on my porch, sipping hot apple cider, and wondering why my morning glories never bloomed.