On The Blessedness Of Joy

A homily for the New Moon on February 17, 2026. Written, as always, without authority.

Dearly Beloved,

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the Divine on this, the New Moon of Aquarius.

Today I want to talk about joy. But it’s going to take me a bit to get there, so bear with me.

I have been through a rough few weeks, dear ones. I have had a lot of duties to fulfill and a lot of commitments to honor, and while I rose to the occasion each time, it has definitely worn me down. But at the same moment, the flowering of Brigid’s gifts from Imbolc, the two encounters with Her that I was lucky enough to have at the two Reclaiming Imbolc rituals I attended (one I helped do online, the other I attended in-person), have combined in the crucible of the last few weeks of frenzied activity to create a new insight. The crux of this insight is simple:

I’m not taking on any more unnecessary burdens.

This means that if it is burdensome and it is not actually necessary to take care of myself, my extended family, and my community and it is not a part of my own true goals and purposes in life (what my fellow Thelemites would call my “true will”), then I am just not doing it.

Now, I should have already possessed this little nugget of wisdom. I have been a Thelemite since I was 12 and I am 48 now. “Liber AL vel Legis”, Crowley, and various other Thelemic authors have all said a great deal about it. I know that I “have no right but to do” my will and that doing anything else will be experienced as a burden and ultimately fraught with problems and failures. But I also tend to see a need and automatically feel a duty to fulfill it. When things come up that need to be done, I have a bad habit of looking around and, if no one else is volunteering, raising my hand. And this has been a problem my whole life.

I know this may surprise the people that have known me a long time, but I didn’t want to start the Sacred Grove with Birch, Will, and Madrone back in 2000. I told Birch as much. I told him that I was no merchant. I am bad at upselling and pushing products because it feels deceptive (it is), I care more about people reading the books and using the spell components than buying them, and I really just wanted to serve at a temple. Birch both pressured me and assured me that, no really, the Grove would be a temple. Neither of those convinced me. Finally he just came out and said that he needed me to make it work.

And that was what did it. He needed me. So like the deeply codependent person I was at 23, I got on board.

I hated it at the Grove, just like I hated working at 13: Real Magick before it. I love magick, and I do well with people one on one, but once there are several people I have to be social with all at once it really becomes a burden. I would go home from work feeling like I had been beaten up. I spent 3 years miserable, hiding from customers and trying as much as possible to work in the back making incenses and oils and working on the website. I almost quit at least 50 times. But every time Birch would say just the right thing and I would go back to whitewashing his fence.

Then, starting on the Spring Equinox of 2002, I started performing the Abramelin Operation with the goal of getting a real connection with my true will and my larger, truer self, known in some circles as gaining the knowledge and conversation of my holy guardian angel. I still had to work at the Grove, of course, so my solution was to incorporate my work there into the Operation. I would brew and consecrate oils in supplication of my angel. I would mix and consecrate incenses in adoration of my angel. I would even deal with customers in an ever-increasing intimacy with my angel. Then I would go home and do more magick to tie it all together, pass out, get back up and do it all again the next day. All of the phenomena of my life were woven together as a singular aspiration towards the Divine for about 10 months. Then it worked. Lightning cracked, then the thunder, and then the silence. And in that silence I found my angel.

But it also shifted something within me. Until then I had chosen the path of neither self nor other. Instead I had sublimated my spiritual work into somebody else’s work (both mundane and spiritual). Birch wanted the Grove, not me. It was his baby and his dream, and he ruled the roost. Sure, we were an anarchist collective on paper, but Birch was the leader. When it was time to tell us all what to do and to get the credit for things—and remember, we were his polycule and he was my best friend—he was definitely large and in charge. But when it was time to pay taxes or talk to the landlord about fixing the roof or stay up all night working to make sure we could have our grand opening the next morning while he goes home to play video games, that always fell on one of the rest of us. And until the climax of my Abramelin Operation, that one was usually me.

I came out of my temple (my studio apartment) on the day I had the climactic vision of my Abramelin Operation very clear about what I was going to do. The very first thing on the list was telling everyone that I was quitting the Grove to go to college. They were flabbergasted. It seemed to come out of nowhere for all of them. My ex-wife, of course, was super-supportive…she had always wanted me to quit magick and get a “real job” (it was not a healthy relationship), but the actual members of the Sacred Grove Collective were as surprised as they could be, especially when I told them I was going to major in mathematics.

That last part hurt. It was like they had all spent the last several years working, living, and doing magick with me and they had never heard a word I said. These people called me family for years and they had no clue who I was.

I’m not going to lie, it kind of broke my heart.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on that little cluster of heartbreaks. I had to do my real work. And in doing that work I thrived, first at Cabrillo College and then UCSC. I learned so much and my horizons were widened immensely. I want to especially honor the late Dr. Nancy Brown, my mentor, who led me into the philosophy department via a logic class I was taking for my math major and then gave me a job as her teaching assistant. I was happy and fulfilled for the first time in my life. It was an amazing experience.

And the reason it was such an amazing experience, the reason I didn’t once perceive it as a burden even as I worked a double major and as a TA, was because it was mine. It was truly necessary for me and part of my true will. It was work, hard work, but it was my work.

But I am an imperfect creature living in an imperfect world, so after graduation I continued to take on work, both magickal and mundane, that was not truly mine. It was not necessary for the surviving and thriving of myself, my family, or my community and it was not part of my Great Work. It was just stuff that seemed like it needed doing. My grandfather always taught me to look for the jobs that needed doing and to do them, and I have been doing that for a long time. My whole adult life, basically. But it has become increasingly burdensome and I’m just not willing to do it anymore.

This all crystallized over the last few weeks because I took on some work that was not mine and I have suffered for it. Not only have I suffered for it, but the work that is mine, my work as a priestess, as a philosopher, as a poet, as commander of Magie Sans Frontières, and as magus of the word Xenē, all suffered for it. Because there is a cost to me, yes, but there is also an opportunity cost when I take on work that is not mine. Time and energy spent whitewashing someone else’s fence means I am leaving my own fence neglected.

And that’s where we finally roll around to the topic of today’s homily: joy. Because when I am doing my own work, when I am doing my own will, that work is joyful. I don’t need to recover after a night of writing. Odds are I will get up the next morning and write some more, because I love writing. I don’t need to recover after doing magick (except sometimes physically…I am chronically ill, after all), because I was literally born to do magick. And while I sometimes get tired from the social part of being a priestess, that is the good kind of tired after doing a job I love, after living up to the calling that I have felt since childhood and have been so privileged as to be allowed by Aphrodite to fulfill.

And that is the best kind of tired.

Even talking about it this way, as “my work”, shows how much my mindset is oriented around work and duty. A lot of that comes from my childhood with my Grandfather, of whom I have spoken before and I will speak again, and my magickal background. I have lived and worked within the A.’.A.’. initiatory system for 29 years. The A.’.A.’. documents, Crowley’s writings, and the writings of almost all Thelemic writers since Crowley, speak of what we do as the Great Work, a term that comes from alchemy. While the Latin from which this phrase is taken, “magnum opus” is “great work”, it is a great work, the result of the labor, as in a great work of art or craftsmanship. It is not “work” in the sense of “labor” (the Latin and English are actually the same for “labor”) that we usually mean the word in modern English. Over the course of the Occult Revival in the 19th century and then throughout the 20th and now 21st century, these two meanings have become more and more conflated in a lot of magickal circles, including my own. My late teacher, Tony Saltana, definitely used the phrase “the Great Work” to mean our own labor as we pursue theurgy and our own true wills, I have used it that way throughout my own career, and many other mages I have known over my 29 years in the biz have used the phrase that way as well. So there was a sort of magickal equivalent of Protestant Work Ethic smuggled into the culture over the years that valued work in itself.

And that isn’t a bad thing. I am a big fan of work as long as it is actually my work. I love sinking my metaphorical teeth into a job worth doing. But work can’t be the only thing we do. I can’t pursue work and duty so hard it harms me. I can’t spend my life working and recovering from working so I can then work some more. That was the folly of my Grandfather, who worked so hard and gave away so much of himself that there was never anything left for him. So I am no longer taking on work that isn’t mine and I am no longer orienting my life towards only work and duty.

I am also orienting my life towards joy.

And joy is a wondrous thing. Because joy isn’t necessarily fun or pleasurable in the normal sense. I am not advocating hedonism. Gods forbid. Real joy can be hard work. It’s hard work to be joyful in the face of the world we live in. It requires a sort of quiet courage that is seldom celebrated but needed now more than ever.

And while I am not advocating hedonism, I am definitely advocating play. Joyful play is a wonderful thing. But just like with work, the kind of play that gets twisted up where one is using it as a drug to escape the pain of life, is never joyful. I’m a gamer, and I have seen some very toxic behaviors in the gamer community where everyone was clearly miserable and doing things they didn’t want to do but they felt compelled to do them anyway. The MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game) space is full of tales of addiction, depression, and self-destruction because play became compulsion and the game became a job.

The secret is that joy, whether work or play, can never be compulsive or compulsory…it can only well up in us as the natural result of us fulfilling our own natures. And that means we must be flexible and open to finding joy in surprising places as we explore ourselves and our world.

There is no greater satisfaction and pleasure in the world than really and truly being yourself.

So I invite you, dear ones, to join me in this simple resolution: let us be joyful and do our own work. Say it three times, if you wish. As we in Reclaiming say, three times makes the spell.

Blessed New Moon, dear ones. May the gods bless you all in the coming weeks until we speak again.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Arnold Böcklin, “Venus Anadyomene”, (1872)