dealing with decay
This is my second-to-last Substack post.
After next week’s message, I will not be using Substack to put a post in your in-box each week. I am also not “migrating” us to another platform (Ghost, Beehiv, Patreon).
I’ve had the same website for over a decade – youaremagicla.com - it is my sprawling wonderland filled with magic. For the time being, my site is the only digital space I am putting any effort into.
I will still be:
· writing (just won’t come to your inbox)
· posting videos for every new and full moon
· playing around and creating new things I believe will be magical
Traditional thinking would have me believe that as a writer, teacher and artist in 2026, I MUST keep dragging us onto these “platforms” and then I MUST keep offering up my work for EXPOSURE and then machine learning MUST steal my work.
I’m like Madeline Kahn’s “burlesque” character in Blazing Saddles. I’m tired of these platforms. I have platform fatigue.
I am very sorry every platform rots.
This is not a decision I make lightly. I’ve been showing up in your inbox for over a decade. I love writing to you each week (and I still will be, but you’ll have to come seek it out).
I contemplated this change all summer. I wrote 4000 words about it. I did a pro and con list. I visualized my life without a “platform” (almost the same as my daily life now). I talked to a few friends. Then I threw hexagram 18 – Dealing With Decay – from the I Ching. If you know the I Ching, and its sharp wit, you know that is both clear and funny advice.
I STILL WILL BE WRITING.
It just won’t come to your inbox.
I STILL WILL BE MAKING VIDEOS FOR EVERY NEW AND FULL MOON.
You just won’t get reminders in your inbox.
OKAY, INBOX EMAILS ARE ON PAUSE, WHAT ELSE IS CHANGING?
1. By next week, the 99 Visions audio project will be removed from Substack – it will only exist in the Library on my site. If you feel you have a lot of time left on your Substack paid subscription, please reply to this email and I will give you a commensurate discount for the library (member’s area) on my site.
2. I’m available for in-person custom group and non-profit events. The recommendations and referrals from clients and friends attending in-person events has, in reality, always been my most trustworthy “discovery engine”.
3. The Free Page will no longer in monthly format, it is going to be more stream of consciousness. I will put things up and change that page in accordance with both my rhythms and those of the cosmos.
4. Starting in September, the passages and quotations that have rounded off every weekly message are getting a new format. Instead of including them at the base of each post, I am going to make a series of commonplace books on various themes: magic, trees, art, shadow, spirit, community, imagination etc. which will be available as printable PDFs in their upcoming wing of the Library. This way, you’ll have a lot of them that you can easily print out and enjoy.
5. I am starting a fresh, NEW email list on my site. I’ve been around for so long, and lists like these get kind of messy – you might be on it long after you want to be. IF you want occasional, non-Substack messages to show up in your in-box in the future, sign up on my home page.
I love you all so much. Writing to you each week in an important part of my own practice. I just can’t do it through a “platform”. For now, I’ll mainly be contacting you telepathically. In fact, any time I pop into your consciousness, consider it a sign to visit me.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. Library members - you are going to LOVE the practice I am working on for our Lunar Eclipse in Pisces next week. It is perfectly in tune with the times.
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Hexagram 18
Dealing With Decay
“Things have been going wrong for some time. Inertia on your part has meant that the situation has simply drifted along its own way. By not taking decisive action, you have lost control of events. Matters are now thoroughly out of hand.
…
Doing the expected thing has prevented you from being as effective as you might be. Traditional ways are by their nature resistant to change. But if you proceed very cautiously, with great awareness, your efforts will meet with success.”
- Sarah Dening, The Everyday I Ching
“AI is a super spy.”
- Meredith Whitaker
“AI is made of people.”
Jaron Lanier
“The algorithm doesn’t tell you what’s true, it tells you what you find more engaging.”
- Ash Callaghan
“Living in the United States and being informed is being subjected to trauma on a daily basis and being traumatized on a daily basis.”
- Angela, Parkrose Permaculture
“The individual cannot bargain with the state. The state recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin
“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other. It seems as though we were all on a boat together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know will never reach port. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other. We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.”
- Ernest Hemingway
In film production, “back to one” means returning to the starting position for another take. Same scene, same setup, but this time you get to choose: same performance, or try something completely different?
Life operates on this exact principle, except most people don’t realize they’re in a movie.
Pattern recognition at the level of soul curriculum. The ability to see when the universe is offering you the same test in a different costume.
The secret is recognizing that these cycles aren’t punishments. They’re upgrades disguised as chaos. Every time life calls “back to one,” you get to choose a new character to play. Same soul, different costume. Same lesson, different backdrop.
Right now, the energy is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. People are feeling the end of cycles everywhere. Old patterns dying. New frequencies coming online. The tower card energy that makes everyone nervous but makes my nervous system feel like it’s a psychic with a wait-list.
Your weirdness isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The same brain wiring that makes you impossible to pin down, impossible to categorize, impossible to keep in one lane is exactly what makes you a natural cycle-breaker. You were built for this kind of navigation.
Today is a day we are going back to one. The summer is gone, and the real work begins. The question isn’t whether you’ll survive the reshuffling. The question is who you’ll choose to become when the director calls action on the next scene.
The cosmic casting call is open. Your move.
- Kelly Oxford
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.
- Charles Wright
The loss of the sacred in western society is also a loss of soul, a loss of the soul of the earth, of the cosmos, of human society. Modern men and women are truly in search of soul, and a retrieval of the sacred is essential to their finding or recovering soul.
— C. Michael Smith
“Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast, shapeless Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot."
- Alan Watts
The capacity to germinate is in the individual seed. And the source of creativity for the society is in the person. Renewal springs from the freshness and vitality of individual men and women… A society decays when its institutions and individuals lose their vitality.
—John W. Gardner
“Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses the ability to express themselves in lieu of granting them their rights.”
- Walter Benjamin
“Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”
- Jarod Anderson