Practical Magick: Applied metAlchemy

How wonderful it is that no one need wait one moment before starting to improve the world. -Anne Frank

This simple, profound sentiment of personal responsibility and change underlies the second mantra of meta-alchemy. When energy is sufficient to facilitate it, grow and evolve as a person, as a professional, as a creator, and as a functional member of society. Take a class, go to therapy, work in your garden—evolution has myriad faces, determined only by the one you wish to see in the mirror. Just remember that you cannot take sustenance from stone; if you don't ensure sufficient energy to sustain your growth, it will fail to take root due to inhospitable conditions.

What Does Sufficient Energy Look Like, Anyway?

Let's say you wake up and, unlike an evocation day, everything feels right. You're in your groove, you've got a lane, you're lined up and ready to start your day. Things just keep falling into place like a jigsaw puzzle, one routine flowing into the next, seamless and smooth. You feel as if you could do anything today.

These days, the ones with spoons to spare—these are the days you want to better yourself. Transformative growth is possible within the fertile soil of possibility that is the human soul. Nurture it with love on days when your heart is full so that it can weather the days where your energy is lacking, for they will come and there will be many.

How Does One Go About the Business of Evolution?

The first step in any evolution is to name the desired outcome. Where are you trying to go? Who or what are you trying to become? Settle on one minor path at a time, and try not to dwell on big-picture answers. You may be tempted to skip this step, but the renaissance is important, symbolically, to the becoming. Don't rob yourself of the perfect working title, alter ego, or simply a reminder posted on a mirror. Own the you that you want to be.

Once you answer these questions with a path to follow, find a way to tie your current identity to your future self and think about the individual steps it would take to bridge the gap. Make the goals incremental and attainable, specific and measurable, set on a time-line with a reasonable end goal. Becoming a doctor would not take two years, for example. Becoming an upper manager from an entry-level position might, though.

What Comes Next in a metAlchemical Evolution?

Do. The. Thing.

Seriously, that's what comes next. There's no magic formula to meta-alchemy. You get good things by doing good things. You get what you put into the universe, and work it demands. Expend your energy on days when you have it to become what you wish to become, and stay the course when you must evoke instead because the intention to evolve and maintain equilibrium drives all else.

Come back after periods of extraction, when you become overloaded in overdrive, when your energy burns white hot like a sun in a five-alarm mania and you have to step away for fear you may spontaneously combust. Not literally, but still, come back even when you need a breather to take the edge off.

Come back again and again until the job is done. Then name a new aspiration and start the evolutionary process over once more. Forward change, or progress, is one of the core principles of meta-alchemy. Proactivity is another. When one evolution ends is when the next should begin, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its old life. Continuity is a third metAlchemical principle, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed like the renaissance of a new evolution.