Letting go of perfection

One of the things I struggled most with, when I was first starting out (and indeed still wrestle with from time to time today), is reconciling my expectations and my experiences. When I read about a new practice, almost always it includes suggestions of what I might experience as I go through the activity. And almost always, my personal experiences are very dissimilar to what was described.

I'm a pretty analytical person in a lot of ways. If someone tells me to close my eyes and imagine a blue triangle, and there is a picture of an equilateral, royal blue triangle, that is what I will try to see. If I end up with an isosceles turquoise triangle, my first response is to try again, to get my mental image to match my expectations.

But I think that one of the great benefits of being a solitary practitioner, is no one can tell me that my triangle is wrong! A lot of what I do has ended up very different from what I first started out practicing. I don't ground envisioning myself as a tree. I have a wand but I rarely use it. I am as likely to cast in the bathroom as I am in a circle in front of my altar.

I don't feel constrained to do the same thing the same way every time I do it. In fact, I have found that if I do things exactly the same, they begin to become rote, and I find myself going through the motions and not investing in them.

Magical practice is a rainbow. We can all look out the window and say "look, there is a rainbow!" We don't separate the red from the green from the blue. The colors bleed together, one to the next, with no set lines and no boundaries. Each one of us is a spot on the rainbow, and we each do things in a slightly different way. My way is a shade off from your way, but we are both part of the rainbow. When we stop trying to be someone else's color, we can grow into our own.