Productive Communication,
Effective Magic,
Worldly Efficiency, and Being Fey

A Surprisingly Fundamental Weave

Do you perceive supposedly disconnected things as woven together, connected in fundamental ways? This blog is about one of those weavings.

Magic is practical.
Taking time often saves time.
Quick and brief is not always effective communication.

Everything is magic.
I am Fey.
So I am Fey in anything I do.
Being Fey contributes to worldly power and productivity.

Not every magic is healthy.
Some magic does not
help me stay in touch with my Fey sensibilities
or otherwise be efficient in worldly activities.

I am more effective when I take time to:
* Explore my Fey cells—instead of numbing out
* Read a long blog—instead of doom scrolling.

Often, listening to a friend for 10 minutes
—instead of texting them—
is more productive and saves time in the long run.

Productive Is Not a Bad Word but It Is Used Badly

The word productive is often in sentences that shame people and help keep them from leisure time, self-care, or self-fulfillment. “You need to be productive. Stop horsing around with your art and get a real job.”

The Goddess is productive. She created a beautiful universe for us to live in. Every day, She is productive by blessing me with magic and power. I want to be productive like Her by doing my part in creating a life of freedom, magic, and beauty for everyone who wants it, including me.

I love being productive!

I love helping the Goddess be productive.

Non-Productive Magic
Drains My Time, Efficacy, and Spirit

Being happy is productive. Making someone laugh is productive. Productive doesn’t only mean hitting manufacturing quotas.

I fall prey to constantly scrolling. Everything is magic. Constantly scrolling is not healthy magic for me:
* It counters my innate fabulous magic.
* It is non-productive magic because it doesn’t produce happiness or otherwise better my life. It does the exact opposite.
* It robs me of time I need to be efficient both magically and mundanely.
* It dulls my senses. So I lose touch with my Fey nature.
* It distracts me so I am not in touch with my vital life force. When I am aware of this essential force, it propels me to stand up for my rights and yours.

A Solution

It’s impossible to break a habit unless I replace it with something else. Here is one of my solutions to constantly scrolling. When drawn toward scrolling, I try to develop important Shamanic material instead.

Some of that material is going into blogs. The depth of the material might make a blog a lot longer than I sometimes publish. If you’re like me, trying to write from my heart and intellect, instead of using AI to produce tripe or co-opt material, writing long blogs take even more time. So I can’t publish as many. But that’s okay when I want to address some topics in greater depth than I can in a brief blog.

What is a habit that makes you less effective and productive? What can you replace it with? Everything is magic. What is a magical replacement that supports your happiness, efficiency, and productivity? Perhaps allow yourself the time to answer these questions before you read the next paragraph. Self-care often means slowing down.

Loss of Focus

Studies prove that social media interferes with most people’s attention span and ability to focus. I know my focus is diminished. I go to social media to see something specific and a half hour later have not checked it. I got distracted, and might even momentarily forget why I went to social media.

Focus Is Important in Almost Everything

Focus makes all the difference in enchantments, efficiency, conversations, sex, and almost everything else.

Focus allows us to dive deep emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, magically, and sexually. Focus allows us to follow through on hopes and ideas, see the connection between events so we understand the big picture, and remember our inner and outer resources when we need them—such as one’s innate magic, common sense, support from family, or art supplies.

The Beauty of Brevity
The Blight of Brevity

I adore the pared-down line of poetry that expresses the entire world. That line is deep communication.

I love succinct remarks. They contribute to empowering, calm, collaborative communication. Not all memes are glib. Not all texts lack substance. Memes and texts are often brilliant, useful, and important.

But you can only say so much in a little frame.

I cannot convey every enchantment, feeling, or other truth in a text or meme.

Stripped-bare interactions like texting are rightly lauded as efficient. But there needs to be more recognition of how they are terribly inefficient and even destructive.

A journalist told me that journalism school’s emphasis on sparse language trained her too thoroughly. It drummed out her ability to say anything complex and meaningful. I’m sure that wasn’t 100% true, but she makes a good point.

Today’s lack of deep communication hurts me, you, society, and Gaia. Even if you don’t personally need rich conversations or in-depth books, rich communication or the lack of it shapes the world around you in ways that are pivotal to everyone. For example, societal groups are pitted against each other in ways that social media conversational brevity has increased. A great deal of this conflict has been willfully manufactured by powerful oppressors who portray oversimplified, brief messages as inescapable truths. In-depth, lengthy conversations can provide caring and personal interactions that could heal some of this conflict.

The Power of Deep Communication

Effective communication is so much more than giving facts that I can read online.

Deep communication, such as a long conversation, careful listening, and reading a complex piece nurture and inform me in irreplaceable ways.

I need conversations in which I can take a breath, drink in what’s said, and let its humanness fulfill me.

We need to read pieces that go all the way to the earth’s center, grounding us in its heart, and only then introducing a topic. Or pieces that share the author’s personal life, or otherwise make a heart-to-heart connection, before introducing a topic. Or that establish context and personal connection in another way. Context. Connection. Heart.

Why? Some ideas only make sense after a living context for them is established. Some brilliant ideas might reveal their usefulness only in context or when shared compassionately. Some nuances are too triggering if they lack context or are not delivered compassionately.

One last reason: Life is ultimately about loving connection. Too many exchanges are disjointed, destroying connections. One reason for this is that our our current culture often demands we be brief.

Everything in the above three paragraphs about written pieces might apply to what you need from people with whom you speak.

Deep Conversations and Efficiency Take Time

Taking shortcuts in the name of efficiency can be biting off your nose to spite your face.

“Move fast and break things” is a creed for not caring whether the results of your work hurt people.

Individuals who slow down to create thoughtfully and well are the true innovators, true geniuses, true revolutionaries.

How To Deep Dive into Richly Rewarding Communication, including Long Blogs

The Challenges of Effective, Empowering Conversations

It can be hard to start talking about a complex or deeply personal topic, especially if you might not have time to finish it right then.

A Solution

Tell the person or people involved that you want an in-depth conversation. Add that you don’t know if it will take more time than you or they might have right then. Finally, ask if they are willing to start the conversation if some of it will happen later.

The downside is not getting the immediate result you might’ve wanted from a discussion.

But that can also be the upside. Social media has demonstrated that trying to resolve a conversation quickly, by immediately responding to a comment, often increases problems instead of creating resolutions or other happy results.

Intentional pauses in conversations, whether they last for seconds or days, provide benefits that can’t always come from an exchange that lasts the length of a phone screen. A pause gives you a chance to:

* Reevaluate your needs. Then you can change them, remember why they’re important, or examine them in light of the larger picture.

* Get in touch with your emotions so that they can help guide your decisions and inform your responses.

* Sort through your emotions to find balance, instead of blurting out a knee-jerk reaction to someone.

* Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself. Then your words will be more effective and productive.

* Contemplate the other person’s (people’s) views and feelings so that you respond respectfully and kindly.

Pauses also give us a chance to decide whether a discussion is a waste of time. How often have you ended up arguing with a troll or bot, instead of taking a moment to think about it first?

I want to have
* rich interactions
* compassionate understanding of someone with whom I am speaking
* an intelligent analysis of their ideas
* and a natural, nurturing pace.

A pause is productive.
A pause is magic.
Listening is magic.
A pause is effective.
A pause feeds effectiveness.
A pause helps me get in touch with my Fey self.

A pause is a magical spell.
Listening is a magical spell.
Everything is a magical spell.

The Challenges of Reading Long Blogs and Other Lengthy Material

It can be hard to even start reading a long piece, especially if it is packed with invigorating ideas or rich with emotions. Starting can be even harder if you don’t have time to read it all right then.

How to Read Long Pieces when You Don’t Have Much Time

Waiting until you have enough time, energy, or focus to read a long blog or other lengthy piece can = it never happens.

Solutions:

1) Don’t hesitate to start reading the piece, but stop whenever you want. Better something than nothing.

Reading a single paragraph that is thoughtfully, carefully written over a long period of time provides benefits that one is less likely to receive from texts and online comments.

2) Or read a paragraph every morning. Okay, this is embarrassing, but: When I wake up, I stumble toward the bathroom while saying my prayers. Then, on the toilet, I do a bit of spiritual reading.

3) Or I might read during breakfast instead.

Just a little spiritual reading first thing in the morning can change my whole day. Try it with one of my blogs or something else empowering. Read a bit every morning or as many mornings as you can. Try it for a week. It can be an experiment to see how it affects you.

A Fundamental Weave

Rich communication, effective enchantments, worldly efficiency, and being Fey are an inextricable and fundamental weave. This weave must include brevity, when appropriate. In fact, a weave of rich communication, effective enchantments, worldly efficiency, and being Fey teaches us how to use brevity better, maximizing its benefits.

When a method—in this case brevity—becomes dominant, so the cultural norms surrounding it constantly invalidate and stomp out other approaches, it also becomes its worst self. When we venture into deep conversations, brevity can become its best self. Brevity can stop limiting us. It can stop being mechanistic, reactive, and dry. A brief communication can instead be a joyful outburst, a childlike wish, a haiku that rends the heart, a mystic blessing, an unmistakable utterance of love, or another honest self-expression. So mote it be!

This is not a super long blog. It didn’t need to be. Everything is magic. Everything is a magical spell. Choosing the magic that is most suited to a situation is effective. Hence, I did not write more. For one thing, going into the post’s topics more extensively is something that I can convey best by teaching experientially in oral tradition. Then my students experience the breath and heartbeat of the topic, which helps them apply it to real life. If the last two sentences didn’t make sense, don’t worry. You probably got the gist. There’s no way to describe oral tradition on the page (or in an audio). Oral tradition can only be explained in oral tradition aka orally, in person. In-person can be on the phone or Zoom, instead of participants having to be physically in the same space.

Addendum: However, I do have to make the post a little longer. I thought I had finished it but then found Charlie Chaplin’s comments from a 1940s film. His immediate context was Nazi Germany. But his words are relevant to this essay. When writing it, I was aware of its relevance to the current fascist rise. I chose not to point that out until I discovered Chaplin’s remarks. I took their appearance in my life as magic: Guidance from the Goddess that I should mention that relevance. So I’m adding Chaplin’s vital words:

“We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. … We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

We can do better.
And we will.
We can communicate at loving depths
and practice awareness of our bodies’ Fey atoms.
We can try to draw on the enchantments
in every object and action.
We can be efficient.
We can be productive.
So mote it be!

Dear reader, in the comment field below this post, please share your answer to the question I asked above: What magical replacement for a bad habit of yours could support your happiness, efficiency, and productivity? Personal answers are often surprisingly relevant to other people, even strangers. So mote it be!