Recycling As Part of My Magickal Lifestyle

In my little “about me”, I say that we try to “live in a good way on the earth” and that we “live a magickal lifestyle”.  I’ll be coming back to this concept time and again in my posts, because to me, magick and being a witch is about so much more than lighting candles, collecting crystals, burning incense and doing spells.  It’s about more than keeping the Sabbats, Esbats and cross quarters, and although dancing naked under the moon is pretty excellent, it’s about more than that, too.

Being a witch is about being aware of myself and my every day actions, whether it’s in the words I speak (words have power) the silences I keep, (so does silence, in its place), and the actions I take.  Where I choose to expend my energies. What small things I do to acknowledge my place as a guardian of the earth. So of course, things like tending my garden, watering low and during the evening hours to minimize loss to evaporation, composting everything that will compost, responsible and reverent wild harvesting, and always recycling what will recycle.

But is it really magick, you ask?  Yes.  I say firmly, yes.  For me it is part and parcel of being a witch that is living a magickal lifestyle.  We live so remotely that Amazon Prime (not an advertisement, just our life) is wonderful.  But.  But carbon from transportation, shipping materials, etc., right?  But.  Living.

Sometimes, reusing is a better choice than recycling after a single use.  The recycling of some plastics, for instance, is costly to our mama in carbon and other toxins, so reusing until something is beyond reuse before sending it off to recycling, just makes good sense.

So.  I have a lot of shipping materials that pile up around here.  Boxes and bubble wrap, peanuts and air bags and bubble mailers. And I save and save them because I simply can’t bear to send them to the landfill, and finding a place that accepts them for recycling out here is also problematic. I always seem to find uses for the boxes, eventually.  They make great weed blockers and compost eventually in the garden.  The grandgirls will color on them and ride trains and race cars and rocket ships to the stars until they are shreds for the compost.  But those damn mailers. As you can see, they pile up. And because I can be an awful procrastinator, and get in such a hurry with making sure my orders go out in a timely fashion, I don’t always take the time to sort among my saved mailers to reuse them.

I’m a minimalist when it comes to my own packing.  I don’t go for any of that fancy packaging that all the Etsy store advisors claim is so important.  It just seems so wasteful.  I don’t even print out those full page packing slips at my store sites, instead I include these with my orders.  A little thank you that prints 3 to a page, and a recycled shipping materials note that prints 12 to a page.

But back to the reuse of the bubble mailers. They pile up because it takes a minute, ya know?  They need to be trimmed to close properly, any barcodes or address info needs to be covered, and stuff.  My intentions have been good.  They were saved from the landfill.  But my implementation has been poor and the mess has gotten out of hand. So yesterday I made a commitment to myself and our Mama Earth to not buy any new mailers until I have reused all the ones I’ve saved.  So I took a couple of hours and waded into that pile.

I got about a third of it done, and it became a sort of repetitive meditation, like many repetitive things do if we let them.  Trim, tape, turn… and trance out. Doubly magick, then.  Being present with my consumption while pondering the mysteries of the Universe.  Okay, maybe not.  More like my next spell crafting and herb work.  Good stuff.

Blessed be,

93

In Light and Shadow,

~Thorne  

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