Creating Your Own Light

Every night, the work got done and nobody ever saw who did it.Welcome to the second episode of No Magic Required. This week we stay in the old farmhouse but it’s later now. Everyone’s asleep and a bowl of cream sits on the hearth for the brownie, the household spirit who threshed the corn and churned the butter while the family slept. He asked for no wages. He couldn’t be watched or criticised. If anyone gave him clothes, he left and never came back. So what are we really hoping for when we wait for help that arrives without our having to ask?~ Who the brownie was, from King James VI’s Daemonologie to Browny’s stone in Shetland~ Hairy Meg of the Grants of Tullochgorm, and the brownie who threw the harvest over the Raven Crag~ Aiken Drum, the Brownie of Blednoch, and the pair of breeks that sent him away~ Why the brownie’s kind of help can only survive in the dark~ Plans that wait for someone else to change first~ The woman who is everyone’s brownie, and still waiting for her own~ Jung’s shadow, and what happens to the need we learned to hide~ The Seven of Cups, and bringing one wish down to earth~ A simple practice for turning a wish into a request~ A guided visualisation across a frosty field to a lit windowJournal prompts~ What have I been waiting for someone to notice, without my having to say it?~ Which of my plans is waiting on someone else to change first? What part of it is mine to do now?~ Where am I someone else’s brownie and what unspoken bargain have I made in return?~ When I stood at that door, what did I ask for? Who in my life could I really ask?If you need supportIf the person you’re waiting on to change is someone whose behaviour is harming you, please reach out for support. You can find free, confidential helplines wherever you are at findahelpline.com, and many countries have support groups for the families and partners of people with addiction. If you’re caring for someone and running on empty, please talk to your doctor. If you’re ever in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.Resources~ What Are You Waiting For? A free quiz for the woman who already knows something needs to change~ At the Threshold: my £11 self-guided shadow work resource~ Shadow Map Reading: a one-to-one tarot session to explore what’s keeping you where you areAll at sageinthesky.comNext week: the clootie wells and what happens when you do all the spiritual things and the magic doesn’t work.Come and find meInstagram: @sage_inthe_skyWebsite: sageinthesky.comYouTube: @sageintheskyI’d love to hear whether you asked for something this week, and how it went.

On Samhain night, a young woman drops two hazelnuts into the fire and waits to be told.Welcome to the first episode of No Magic Required, a new season running from Samhain to Imbolc. Tonight we sit by a farmhouse fire in Robert Burns' Ayrshire, where young people spent Hallowe'en asking the dark who they would marry. We meet Jean and her two nuts, wee Jenny at the mirror and old Uncle John with his three dishes. And we ask what we're really hoping for when we reach for one more card or one more sign.I believe in magic. I just don't believe magic gets to do my living for me.~ The Hallowe'en charms Burns recorded in his 1785 poem Halloween, from pulling kail stocks in the dark to burning hazelnuts on the fire~ Why asking the fire made sense for young women with little say over their own futures~ Jung's shadow, projection, and where our own knowing goes when we push it out of sight~ The difference between looking for guidance and looking for permission~ The Magician, and the four tools already on his table~ A simple practice using two cards or two slips of paper~ A guided visualisation to a farmhouse kitchen on Samhain night~ Journal prompts to take with youJournal prompts~ What question have I been asking the fire, again and again, hoping for a different answer?~ When I picked something up from the table, which one was it, and what did it tell me I already know?~ Where in my life am I looking for permission, when I've already had all the guidance I need?~ Who or what have I been handing my knowing to? What would it feel like to take a little of it back?If you need supportIf this episode brings up something that feels bigger than reflection, please reach out to your doctor or a counsellor. If someone in your life is making your decisions for you and you feel afraid to go against them, you can find free, confidential support wherever you are at findahelpline.com. If you're ever in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.Resources~ At the Threshold: my £11 self-guided shadow work resource, for when you're ready to look at the patterns that keep you standing at the fire~ What Are You Waiting For? A free quiz for the woman who already knows~ Shadow Map Reading: a one-to-one tarot session to explore what's keeping you where you areAll at sageinthesky.comNext week: the brownie, the household helper who comes in the night and does the work while the family sleeps.Come and find meInstagram: @sage_inthe_skyWebsite: sageinthesky.comYouTube : @sageintheskyI'd love to hear which object you picked up from the table, or how the nut trick went.

This is the twelfth and last of the series, and it's the equinox. Light and dark come level soon and then they tip, and from then the dark half has it.It isn't a recap and it isn't a big finish. What it is, is a doorway episode. We stand at the threshold for an hour, look back down the glen quickly without making a meal of it, and then say something over the going.The folklore is one of the Gaelic journey blessings, said standing at your own door before setting out. And it doesn't ask for what you'd expect. Not a safe arrival, not clear weather, not the business at the other end going your way. It asks for the earth beneath the foot to be blessed, and the path whereon I go. Nothing at all about the destination. There's a kindness in that which took me a while to see, because if you bless the destination you've given yourself something to keep checking on, and if you bless the ground you're standing on then it's already done.Then the gap you're about to be in, and why you'll probably misread it. William Bridges separated change, which is the external event with a date on it, from transition, which is the internal business of becoming somebody for whom that's now true. And transition begins with an ending rather than a beginning, and the bit in the middle where the old thing is over and the new one hasn't started is not a failure of the process. It is the process. I've included what it actually feels like, since people recognise the symptoms long before they recognise the description.There's also a passage in here for anybody who has listened to all twelve and still hasn't climbed the hill. Twelve podcast episodes were never going to shift something that has been in place for nine years, and I'd not have you turn that into evidence about yourself.And the card is the Fool, which is numbered zero, which takes it out of the sequence and lets it sit at either end of the deck. So finishing on it isn't a trick. The mountains are behind the traveller rather than ahead. The bundle is tiny. And Pamela Colman Smith didn't paint the fall, in either direction, which is honest.The practice at the end is a doorway one, and it finishes with the blessing and a turn.The letter carries on every week. The podcast comes back around Samhain.This week's card: the Fool. Numbered zero, which is why it can be the first card or the last one.What happens nowThe weekly letter carries on. If you'd like company through the dark half, that's where I'll be. The podcast is resting through the autumn and comes back around Samhain with a new series. All twelve episodes stay up, so if somebody you know is standing at the foot of something, they can start at the beginning whenever they like.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore, and you've met one or two of them across this series. At sageinthesky.com

Back at Lùnastal we spent an hour asking who lit the fire on your hill. This is the other side of it. Who are you lighting them for.And I want to be careful, because the obvious version of this episode is one you don't need. You have been pouring yourself out for other people since you were about nineteen and it's a large part of why you're tired.So here's what I actually think. Most of what we call helping is doing things for people that they could do themselves. It doesn't light any fires. It makes them smaller and it makes you emptier, and those turn out to be the same process.There's a piece of family systems work behind that, from a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen, and it's the sharpest thing I've brought you in this series. He described over-functioning and under-functioning as reciprocal positions. They produce each other. One person's taking over is what creates the room for the other's stepping back, and the stepping back pulls more taking over. So the woman doing eighty percent of everything is not surrounded by useless people. The people around her have become less capable because she does it all. Same fact, seen from two ends.He was clear that this isn't a character flaw. It's a way of managing anxiety and it works, which is why it's so hard to shift. The line worth having is that both positions bring the anxiety down, and what neither of them does is help anybody grow.Then the alternative, which our people had. The taigh-cèilidh, the visiting house. Every township had one, and it wasn't appointed, it emerged, usually because the fire was good or the woman of the house was welcoming. People drifted there after the work was done. The news first, then the songs and the long tales that could run three nights. And over in the corner, out of the way, the children, half asleep, absorbing an entire culture.The folklorists call these houses informal schools. And nobody in that room was teaching anybody. The adults were doing the thing, well, in front of people who knew when you got it wrong. That's the whole method, and it carried the language, the stories and the music of Gaelic Scotland across centuries with almost nothing written down.And the Queen of Wands, who is the warmest woman in the deck and is sitting down. She isn't out looking for anyone. She's seated, holding her own sprouting wand, with a black cat at her feet that cannot be commanded by anybody. And her body faces you while her head is turned away, which is a very particular kind of welcome.There's a practice at the end about handing one thing back, and it's the hardest one I've given you.Next week is the last of the twelve, on the equinox.A note: none of this applies to somebody who genuinely can't do the thing. Small children, people who are ill, anyone in a crisis. Doing the work for a person who isn't able is care, and it isn't what this episode is about. The episode says so.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

There's a feeling I hear about constantly from women in their forties and fifties, and it never comes out directly. It sounds like: I've left it too late. That was the window, and I was busy. The interesting part has already happened and I wasn't paying enough attention while it did.Underneath all of those is a picture, and I want to get it out into the light. The picture is a hill. You climb, you reach the top, and then you go down the other side. Which puts a woman of forty-eight somewhere on the descent, not because of anything she's done, but because of the shape of the diagram.I've called this series Light Over the Hill, so I've been handing you that shape for nine weeks. This week I'd like to complicate it, and offer two others.The first is the Cailleach. The old woman who made Scotland, striding across the country with a creel of stones on her back, dropping the mountains behind her as she went. Blue-skinned, one-eyed, rust-red teeth, and nobody has ever tried to make her lovely. She rules the dark half of the year from Samhain to Beltane, washes her great plaid in the Corryvreckan whirlpool until it comes out white and lays it over the country as the first snow, herds and protects the red deer, and vanishes at Beltane. Her power and her age are the same fact. And there's a stone house in Glen Lyon where somebody still takes her family out at Beltane and puts them back at Samhain, every year, as far back as anyone can trace.I've also included the part that stops this being a pep talk, which is that she grieves. There's a poem twelve hundred years old in which the oldest woman in our folklore sits down and mourns her own youth in some detail. Both things are true at once.Then the research that has been arguing with the hill for twenty years, and I've given you the contested version rather than the headline, because the shape has been changing and it deserves honesty. What has survived every revision is that none of it is a hill.And the Wheel of Fortune, which floats in the sky with no ground beneath it, because on a wheel there is no summit. The top is a position you pass through.Next week we come near the end, and it's the other side of the Lùnastal episode. We asked then who lit the fire on your hill. Next week, who you're lighting them for.This week's card: the Wheel of Fortune. It floats with no ground under it, and the top is somewhere you pass through.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

This is the warm one. We've had eight weeks of heavy weather, and the year has turned toward the harvest, so I've the Sun for you.Which is exactly where somebody in my line of work is most likely to say something useless. So here's the thing I want to be straight about. You cannot make a sun. And a fair bit of your life has gone by while you waited for one to come up, because there's a way of thinking that goes: I'll start when work settles, when I've got my energy back, when I feel more like myself. Every one of those is waiting on something arriving from outside you that changes the conditions, and you have no hand in any of it.So this episode is about the other thing. At the end of August, the women and the bairns went out to the wet ground to cut rushes. You strip the green skin off to get at the pith inside, leaving one narrow rib of green running the length of it, because without that the pith has no backbone and collapses in your hand. Then you dip it in whatever fat the household has saved in a pan by the fire. And you have light, made out of a weed from the worst bit of the field and the grease off the dinner.These things existed because a tax in 1709 priced poor people out of candles. So this is not a charming rustic craft. And they were held in an iron clip at about forty-five degrees, because too upright burns dim and too flat burns out fast. Our people built the discipline into the object rather than relying on anybody's willpower.There's also where the phrase comes from. You could light a rushlight at both ends for twice the light and half the time, and it originally meant reckless and wasteful. I don't think I need to labour that one.Then a diary study of twelve thousand entries that found the single strongest driver of a good day was making some progress on something that mattered, and that small progress worked nearly as well as breakthroughs. Along with the half of that finding nobody quotes, which is that setbacks hit two to three times harder than progress helps.And the Sun card, which has a wall in it that most people walk straight past.Next week is the one I've been looking forward to since I planned this series, and it's about the old woman who made the mountains.This week's card: the Sun. The sun makes no effort at all, and that isn't available to us. The wall is the interesting part.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

This is the third time in eight weeks I've come at the same problem, and I want to be honest about that. In week three we looked at the hill you keep circling and I said the circling costs more than the climb would. A fortnight ago we were out on the bog and I said you're waiting for a certainty this sort of decision never produces. Both of those are true. Neither has got some of you moving, and I've been sitting with why.Here's the thing I think I'd been missing. Wanting to see the whole mountain isn't really a request for information. It's a request for a version of the climb where you get to skip being a beginner. Because if you could see the entire route, you could plan it, and if you could plan it you'd never be caught out, and you'd arrive at the top having somehow never once been a novice. Which is the one way up that doesn't exist.And that matters more for you than for most people. You've been the capable one since school. Which sounds like a blessing, and is actually a gap in your training, because it means you've built a life almost entirely without the experience of being visibly incompetent in front of witnesses. Chris Argyris found something like this when he studied management consultants and expected them to be the best learners in the building. They were the worst. Because they'd almost never failed, they'd never learned how to learn from failing.The folklore this week is cairns. The heaps of stones on Scottish hills that do three different jobs, and the thing all three have in common. There's the plain one, which is waymarking across ground where the line isn't obvious. There's memory, and the old blessing cuiridh mi clach air do chàrn, I'll put a stone on your cairn, which means I won't forget you. And there's the tradition where each man placed a stone before a battle and the survivors took theirs back afterwards, so that what remained was the exact number of the dead, and nobody had to count.Every one of those was built by somebody who isn't there. Which is how you actually cross a hill you can't see. Nobody has ever done it by knowing the route. You walk to the stone you can see, and the next one appears when you get there, and never before.And the card is the Page of Wands, the youngest and least experienced figure in the suit, standing in a desert with a sprouting stick and no plan, looking at the one living thing in his hands rather than scanning the horizon. Nothing in that card is embarrassed about him.There's a practice at the end about naming the audience you can't bear to be a beginner in front of, and giving yourself a bad-at-it allowance.Next week the year turns and we go somewhere warmer, with the Sun.This week's card: the Page of Wands. The beginner, holding one living thing, in a desert, going anyway.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

I've said the same line in nearly every episode of this series. The lantern only lights the next step. This week I want to take it apart, because I think most of us hear it wrong.The way it usually lands is as consolation. Poor you, out in the dark with your inadequate wee light, never mind, you only need the next bit. That reading has the Hermit stumbling about lost. So go and look at the card. He isn't lost. He's standing on the top of a mountain he already climbed, with a staff in his hand because he walked up there and there's nothing in his face wishing the lamp were bigger.Last week we spent an hour chasing a light that kept its distance. Here's the answer to it, which is that you stop chasing lights when you're carrying one.The folklore this week is the shieling, the àirigh, the summer town up on the high grazing. Every year from around Beltane, a large share of the women and girls of a township went up the hill with the cattle and stayed for six weeks to fourteen. They milked, made butter and cheese, and made a startling amount of the Gaelic song tradition while they were at it, because you don't get that volume of song out of people who are busy. Around this time of August they came back down, and the township turned out to meet them, and nobody debated whether she had been entitled to go, because the butter was walking down the hill in front of her.Then the part that might sting a little. Solitude and loneliness are separated by one thing, which is whether you chose it. And most capable women aren't short of time alone. They're short of chosen time alone. The commute, the lunch at your desk, the fifteen minutes between meetings, whatever falls between the phone calls. Those are gaps between duties that you were issued rather than picked, and the missing ingredient is the only one that does any work.And the Hermit, whose arm is up. He's holding that lantern out over the edge of the peak as a beacon for whoever is still climbing. It isn't lighting his feet at all. He didn't find it either. He made it up there on his own, which is the only reason it's small, and small turns out to be plenty.There's a practice at the end about picking your own shieling and putting it in the calendar the way the cows needed the grass.This week's card: the Hermit. He isn't lost, he's arrived, and the light in his hand is one he made.Take the quizYou already know. So what are you waiting for? There's something you've been circling. You can describe it accurately, and still it sits where it sat. That isn't indecision, it's a pattern, and it has an old shape. Nine questions will name yours and each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. About three minutes, at sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

We've spent five weeks talking about a light over a hill as though every light is worth walking toward. This week I want to poke at that, because it isn't true.The Spunkie is the Highland name for the thing that hovers out on the moss at night. Every country with wet ground has one, and every one gave it a different name, which tells you how often people ran into it. In the Highlands it was said to appear as a linkboy, the lad who stood at a corner with a torch and lit you home for a coin, so the thing that leads you into the water arrives looking exactly like the help you were hoping for. It got blamed for shipwrecks too, mistaken for a harbour light by crews doing the sensible thing.And there's a tell, repeated across every county and every language. It recedes. You walk toward it and the gap holds. A real light does the most ordinary thing in the world, which is that it gets bigger and lets you arrive.Which is where this gets uncomfortable, because I know a fair few women walking toward a light that has kept the same distance for years. The one called being sure. One more sign, one more reading, one more month to see how things settle.So I want to sort out three things we've jammed into one word. Your intuition is a faculty, and it's yours, and nobody needs to certify it. Jung had it as one of the ways we perceive, the one that gets its information from underneath and arrives already finished. Everyone has it. Some people have just spent forty years being told to stop picking up. And then there are the two that turn up wearing its coat, which are fear and wanting, and they can be told apart by how they behave rather than by whether some outcome later scored them correct.There's a section in here on why I'm not going to hand you a way of proving which is which, and on what you can do instead.Then the Moon, which is lit entirely by borrowed light, with a crayfish half out of the pool and a path going off between two towers that regular listeners will recognise from a few weeks back.This one comes with a proper word of care in the middle about safety and about alarms that were set very early, and I'd rather you heard it than skipped it.Next week we stay out in the dark with the only figure in the tarot carrying his own light rather than chasing somebody else's.This week's card: the Moon. Nothing in that picture is lit by anything of its own, and there's still a path.Your free companionThe Light Over the Hill is a free six-card spread that lays out along a path climbing the slope, to help you find your own hill, your own light, and your own next step. It's at sageinthesky.com, and it comes with the weekly letter.

It's Lùnastal, the first harvest, and for a very long time in this country that meant everybody climbing the local hill together with baskets to pick blaeberries and light a fire on the top. Nobody organised it. Everybody simply knew, because it had been handed down the line for so long that the names had come off it.So this week I want to ask who lit the fire on your hill.We go up for the gathering, and I tell you about the founding of this festival, which I knew nothing about for years and which stopped me in my tracks when I finally looked it up. Lughnasadh began as a funeral feast. Lugh held it for his foster-mother Tailtiu, who cleared the forests of Ireland so there could be fields, and died of the work, and never saw a single harvest. The first harvest festival in these islands is a thank-you to a woman who wore herself out so other people could eat. And she got thanked properly, for about two thousand years.Then I tell you about a piece of research I found. Kumar and Epley asked people to write to somebody who had changed their life, and to predict how it would land. Every time, the writers underestimated how happy it would make the person, underestimated how surprised they'd be, and badly overestimated how awkward it would feel. Which means the people who lit fires for you genuinely do not know they did it. And it means you have lit fires you know nothing about, which matters if you're somebody who has poured herself into others for years and never had much in the way of a receipt.There is also a section in this one for anyone whose family line is a difficult one, and it isn't an afterthought. The old Gaelic world reckoned foster-kin above blood, with a proverb to prove it, and Tailtiu herself was a foster-mother who was handed no field by anybody. If you are the first in your line to do something differently, this episode turns out to be more yours than anybody's.And we sit with the Six of Cups, where one child hands a flower to another while the person who planted the whole garden walks quietly off down the path without waiting to be thanked.The practice this week asks you to actually do something, which is rare for me. Name them, write down what you still use, and then tell one of them.Next week we go after a light that moves, out on the bog at night, and talk about which of your instincts are worth following.Your free companionThe Light Over the Hill is a free six-card tarot spread that lays out along a path climbing the slope, to help you find your own hill, your own light, and your own next step. It's at sageinthesky.com, and it comes with the weekly Light Over the Hill letter: a piece of folklore, one card, a prompt, and something small to do.