This week I did a working. The details of it aren't what's important here, and some spells are personal practice. But something happened during it that I haven't been able to stop thinking about, and I think it belongs here.
I was burning bay leaves. If you work with bay, you know that they generally catch easily, burn cleanly, carry intention beautifully. Reliable. Straightforward. I have burned so many of them without a second thought.
This one did not want to catch.
Six matches. Six. The flame would redirect every time I brought it close, like something was physically steering it away. A couple times it went out entirely..When the leaf finally caught it would smoulder for a few seconds and go out. I tried again. Same thing. The energy in the room was not subtle about it.
So I stopped. And I sat with it for a minute, because this is actually one of the most important skills in craft and one of the least talked about, knowing what to do when the working pushes back. Resistance during a spell is not failure. It is information. The question is learning to read which kind.
Sometimes resistance means the timing is off. The intention is right, the target is right, but the moment isn't. Something is still moving into position and the working is essentially telling you, not yet. This is not a no. It is a hold.
Sometimes resistance means the approach needs adjusting. The energy you're bringing to the working doesn't match what the intention actually needs. You came in with fire when the situation calls for something slower and more deliberate. The spell knows. Your materials know. They will tell you if you're listening.
And sometimes, and this is the one that requires the most honesty, resistance is showing you something about the intention itself. Something unexamined. A motivation that isn't quite clean, an outcome that isn't quite right, a layer underneath the surface intention that hasn't been addressed yet. This is the kind of resistance that feels the most uncomfortable and does the most useful work.
Instead I sat with the leaf. I asked what it was trying to tell me. And then I made a decision about how to proceed based on what came back. The person on this leaf has very apparent protections of their own, whether they realized it or not. I was interfering with energy that was already doing work.
That discernment, the ability to distinguish between resistance that is asking you to stop and resistance that is asking you to slow down and get more precise, is some of the most advanced work in this craft. It doesn't come from any book. It comes from practice, from relationship with your materials, and from being willing to be wrong about what a moment needs.
The leaf eventually burned. On my seventh attempt, with more clarity about what I was actually doing and why, it caught (finally) and burned completely.
That felt like the answer.
Until next time,
Cerissa