First page of ***The Rooted Flame*** (Paralibrum Press, 2026), image by José Gabriel Alegria Sabogal after a motive by Austin Osman Spare.

I have much to say, but not now.

What is for now is catching my breath. Sitting still. Placing a palm over my heart and remembering this body I am in. What is for now is taking a sick week, and drawing myself back from the edge I have been walking for longer than I care to admit.

The last seven weeks especially, I spent breathlessly from dawn to dusk trying to support employees who are still caught in the ongoing Middle East crisis. There are moments in our jobs when genuine meaning comes very close to the surface. Yet it’s those same moments that can become among the hardest to bear, because a million small obstacles stand between our intention and any real difference we make. I am deeply grateful for all the support Harper gave me — for the sanity she helped me preserve, the food she placed before me, the times she listened, and the long, silent hugs.

I have much to say, but not now.

For now, I would rather sit quietly with a few questions. How did we come to believe that we must hold a razor-blade like opinion on everything? How did we fall so fully under the spell that these opinions mattered at all? And how did we become so quick to mistake integrity for the public display of sharp opinions, rather than for the difficult work of caring for those around us with as little judgment as possible?

I have much to say about the many false ideas surrounding leadership and labor, about capitalism and the void where a viable alternative ought to be, about those who choose the path of the artist and end up worrying mostly about money, and those who choose the path of money and end up worrying mostly about not being artists. I even have a book project mapped out on the bizarre wilderness of “earning a living,” through which each of us tries to cut a path of our own. But that, too, is not for now.

What is decidedly for now is reading. I have an entire library to catch up on. At the top of the stack are Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, David Beth’s Black Pilgrimage, and the astonishing 1967 anthology The Human Dialogue. That last book, in particular, is the first volume from a shelf I have set aside to guide me into my next project: a book on sigils and ritual magical practice as they took shape between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So many of the liturgical elements later absorbed into the fragile and still-forming orthodoxy of Western magic, as a heretical underground current, still bear the marks of their time, their culture, their lands, and the hands of the human beings who first assembled what we now call “grimoire culture.”

Meanwhile, we are now not far out from Scarlet Imprint opening the pre-order for my double volume Goêtic Collectanea.The Olympic Spirits are now available and shipping in their soft- and hardcover versions; and the deluxe edition will follow soon. This last week, The Rooted Flame has gone to the printer. Both the fine and hardcover edition will be completely available and in stock before orders open. So no pre-orders or long wait times; instead the Paralibrum Press shop will open for orders as soon as the books are ready to ship. I will share more about this title, when the time comes. However, if anyone plans to hold a reading marathon, it will beautifully connect and lead onwards from the Goêtic Collectanea, which in itself will contain and long and most radical new piece. Then there is an unnamed anthology to which I was able to contribute; which is to be announced later this year. I am very excited about this project, as it corals around a topic very dear to my heart. Also, there is small surprise project coming to life soon. Only 24 pages, small and humble, like these original Rosicrucian pamphlets, but filled with heart and hand on each page. Finally, I am looking forward to meeting some of you at the Occulture Retreat in Italy this fall. It will be the first time that Harper and I speak and teach publicly together; and it will mark the end of the time where Acher was anonymous…

So there is a lot to get through this year that I am deeply grateful for.

I want to close this brief update, by saying how much I see people around me suffering these days. Small pains and big pains; tiny losses and devastating ones. But above all, immense anxieties: about the world we inhabit, about our own insufficiency, about the people and institutions we once trusted and no longer do, about who we will become in the storm that is gathering, and how we might ever learn to name that storm in such a way that its terror is lessened, its vastness made containable, its violence drawn into some intelligible boundary. For nothing constrains like a name. Even shadows become profiles, and horizons become paths, once we know how to call them. Or so, at least, we have taught ourselves to believe…

I want to close these brief reflections, by saying I see you. I stand with you. I might not be of the same opinion, background, culture, or identity. Whatever that latter is? But I stand with you nonetheless, and exactly because of that. Because we are different, because we are legion in the variety of our lives. And one in our pain, in our loss and constraint.

And if you feel that you cannot bear one thing more, that whatever this is has brought you to the outer edge of yourself, then allow me to leave you with the words my Holy Daimon spoke to me only the other week, when I myself was all mud and clay and confusion:

You do know, s/he said, that you do not need
to weigh anything at all?

Spring 2026 Update

A Conjuration of Sekhmet