Something James Altucher mentions reasonably often on his podcast is a phrase his producer once told him: How you do anything is how you do everything.
It’s usually served up in the context of rah-rah, hustle hustle, entrepreneurialism. And it’s certainly sufficiently true for that world. But it actually has universal applicability. And that is frankly horrifying.
Talking to Austin recently about Venus Ret’s move into Libra, ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ is a good encapsulation of the medicine in this particular configuration. It is the definition of stark. In Libra -a sign she vastly prefers- Venus Ret holds up an internal mirror of justice, fairness, and balance.
Only you know how you do ‘anything’: What you half-ass in your relationships or at work, how to treat the telemarketer who calls during suppertime. You might be proud of your macro achievements -behold! My children are all still alive and not in prison- but you cannot hide the minutiae of your micro ‘anythings’ from Venus Rx.
It is far too simple to decomplexify this down to simply "be nice to people". Libra is the sign of scales. Of balance. Mere niceness is unbalancing. Sometimes you have to use the sword in Justice's other hand. Navigating your own anything/everything is far more difficult than that.
I notice this particularly on the farm, where it is now Spring. If you half ass the mulching, then you blink and grass is coming back through. If you leave the brushcutting for the weekend then you might as well be hacking through a jungle on your way to a Lost City. I have done and regretted both of these. Spring is the only remaining season I have yet to experience here in southern Tasmania and, holy shit, 'watching the grass grow' is a spectator sport with all the excitement of Formula 1.
One of the anything/everything pain points I have been shown in Venus's underworld mirror is a vastly reduced blogging schedule. And yes, I've never been busier in my life. And yes, the show, the newsletter, the Premium Member content, working on books and articles for other people's books, the sold-out event in Melbourne later in the month... all before we even start on setting up an accommodation business and mainframing a permaculture farm -neither of which I have any experience in- all more or less on my own... certainly qualify as legitimate reasons.
The actual lesson isn't so much "you should get up earlier than 5:30am anyway. There is always time to do things if you're honest with yourself." That is true enough. I absolutely could have 'found time' to get a blog post out a week, say. But the mirror instead shows me that the medicine isn't individual time management, it is being honest with yourself about what you can and can't do. And when to ask for help, and who you 'balance' time with. In my case, this is obviously my partner (Venus, duh), who has only been spending four days out of every fourteen down here, two of which he has spent remote working.
But my one successful 'corporate magical campaign' this year -divination, sigils, timing, pacts- has been on his behalf and has been so successful it almost makes me miss the cut and thrust of having a proper job. Almost. So from about this weekend, he moves into a 'one week up, one week down, all weekends on farm' arrangement with work, which invites a 'rebalancing' of the daily chores required in getting this permie space ship into the air, especially as we head into Summer and have daylight from 5am to 10pm. Unsurprisingly, this coincides with an opening up of home sector challenges in my own chart that began more or less since I moved down here, and which I was entirely aware of. (There's some pretty wild eclipse turbulence in H1 of next year but, other than that, it's opening up.)
What hasn't suffered in my time squeeze -and what usually does- is regular magical practice. But, somewhat eerily, it has locked step about five or six months ahead of whichever courses the premium members have voted for and actually not only fit into these fifteen hour days, but fit perfectly. Meditation and altar practice in the morning, interactivity with the more-than-human during the day (unavoidable on a farm), and card work and journeying in the evenings. You obviously hope, when you embark on an adventure like this, that the integration between magic stuff and life stuff is seamless -because it is metaphysically identical- but it has so far exceeded my wildest dreams.
The upshot of the Venus Rx Libra medicine is -whisper it- I'll hopefully get time to return to my first creative love, which is definitely blogging. I'm also -fingers crossed- going to have the capacity to do more video work on the stuff that is happening on the farm, now that, you know, stuff actually is happening on the farm. In between now and then, here's some place-based snapshots of what has been going on in early Spring at the edge of the world.
Farm
A visit from my high school bestie and his new girlfriend. He's the only person I have ever met who can outdrink me and, goodness, did we push that particular barrier. Having friends visit your actual farm is one of those things that make it all worthwhile.
The kitchen garden has been excavated so the chickens are enjoying their newfound freedom. Also the first of several new dams/ponds is going in now that it is theoretically dry enough to do so. They have to be done in sequence because the dam wall will also double as access to the main part of backfield for larger trucks and machinery required to lay gravel and build a greenhouse.
Around the Valley
The Magical Geography course in particular gave me the inner permission I required to actually spend more time in the wider locale, including the Harz Mountain National Park, where I drank from that lake and admired one of the tributaries waterfalls into my river. Spring was in danger of becoming my favourite season down here -which is quite a league table climb given it was previously my least favourite- but apparently, we've just been having a really nice and mild Spring. Typically it is windy and wet, something that it has decided to switch on this past couple of weeks.
Newcastle
MMTP had a hip replacement last month so I flew back home because... well, that's what you do, I guess. Anyway, she's fine and I had a great day hanging out with my little brother and his kids, enjoying vastly, vastly different weather to the farm. The highlight wasn't seeing my niece's ballet class -which was terrible- but rather that she has now progressed from looking exactly like Eleven in Stranger Things Season 1 to Eleven in Season 2, now that she has hair.
Even better, her mother has finally seen the show, so she's stopped being offended when others comment that her daughter looks like a government-abducted mental patient who kills people with her mind. (Which to be fair, does not sound like a compliment.) Now that she's seen the show, she's progressed to finding it really super weird that there is an actress out there with the same face as her kid.
Hobart
There have been quite a few trips up to Antarctica's capital, and I've more or less found my way around. A few weeks back, it was my new witchy neighbour, Avalon, and I, getting on the sauce with a small but growing number of local weirdos.
Also, and most recently... James and I did our first beekeeping course in advance of getting what I hope to be an enormous number of bees in the Summer. Bees are better than chickens. I don't make the rules.
Melbourne
For both magical reasons (which the premium members will know about) and operational ones -principally around organising Austin and my event later in the month as well as selecting impossibly dull things like tiles and coffee tables for the guest house- There have been almost monthly trips to Melbourne. The most recent visit had some amazing and frankly un-Melbourne weather which felt exactly like Downtown L.A. last July while drinking on rooftops and exactly like Bordeaux in the Summer when sitting under trees... drinking. It's an hour away by air but feels like an efficient bundling together of all previous holidays.
Those last two are pictures from a tour of the event venue, making sure I know where we can put the open bar... and also the audio, the seats and all those other optional extras.
Excellence
So that's the news. 'How you do anything is how you do everything' is, inevitably, a softer way of saying you should shoot for excellence in everything that you do. Excellence, perhaps unfairly, carrying pseudo-meritocratic, Protestant-work-ethic baggage. But it also has potentially cosmic implications. I keep thinking about how anything/everything approaches can eventually change the world -and maybe they are the only thing that can.
For those who are interested, below is a story about one intransigent, Australian farmer who did everything 'officially wrong' and not only utterly rehydrated his farm but all the farms downstream from him to the point that they are droughtproof -which we can attest to as Australia is in the throes of a hideous drought. And the sense is that the tide really might have turned and that government policy might actually change on a national level to practices that look more like this. Think not only of the food and water security implications of that, but also the biodiversity ones. (My main gripe with the article is that permies and P.A Yeomans were doing this sort of thing long before. But who cares who gets the credit if it happens?)
Anyway, we can but hope.
I'll leave you with the last and spookiest cosmic implication. If -and it's a perfectly serviceable model- the universe is in some sense a single, evolving organism which exists to experience itself, then consider this: Based on population numbers, 50% of all human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience is being experienced by people who are alive right now.
Which means there are a lot of anythings contributing to the overall everything at this very moment and you're part of it. Take a good, albeit uncomfortable look in that mirror Venus dragged up from the underworld for you.