This story starts... well... it's hard to decide where to start because all the threads of my life are so interconnected together... if any one tiny thing had happened differently in my life, I wouldn't be here right now writing this blog post on Paragraph.

Where to begin... where to begin...

No, seriously, this is really hard...

Cuz do I begin where I first encountered the idea of magic when I was 13 years old?

That's maybe a bit too far back.

Let's start in 2017, when I first moved into this house.

I was deep in a toxic marriage in a barely tolerable living situation and I wanted out. Couldn't save money for shit because I was barely making enough to keep going as is.

Got a nudge in August 2017 to write a book. Not only that, to write and publish a book in a week and post about it publicly on Facebook.

I set up pre-orders and everything.

Didn't make a whole ton of money, but enough to pay some bills.

The book is called Bitchslap Journaling and it's still available on Kindle, though I never market it.

In September of that year, I decided to launch 100 Days of Bitchslaps to close out the year. I'd post one Bitchslap Journaling prompt a day, and we'd see where it went for us. (That evolved into the yearly 100 Days to [Year] habit streak marathon that I do and encourage others to join each year.)

Long story short, by December, I'd made enough money I could pay off some stuff I needed to pay off, and someone I barely knew on Facebook, who I'd met once at a local event, offered to let me move in with her rent free so I could get enough saved to get my own place finally.

Within a few months, she let me know that the house was going to be going into tax foreclosure the next year. She was moving in with her boyfriend - in an old farmhouse on a whole bunch of acres of land with a big barn so now she's got big ponds and more chickens and other animals than she could have here in the city. Because of a program here in the city I live in, if you're a non-owner resident of a house that goes into tax foreclosure, you're offered the opportunity to buy it.

But I was still poor as fuck. Unemployable. Scraping by on what I managed to make shitposting and offering various services online.

By this point, I'd already been branding as The Village Hermit. I hadn't yet taken my monastic vows - I was waiting until I had secured my hermitage to do that - but I'd already built a tightknit online Village of Heretics when the house started going through the foreclosure process in 2019.

In August 2019, I decided to start choosing monthly words to serve as a sort of theme and contemplative focus for the month. I chose Sanctuary that month - it was the month I was going to find out if the house was going into the batch auction which would make it eligible for that particular program that would give me the opportunity to buy it.

I posted about it frequently, keeping my Village of Heretics updated on the progress.

And yay! It got added to that batch auction. After which, it was a waiting period for the next step, and a whole series of strange events that weave together in twisted threads that are gonna take some explaining...

I decided to continue the monthly word practice. But I didn't pick my Word for September.

Instead, a Word jumped into my head and wouldn't leave until I accepted it.

Surrender.

I had no fucking clue what was coming.

My birthday is in September.

And I have a thing about my birthday.

It always sucked in some way or another.

I was still married, and my then-husband was working out of state and I was looking forward to a blissful birthday alone.

Except he still managed to make it suck. Irritated the fuck out of me. Walked off the job in another state because he made himself sick. Blew up my phone all day long.

I was still fucking annoyed when he got home the following Friday - his boss was a long-time friend of his and was used to his temper tantrums. He dropped everything that was in his pockets on my desk, including the tourniquet they'd used when they'd done blood draws and given him a saline iv at the urgent care because he'd dehydrated himself not drinking anything all day because he didn't have money for his preferred beverage. (There are many reasons that marriage died.)

My birthday is September 11th. That year, Friday was the 13th, and it happened to also be a Full Moon, and I happened to have started my period.

So I hexed him.

In the past, when I'd hexed him, he'd move out for a few weeks, give me breathing room, then I'd let him come back because I suck at housekeeping and he's great at it. Then I'd regret it and hex him to go away again.

The following Monday, I was sitting at my desk. He'd decided not to go to work that week. I was annoyed, but trying to just focus. I was venting in my group in the comments on the daily check-in post.

I wrote:

As soon as I hit enter, I saw flash of light out of the corner of my eye, heard the gunshot, and then heard him scream, "FUCK!"

I looked up and blood was spraying out both sides of his arm.

When I cast that hex the previous Friday, what I hadn't known was on my birthday, when he'd pissed me off, he'd told his boss, "If I keep pissing her off like this, she's gonna shoot me with my own gun." His boss is still convinced I shot him. Mostly because he himself would have shot my ex if he'd had to live with him again.

Now, I'm not saying my hex actually caused my ex to shoot himself.

In a month where Surrender was my Word.

But the coincidences are notable and the more I follow them, the weirder - and better - my life gets.

My Village of Heretics pulled together for me. They immediately coordinated to send me a new mop and bucket so I could throw away the one that I'd had to use to clean up all the blood. They also sent donations, coordinated grocery and takeout deliveries, and basically kept me sane in a way that didn't make me feel crowded as an extreme introvert.

BTW he survived. That tourniquet came in handy, a neighbor across the street had heard the gunshot and came over and clamped down on the arm - which had an arterial bleed - while I called 911. We both got grilled by the police, and his mother is convinced to this day that I shot him because she can't accept her son is a reckless idiot.

So how is this related to buying my house for $4000?

It goes back to that Village of Heretics stepping up for me to keep me going while I was dealing with police suspicion and worry about my husband who I had a love-hate relationship with - I didn't want him dead, just out of my life...

It showed me that I had been building something really special. A group of people who wanted to support me because they liked my content. My chaotic, experimental, living my learning out loud content. I wrote about my own personal and spiritual growth. What I was doing, as I was doing it, sharing my results in real time.

And they vibed with it.

I continued doing the monthly Words, and in October 2019, I opened it up and started doing a monthly Word post offering to give people a Word.

Just a Word.

I asked them to tip/donate if they wanted, but it wasn't mandatory.

I kept doing it month after month, except for taking the first half of this year off. The Village missed it so much, they flooded the post when I offered it again last week.

They came back again and again cuz my Words are eerily accurate to what they end up experiencing for the month.

They're not intended as a prediction, but as a focus for attention and contemplation.

But it does get very, very weird.

So, back to the house.

Six months after Bloody September's Hex.

March 2020, I finally find out how much I need to come up with to buy the house.

$4000.

I'd already been posting about it, strategizing, plotting out how I was going to do the fundraising.

Including this gem in February 2020:

But March 2020 is where we really started to get hit by COVID so it was a weird time to be doing a fundraiser.

On Friday, March 13th, 2020 - 6 months after I'd cast that hex on my then-husband, I did some money magic and posted on Twitter with the #CashAppFriday tag not actually expecting to be one of the people they sent any money to.

So imagine my surprise when I get a cashapp notification for $1000. From Jack Dorsey.

1/4 of the amount I needed to buy the house.

I grabbed a screenshot and shared it on Facebook - where I had a fundraiser going since that's where my main audience is.

That immediately gave my fundraiser the traction needed to raise more than enough to buy the house.

Two bedrooms, with a woodstove in the living room, two grow rooms in the basement, on 2.5 city lots with established perennial flowers, vegetables, and berries, as well as a pond in the backyard, and a garage converted into a studio with an independent electric breaker box.

Was it magic or coincidence that these events lined up in this particular way?

If I hadn't had the support I had through the crisis of my husband accidentally shooting himself, I wouldn't have gone on to go to the silent retreat I attended in December, which radically transformed me, nor would I have had the confidence to shift to the donations-based income model that I adopted upon returning from that retreat - the model that allowed me to successfully fundraise the amount needed to buy my house, six months after I cast that hex.

My answer is I don't care if it's magic or pure coincidence. I can't prove it one way or the other, and leaning into the whimsy of it is WAY more fun.

I say what I want, what I'm gonna do, what I'd like to see happen. I post it on social media. And then it happens. So I keep on doing it!

It's the nudges that led me to doing things like moving in with a woman I'd only met once before in my life that lead me to things like her basically giving me the house she'd lived in for thirty years. It's not rational to move in with a stranger. But it wasn't the first time I'd done that because of a nudge, and if I hadn't, I wouldn't have this lovely, cozy little hermit life that I have right now.

My current nudge? It brought me to Farcaster right before Moxie launched.

So far, I'm gonna keep following it!

❤️ Gwynne