On a sleep-deprived autumnal Tuesday, I met up with a mate for coffee then ended up doing a ritual.

There’s a mate of mine that I’m not so secretly obsessed with. He knows this. We’ve talked about it. One of those friends where as soon as you meet, you’re like: mate, what took you so long? This friend I’m talking about, we only met in the past couple of years, but in the time since then we’ve discovered we were hanging about in many of the same places, scenes and subcultures at the exact same times. We were having parallel lives. Searching for each other is the joke that we make now. Only we’re not really joking. Because this friend —  like so many of the ones I’m grateful to have these days —  is one I have a bone-deep, soul-deep sense of connection to. Like: we were meant to share these things, this space, this life. Of all the infinite possibilities of who and where we could have ended up, it’s a constant source of love and gratitude to me that we’ve overlapped. Now we have, we’re making up for lost time.

Last week, insomnia turned me into pathetic ghost. This happens every now and again. I thrash and strop in bed for hours, give up and make a self-pitying blanket burrow, watch the sky shift from dark to pale while I wait for the world to wake up, then sleepwalk through my day. Only last week, I had a catch-up work date planned with my mate. So I dragged my sorry arse to the tram and soaked up the warmth of that low gold sideways autumnal sun as it rattled me towards my destination: a boho hipster Chorlton bar with burnt gold walls, teal velvet seats, a cute metalhead barista and a constant parade of adorable dogs.

I mainlined coffee until my friend’s arrival, chatted some shit to the barista and the dogs, and scribbled in my notebook. I’ve been hiding from fiction writing lately, but reconnecting to and excavating the past through non-fiction has been a process I’m trying to trust. My mate is a gorgeous, wise Viking soul with always-present perfect eyeliner, red braids and knuckles tattooed in old Norse, and as soon he turned up we followed our usual pattern: immediately forsaking all our good intentions of doing work and instead tumbling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of our latest obsessions and discoveries, gabbling away at top caffeine-fuelled speed like hyperactive toddlers, until we realised the light in the bar had changed, and hours had passed. The day was slipping away.

This mate of mine: I met him for the first time during a ritual for the winter solstice, a shivery dawn swim in the freezing cold to mark the sun’s return after the longest night. Witchcraft, neo-paganism, rituals and magick have always been part of our conversations. We’re both into it, we both read a ton of occult and esoteric books, and almost all of our chats devolve into exchanges of what we’ve learnt. But one of our current ongoing threads is about trusting our intuition. About how sometimes we don’t need to be told what to do by a book, because the answer is already within us.

Over our coffees, we’d been describing our intentions for the remainder of the year. And when we finally realised the time, we gave up pretending we were going to get any work done. Come back to mine, he said. We can do a ritual to set those intentions into motion. It was a Tuesday, the day of the week associated with Mars, which in planetary correspondences means courage, strength, and taking action.

We bundled ourselves up into our layers and mooched back to his, collecting fat, glossy conkers as we walked and still talking ten to the dozen. His place is a goth paradise where it’s Halloween all year round, and an autumnal altar was already set on the coffee table, waiting for us. He disappeared upstairs to ransack his witchy supply cupboard, came back down with a jar of red sand from the Utah desert, a vial of rain collected during a thunderstorm, and a marbled hunk of dragon’s blood, a stone said to enhance will, endurance and tenacity. We lit some candles, burnt some incense, cast a circle. Between us, we made up a ritual: an organic combination of intuition and knowledge from other sources, inking our intentions onto scraps of paper that we burnt in my mate’s tiny cast-iron cauldron with a mix of other ingredients.

My favourite definition of magick is from Dion Fortune, who describes it as “the art of changing consciousness at will,” and whether you subscribe to magick as a real metaphysical force or extended metaphor, if our aim was to feel more confident, strong and empowered in the intentions we’d set, our actions that day did just that. By invoking elements of ceremony, discussing the mundane and divine help we might want and need, and putting words and weight behind our intention, we made them more tangible for ourselves and each other, and through that process made them feel much more within reach.

The ritual we co-created isn’t replicated from any book, but it drew on our learnt and instinctive knowledge, and gave us a way to acknowledge and move towards the things we want. Like a permission slip we signed for each other, or a piece of self-advocacy all the more powerful for being witnessed.

Near-delirious with lack of sleep, I made my way home, leaves falling like confetti around me in the gloom of the approaching dark. Despite my exhaustion, I felt lighter and brighter for the magick we’d made together, and grateful for the sweetness, comfort and potency of co-affirmed possibilities made more tangible for being shared.

Originally published via Substack in October 2023