I was reading Gwynt-Siarad’s 8 Winds and Broken Vow, and the follow up post. He was going through some really practical Mage stuff, serving his community in the role of the shaman. One of the things he mentioned was how tired he felt after going on a Spirit Walk and encountering a spiritual-beastie.

I totally know that feeling. When you go looking into people’s “spheres” to see what’s going on in their spiritual life, it can be really draining to you personally. Emotional strain is tiring. It takes a level of compassion and empathy to be able to get a clear reading on someone’s spiritual state that can leave you feeling exhausted afterwards.

We’re used to dealing with our own stress levels, and we’ve got the reserves necessary to deal with that on a regular basis. When we start working with other people’s stressors, it’s an additional load to process, and it can leave you feeling weak, even if there are no entities encountered.

I’ve seen empaths advise different methods of maintaining a safe distance from your clients, ways to filter out the stressors so they don’t impact the empath. It’s a matter of maintaining a clinical objectivity while still interacting with some emotionally charged issues. It takes a lot of practice to do it well, and even in the best of times it’s still a filtering technique. Filters have holes to let things through that you want, on purpose. Extreme situations (or entities in your clients’ sphere) can rip right through the filter.

Like physical exercise, spiritual exercises improve endurance and spiritual muscles. Regular core maintenance rites, like cycling through the spheres, meditation and contemplation, regular observances to patrons and so forth are good core exercises that help build up your ability to deal with other people’s shit.

But emphasizing one or two exercises isn’t enough. There are people who do the LBRP and Middle Pillar daily, and they’ve got some really big muscles developed as a result. But when they get put into practical situations, they’re like the body-builder who finds himself in a Mixed Martial Arts octagon getting their asses kicked by someone half their size.

Vary your routine, make sure your core practices involve more than just a couple basic techniques. If you have a reasonable expectation that you’ll be meeting up with demonic forces or hostile spirits, you need to get used to dealing with them. One of the few things I’d recommend the Lemegeton’s Goetia for is training in dealing with spirits with malevolent natures. Don’t challenge them to a duel to the death or anything, you know, stupid. But they’re safe enough to conjure and interview, when the proper precautions are taken.*  They’ve got a wide spectrum of abilities and specialties, and getting to know them, how they operate, the forces they represent and wield can be a very useful thing when you encounter them, or similar spirits in your Work.

Also, it never hurts to make sure they’ll never work against you, especially with all the folks turning to that particular grimoire first when they think to curse you. Rofocal-Focalor (or one of his lackeys or corresponding spirits) will be sent against you sooner or later if you ruffle feathers in the occult community, and feathers are easily ruffled ’round here. Having him show up and say, “Hey, so-and-so sent me to kill you, LOL,” is much better than performing an exorcism from a hospital bed, you know?

Now that I’m all side tracked, I’m considering re-releasing the Modern Goetic Grimoire. I’ve had a change of heart about them recently. An insight into their nature, and their role in the life and sphere of a magician. That’s another post though.

This post was about strength training.

daily exercises, meditation, contemplation, opening portals to the aethyrs, travelling in astral form through the elemental kingdoms and planetary spheres, ascending to the highest spheres through the Gate opened by Iophial… These things are important for the magician.

Magicians are like Americans moving back to the countries of their ancestors. I’m French. I have relatives in the Alsace Lorraine region, allegedly. To live there, in the home world of my true ancestors, I’d need to learn the language, figure out local customs and economics, and integrate myself into the system so I could benefit from it, and it could benefit from me. It would take time, practice, and repeated exercises to make a place for myself, and to thrive.

But I’d do it. What else is there than to thrive?

If we’re going to thrive as magicians, we need to take time for strength training. Proactive research, conjurations, and the building up of gnosis so that when we are faced with situations that require strength, we have it.

* It’s only when you start asking them to influence your life that you start asking for trouble, in my opinion. Not saying it can’t be done, if done in the spirit of “teach me to excel” rather than “grant me the fruits of excellence without doing anything for it,” but it takes wisdom and patience and work ethic.

A potential course member wrote to me asking if the magic I teach in the course results in visible manifestations. He had read Lisiewski and others who claim physical manifestations are not only possible, but also necessary for the magic to be successful.

I’ve heard the siren call of that level of fundamentalism. I tend to think of the new Hermetic Fundamentalists as Grimoire Thumpers, with all the zeal and common sense you find in extremists of any belief system.

Look, when the spirits are present, yeah, you sense them. You might see something in your “astral” vision. You might smell them, hear them, or feel them press against you as they perform an initiation on you, tracing out seals on your forehead or whatever. you might even see them physically open the door, sit down next to you and spark up a bowl of fine imported tobacco. That doesn’t mean that anyone else sitting next to you in the room will experience the same thing, nor does it mean that your ritual will be any more or less successful.

I’ve seen spirits. I look over and see darker or lighter “orbs” floating above the altar. Bune sits on the floor where my baseboard heater runs along the wall, with his long skinny knees up. I see angel faces appear in my crystal ball. I don’t pretend any of this is something anyone else would physically see if they were present.

That said, my spouse sees stuff when I do magic. But it’s not always what I see.

I’ve had magician friends tell me they followed the steps of the grimoires exactly, Lion Skin Belt and all, and they tell me they saw the spirits visibly. Great, but what about the results? No different than my own.

Personally, I suspect they had a stronger psychic image of the spirits as a result of the increased initiatory vibration attained through the creation of the Belt. I don’t think a mundane person who hadn’t been through the process of creating the talismans would see it. That’s just my opinion. I don’t think something that can’t be photographed can be seen by the naked eye.

As far as I know, the historic accounts of magicians conjuring a spirits using the techniques of Reanaissance grimoires don’t mention physical or visual manifestations, unless they used a skryer to see the spirits as Dee and Kelley did. Dee didn’t see the visions Kelley saw. Benvenuto Cellini, a 16th century goldsmith and magician performed the magic of the grimoires of his time to conjure up spirits in the Colosseum. No one but the skryer saw anything. The other witnesses literally and figuratively shat themselves in fear when they felt the spirits arrive, but no one but the skryer saw anything.

So, since my own results don’t indicate physical manifestation is possible, or more importantly even necessary, and historic accounts of magicians of the time of the grimoires I use don’t mention physical manifestation, my stance is that sure, you may see something, but don’t expect anyone else to. And don’t worry if you don’t see anything; results are the only proof that matters.

The Flu Season. And there’s H1N1 mania sweeping the nation on top of that!

So here’s a little “get rid of the ick” technique that works really well for me.

Close your eyes, and listen to your heart beat. Visualize it pumping blood all over the body. Follow its paths in your mind’s eye, seeing the blood flowing to the different regions of your physical shell. Now turn your awareness to areas of illness or pain. Look at it with your mind’s eye, seeing the elemental building blocks that make up the frame. Earth and Fire, Water and Air, blended together in a myriad of proportions at the elemental (like atomic) level. Now see the ones that represent the illness turning black. To me they look like little cubes spinning in space in close proximity. The ones that are the illness turn black, and the one that aren’t turn red and white.

Picture the black ones leaving your body. Move them along with the power of your Will. Keep them moving until they’re all out, fading away into the background of existence, returning to their raw forms. A little heat applied to the stubborn ones, carefully so you don’t hurt the good stuff, seems to work well in loosening up sinus infections.

And take vitamin C.

Some of you may recognize the technique as the result of my Work with EHNB a while ago. I was suffering in silence through a sinus infection last week when Frater POS (His motto is not “Piece of Shit,” in case you were wondering) said it’s too bad I don’t know any magicians who could heal me. (He was home from work because his back was out again, and I magnanimously let that slide. The sinners mocked Jesus with “Healer, Heal thyself” too, after all.)

At the time I said I didn’t do magic for sickness because a full ritual takes 2 weeks to manifest, and it doesn’t seem worth it to deal with a three day cold. Mostly because I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. Then he reminded me that we get to do some things instantly as magicians, and graciously changed the subject.

Of course later on I was thinking about it, and I remembered the Enochian technique that had worked so well last year. I fished it out of the memory banks and put it to use. The next morning I was significantly better.

So, since I had to have a reminder to jog the old memory banks that magicians can heal themselves (after all, I’m not Jesus*), I figured I’d pass it on. Healers, heal yourselves.

* Really. Neither Lon, nor Jesus Christ.

“A project is a finite endeavor (having specific start and completion dates) undertaken to create a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value.” – from Wikipedia’s Project Management entry.

As you may know, I’m a priest in the cult of Project Management (PM). It’s supposed to be a business methodology for accomplishing projects successfully and efficiently. Wikipedia says it’s a discipline, but in real life, the disciples of PM are the true believers, the Project Management Office in major corporations are the Priests of their true God, and the rest of the team are heathens claiming to be converts to keep their jobs. The QA team is the Holy Inquisition, audits are their inquests, and …

Ok, I can see I’ll slip off into some weirdness if I keep comparing my job to a religion. So to the point!

Each project has a “life cycle” that can be broken down into basic phases. Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Control, and Closeout. It’s all pretty much common sense, but having it codified makes things a lot easier to figure out how to make things work. It provides a template for developing your projects efficiently.

In my Great Work activities, I find that using the simple approach of PM helps immensely. It’s not something I have to do nearly as strictly, but it provides a framework within which I can work and excel.

Usually when you decide to do a ritual, it’s in response to a need that has become apparent to you in your life. Obvious, eh? I know, but writing it down helps the rest of the post.

When you’ve identified that something needs to be addressed Magically, you can enter the “Initiation” stage. In this stage, you identify what you want to happen, the result, or “deliverable” of the project. You identify when you want to start the project, and when you want it to finish. You loosely identify the scope, that is, the area of impact of your ritual, and put into writing exactly why you need or want to use magic to accomplish this result. You also figure out whether you can actually do the magic, whether you have the resources of time, skill, and information available to accomplish your desired result.

Many ideas for projects get tossed in the trash can after this phase in business. The place I work added a pre-initiation phase to their projects called “Discovery” to eliminate the number of projects that got started and shit-canned along the way. It saved them a lot of money because one person can do the discovery phase in a major corporation, while to do the Initiation phase properly, you end up using a lot of people and wasting everyone’s time and cash.

Magicians don’t have to worry about that. The primary value of going through the steps of an Initiation Phase in magical projects is that you have a time set aside to really think about the ritual and put some things in writing so you don’t lose focus along the way. When you’re finished with you Initiation Phase, you should have everything you need to begin the Planning phase. You should have on one piece of paper:

• A start and finish date
• A Statement of Intent
• A paragraph or two explaining what it is you expect from the ritual, and how you want it to manifest.

The next phase is Planning. In this phase, you take your deliverable and reverse engineer the requirements and processes you’ll need to be able to perform the ritual. In this phase, you identify what kind of spirit you’ll be working with, for example, Angels, Daimons, Gods, or Heroes using Iamblichus’ classifications of spiritual entities. You identify the planets, astrological influences, or which specific spirits you’ll be working with. You identify the prerequisites, like whether you need to be more in tune with a particular power to be able to direct the subjects of a particular spirit. You gather information about what herbs, incenses, or elemental forces that are in harmony with your intent.

When you are finished with this phase, you will have a list of all the things related to your ritual that you will be using to perform the ritual. Writing these things down in bulleted lists grouped by subject area is an exercise that makes the following phase much easier.

The next phase is the Design phase. In this phase, you actually write up the ritual. On Mars day in Mars hour, you burn Mars herbs and call upon Martial Intelligence, Martial Spirit, and the Elemental King of Fire in the Martial Names of God while wearing the Martial Lamen and tracing the Seals of the spirits you will be working with. You’ll write out your oration notes, and develop your basic Playbook. This is a document that details each step of the process you will be doing during the next phase, Execution. Personally my “playbook” will be written on 3×5″ cards. The Orations are usually just noted with the specific names of the beings, and I have place holders for when I’m supposed to ring a bell or light incense or trace particular seals using particular elemental weapons. When this phase is complete, you should have the following:

• A playbook that has detailed instructions and sequential process steps noted and arranged in the appropriate order
• A checklist of things that need to be in place before you take the first step in the playbook.

Once you have all the planning and design finished, and you know specifically what you will be doing during the ritual, you’re ready to begin the Execution phase. In this phase, you gather all the ingredients you’ve identified in your requirements, and you make sure you’ve got everything you need ready to go at the right time identified in your playbook. This is the phase where I’ll be melting the copper and banging it into a disk to engrave in the appropriate hour, or performing preparatory kinetic meditations, or seeking initiation into the spheres I’ll be working with if I haven’t worked them before. This is the time that you set up your altar, if it isn’t set up already. This is the time you make sure all the candles are in their holders, the lighter has fluid, and the charcoal is sitting in the brazier ready to be lit. The last thing you do before the Execution phase is complete is perform the ritual you have designed.

The next two stages are the ones most magicians don’t bother with. In Monitoring and Control, you are supposed to be watching how the ritual you did is unfolding in your life. You’re supposed to be checking to see that things are working as designed. Unfortunately, Crowley with his warnings about “lust for results” and the Chaos Magic meme’s insistence on banishing with laughter and forgetting that you even did the rite have made a lot of magicians stupid. Between the time you perform the ritual and the time you expect it to manifest, you should be keeping tabs on the results without “lusting” after them. You do this by checking with the spirits to see where they’re at in their processes, and by paying attention to the subject areas of your life related to the ritual. If something comes up that is obviously going to fuck up the result, you take steps to implement your controls, processes you design into the ritual to mitigate unforeseen risks to the successful completion of the project.

The final phase of a project is the Closeout stage. In business, this means you’ve delivered the deliverable, you’ve made sure it’s working, and you pass on responsibility of ongoing maintenance to the appropriate business area “owner.” In magic, you enter this phase when the result has been accomplished. You clean up any offerings that were left out for the spirits, you send your spiritual thank you notes to the spirits that attended, and you write up the results of the ritual in your Magical PM log. This write up should include any lessons you’ve learned that will make future projects go more smoothly.

Chances are you already use a process similar to this in your own Work. the steps are common sense, after all, but maybe you don’t bother writing anything up along the way. By taking the time to formulate your statement of intent and the requirements and the playbook and the documentation of the manifestation and lessons learned, you’ll have more repeatable, traceable, and consistent results. The planning that goes into each phase will help you identify any potential gaps that could become “showstoppers,” the things that will totally derail your intended manifestation.

I’ve gotten some interesting comments on the Anger Magitude post, and I’m thankful to everyone for their comments. They are constructive and helpful.

I’m going to continue to Work with Mars on eliminating my anger issues. I’ve had similar issues in the past, and Martial work eliminated the symptoms, and I was fine for a while. When the triggers manifest again though, the path of least resistance is rage.

The point for me is to Work with Mars until everything that is anger-related is so pure that there is no room for unrighteous wrath.

The thing is though, “unrighteous” implies that there is a “righteous” wrath. In the Bible, Paul writes, “in your anger, sin not,” saying that anger itself isn’t a sin, it’s the things you do when you’re angry that can be sinful.

In the modern Western world, the same general approach is taken. Scientists and Psychologists are quick to point out that Anger is a Survival Mechanism(tm), and that the released hormones help us in the fight or flight response. Her’s a sample definition of Anger from angermgmt.com:

Anger is a natural human emotion and is nature’s way of empowering us to “ward off” our perception of an attack or threat to our well being.

Check the people they show on the web site. Five people, black woman, white guy, black guy, oriental guy, and a white woman, all smiling, relaxed, and dressed business professional. Obviously EVERY successful person, regardless of race or gender, knows the secrets on this page, right?

Because we accept Anger as a natural force, a natural reaction in our modern culture, the types of techniques for managing anger treat the symptoms. From a Christian Counseling page:

• Consciously determine to be calm. Don’t react, think! Remember your goals and respond appropriately. Choose to remain calm!
• Communicate. When someone upsets you, tell them. Calmly talk to them about how you feel about their words or actions. Learn to express yourself better — clear and composed. Choose to!
• Remove yourself from the scene until you can respond without anger.Your success will not happen overnight. Take it one step at a time, one day at a time. Remember to relax. Relaxation exercises or music can be helpful. Keep in mind you can reach out to someone you trust for help. Choose to!
• Frequently take time for yourself. Do something you enjoy like walking in the park, swimming, reading the Bible, or seeing a feel-good movie. Do something nice for someone you admire. It’s okay to feel good about yourself. Choose to!
• Look for the positives. Don’t dwell on the negatives. “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Learn to be forgiving. This is difficult, but we need to start by learning to forgive ourselves!

Similar stuff can be found in different words below:

• http://www.angermanagementgroups.com/Skills.html
• http://www.angermgmt.com/techniques.asp
• http://www.apa.org/topics/controlanger.html#strategies

My favorite is the “Using Humor” part of the last site above. “Picture yourself a God or Goddess; the idea that you could be such a thing is so FUNNY you won’t be angry…” Yeah right, he don’t know magicians very well, do he?

But anyway, the basic point of each is summed up in this statement:

The goal of anger management is to reduce both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes. You can’t get rid of, or avoid, the things or the people that enrage you, nor can you change them, but you can learn to control your reactions.

Meanwhile in the Buddhist Orient, there’s another interpretation. The very definition of Anger in Buddhist is completely different and presupposes a universal view that is so radically different from the modern West’s view of the Mind that there is no easy reconciliation:

Anger is a deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, and wishes to harm it.

That’s from the “Anger Management Techniques.org” web site. As you can see, the fundamental approach is different. A deluded mind. Here they teach that the source of anger is something else too:

Anger is a response to feelings of unhappiness, which in turn arise whenever we meet with unpleasant circumstances. Whenever we are prevented from fulfilling our wishes, or forced into a situation we dislike – in short, whenever we have to put up with something we would rather avoid – our uncontrolled mind reacts by immediately feeling unhappy.

Ok, honestly, the West has understood that part pretty well too. They’re like, it’s pride, dude, self-centered, narcissistic pride that leads to anger. How could something like THIS happen to ME!!!?

Anyway, still, neat stuff.

The other main reason we become unhappy and angry is because we are faced with a situation we do not want or like. Every day we encounter hundreds of situations we do not like, from stubbing our toe or having a disagreement with our partner, to discovering that our house has burnt down or that we have cancer; and our normal reaction to all of these occurrences is to become unhappy and angry. However, try as we might, we cannot prevent unpleasant things happening to us. We cannot promise that for the rest of the day nothing bad will happen to us; we cannot even promise that we shall be alive to see the end of the day. In samsara we are not in control of what happens to us. (Emphasis added by RO.)

So how does the Buddhist deal with anger? What are their anger management techniques? Let me tell you, they are a lot different than the ones listed above from Western sources. Lots of my free-will believing readers are going to puke at the thought of what’s about to come, but to this neo-Calvinist, it was pure honey:

Since it is impossible to fulfil all our desires or to stop unwanted things happening to us, we need to find a different way of relating to frustrated desires and unwanted occurrences. We need to learn patient acceptance.(From here.)

WHOAH! How many people read that and were like, “Fuck that!”? PAtient Acceptance of shit that pisses ME off?

It gets worse:

In reality most of our emotional problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things as they are – in which case it is patient acceptance, rather than attempting to change externals, that is the solution.

Yep. You see, they aren’t justifying anger as a natural response, instead they are placing the entire responsibility for your reaction to events you don’t like squarely on YOU. Because you’re a big baby who can’t take reality without throwing a temper tantrum.

They understand what we’re trying to grasp in the Great Work, that it’s MIND that forms reality, and everything else is symbolic. Cool stuff. I highly recommend reading every page on that Buddhist site. It’s much more in alignment with the teaching of the Corpus Hermeticum, and the teachings of Christ (not Paul). It doesn’t advcocate doing nothing or not taking pragmatic steps to get out of bad situations either, it’s not stupid.

So making it a bit more personal, the reason I’m hooked on anger is because I made room for it. I use it as a way to filter out things that I would need to Work on, that is, I use it so I don’t have to patiently accept what I have to deal with in samsara, the manifest world.The Buddhist perspective offers a way out of the cycle. The Western methods offer bandaid solutions, treatments of symptoms. The Buddhist solution is much more in keeping with Hermetic values. The modern Western methods are not.To me, it seems like a simple choice.

So, following up on Monday’s success, Tuesday night I conjured Kammael of Mars in a similar way to that performed with Gabriel Monday night. I spoke with him more, as I’ve been having anger management issues lately.

He explained what was going on, and again I “saw” an entity wrapped around me, a black evilness that had become attached. This time it wasn’t as squid-like. It was more scorpionish, or insectoid. It didn’t just let me go, either. Instead its appendages were burried in my symbolic flesh, and they were barbed. The weird thing was that they weren’t like piercing me and causing harm as much as they were embedded in the flesh. My symbolic flesh in the vision had welcomed the evil spirit of self-righteous indignation, made room for it, and grown around the barbs in a way that they couldn’t just be removed without causing damage.

Obviously I’m attached to my anger. I like it. Or at least I perceive that I like it. That’s the trouble with this kind of Work, differentiating between the subjective reality and the subjective interpretation of the subjective reality.

This time it wasn’t nearly as easy to release the evil thing. It is still with me, and I can sort of sense it at any given moment. It feels a lot like an addiction, like that ever-present anxiety you feel when you consider quitting something you’re addicted to. Nicotine addicts will likely understand me better than most, but I’m sure a few pot heads who’ve had to face down their jones will grok what I’m talking about too.

IT’s kind of a weird way to Work with this kind of thing. Usually, when I need help with an issue, the spirit just appears and then the issue is gone, as if by MAGIC. This is taking a bit more effort on my part. I’m thinking it’s only taking more effort because I like the rush I get from anger. It’s not the kind of thing I’m happy liking though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get over. A change of heart is in order, and that’s a relatively simple thing to arrange with the powers that be.

But again, I found a lightening of my attitude as soon as I performed the rite. I found myself laughing and carrying on in ways I hadn’t in a while.

I had an attitude adjustment Monday night. Don’t know what happened, exactly, but I can speculate.

I was falling asleep, and I remembered I was feeling glum about not doing enough magic lately. I got this overwhelming “It’s time” feeling/thought that sort of pushed down on my body as I laid there. Looking back, I recognize it as the same feeling I get at Church during the worship service (pentecostal) or during the Transubstantiation (Catholic). It’s this warm bath-of-Spirit.

At the time, my reaction was, “Sigh, oh what the hell.” I remembered it was still technically Monday, and I believe it happened to be in the hour of the Moon. I decided to conjure Gabriel, and do a little Lunar Work. I went “up” through the elemental spheres into the Lunar realm, met Gabriel, showed him the Silver Key (his seal) and asked for admittance and further initiation into the Sphere of the Moon in the Name of Shaddai El Chai.

Some stuff happened. Fishy-depths visuals, your basic transformation revelations, lots of scenes from The Big Blue, coral, jellyfish, clownfish, and yeah, it was like a scene from Nemo, but darker. Not as sunny-bright.

Next day at work, I noticed how people had REALLY shitty attitudes, and how my own had sort of conformed to theirs. In contemplation, I analyzed where it came from in my thoughts and expectations, took a look at where my desires weren’t meshing with the manifestation of God’s Will, and took soime minor, mostly symbolic corrective action. The results were immediate. I found myself leading a meeting, which isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be doing after a Water ritual. At least, not me.

But I was thrust into a leadership role the next day, and inuited my way through it, finding common ground, avoiding bitter cynicism, and generally not being a bitter bastard. People walked away from a rough meeting (rough because all the deliverables are late and getting later, and there’s nothing we can do now about it) feeling like they were part of a team, knowing what they had to focus on that day and the rest of the week, and who to reach to get the info they needed. It was a pleasant change from the usual diaspora that follows our meetings.

Later on, I kicked some upper-crust executives out of their “Executive Steering Committee” meeting, which is generally a poor career move. The suits all tend to look the same after a while, and I mistook the air of executive authority the bald suit was exuding as your basic prickness, so I sort of pricknessed him back and got my snotty admin attitude a bit. I’m not perfect.

But in general, I’ve noticed a much more positive flow to my expectations since the recent Lunar Work. One of the things I remember was the feeling of some black evil shit dissolving from around me in the depths of the sea. slippery slimy tendrils releasing me, like escaping from a black shadow-squid. Or being let go, rather. It definitely wasn’t an escape. More like, “ok, you can let go now,” and it was all, “ok, talk to you later.” There was a familiarity with it, like it was an old friend and partner in my life. As I think about it, yeah, I have some evil phases on occasion, I can be a bit of a bitter bastard once in a while. It makes sense that I’d have a familiarity, a working relationship with being a pessimist.

It’s us. And the secret is it’s what we do. And the initiation is that we’re doing it. And if you haven’t started doing it, then do.

The pictures beyond have nothing to do with the rest of this post. It’s just here to say Happy Easter.