“Just because you’ve written a book about something doesn’t mean you’re done thinking about it.”

I’ve been reckoning for several weeks now.

Reckoning is not the normal kind of thinking, the everyday thinking. Not that kind, no. That everyday kind is the pleasant kind, the kind where thoughts settle well back into the body.

No. Reckoning is the figuring kind of thinking. The sizing up, the taking stock, and it’s much more exhausting.

It’s been many months since I’ve written anything regarding current politics. I’m quite sure I’ve needed this break, having directed a rather exhausting amount of reckoning on my soon-to-be released book, Here Be Monsters. And, really, I’d much rather only write about gods, and the medieval demonology which led to our current political theology, rather than also anything currently shaping political discourse.

I reckon that’s not how it will be, though.

I got my first copy of my book several weeks ago, and immediately started reading it. I finished it in one sitting, and the next morning felt a kind of elation and release that I soon realized was quite misplaced.

“I’m done with all that,” I said to my husband, noticing immediately the error in my words as they left my lips.

What I’d meant by “done” was that I somehow imagined I no longer needed to reckon with those matters, no longer needed to think about them.

I’d written a book about it, and that was the end of it.

As I said it, shook my head, sadly, remembering a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:

In fact, writing that book means I’ll need to be thinking much more about it, and talking much more about it, which means also writing much more about it.

But part of me really still doesn’t want to, at all.

I gave some time since reading the finished book to checking in on what’s being talked about on “the left” in the United States and the United Kingdom. Having altogether stopped reading social media feeds, I was first of all quite confused. How — and why — did I ever take those things so seriously?

Then, I realized how quickly the feed-mind creeps into your consciousness. People compose thoughts and ideas for the feed the way we compose essays for audiences. But at least with essays, I have a general idea of who might be reading my essays, who I’d like to have reading them, and what I hope will resonate with them. Social media mediates that resonance, makes it difficult to reckon what might resonate, and leaves every turn of phrase open to (often willful) misinterpretation from an audience who has no connection to the author.

It’s a horrible thing we’ve created.

Unfortunately, I’ll need to go back into that all, at least if I’m to be faithful to myself and the work I created.

Here Be Monsters required an almost intolerable amount of reckoning to write. Almost intolerable, but not quite, because I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t believed in its power to change things. I’ll need to go back into all that, back into the fray, back into the consuming machine where there is neither life nor light. I’ll need to talk about my book, and defend my book, and to argue it further into the world.

Harder still, though: I’ll need to reckon with what others think, what they’ve come to believe, and especially in what they’ve come to be mired.

Fortunately, I’m not the same as I once was, easily exhausted, unaware of my strength, and too uncertain of myself.

I mentioned at the end of my Greece travel journals that I returned with more gods than I started with. My litanies of prayers each morning and each evening have always grown a little longer with the passing of time, the list of names expanding yearly like forests.

Often, it’s been one at a time, and gradual, again like a forest.

This time was four at once, along with a strange ancestor from a very, very long time ago. That one showed me something she’d buried deep underground, in the caverns of unconscious memory. She’d not left it there for me, necessarily, but for someone. But none have come for it until me, and though I worried by receiving I was stealing, she’s made clear it was otherwise.

I don’t talk much of my own magic, because I don’t always understand it. I do things, and then reckon later with the effects to understand what I’d actually done.

Were there priests of my gods, perhaps I’d try to confess. No doubt they’d laugh and shake their heads: the gods I know care nothing for sin. Yet I still try to reckon these things out, to give account, but I often resist hearing what I have to say.

I’ve needed to trick myself more times than I think I can count, in order to get myself to want the things I truly want. That’s always the hidden joke in “do what thou wilt:” you’re always the only one truly in your way.

Here’s some liberating self-deception for you:

A walnut held tightly in a car driving too fast. Parts of a car-killed crow lain out upon a table. Jars with names drowned in honey, or in piss. Glasses of water covered by crossed blades (scissors do the trick). A coin buried in the roots of a tree, blood pricked by the thorn of holly, stars through pine branches as the spinners approach. So many stones, and feathers, and tressed beards thrown into rivers. Hermes the Expedient slipped into the pages of a passport, rosemary branches tucked behind the ear, seeds of tree and root sown deep into the dark.

I’ve always known their effects, but only now reckon with their cause.

The four more gods seem intent I account for these things — not to them, but to myself. To reckon with what I have done is to know how much more I might do, so that the whispers I hear — now they are here — sound less like taunts and more like provision.

Since they’ve all arrived, my prayers have changed — not just the words I use, but even the voice with which I form them. Since they’ve all arrived, the weight of things has changed, grown heavier, more resistant to match an increased strength I’d not noticed I possessed. Like weeks of using the same weights at the gym, feeling nothing’s changed, feeling almost a bit bored, and frustrated. Then, trying harder ones, and finally understanding: you’re stronger than you reckoned.

Am I, though? I don’t always feel that way.

I had to clear out my wardrobe recently of all the shirts I cannot wear any longer, and replace them with larger sizes. Cable delt pulls and overhead presses added a couple of inches to my shoulders, a happy but costly increase. My quadriceps and hamstrings have torn the crotch seams in most of my trousers, the elastic of my socks breaks when I flex my calf muscles.

My increasing muscle bulk is destroying my clothing, shedding it like old skin, but it’s still hard not to remember when, years ago, depression and self-doubt did something similar. I remember when I’d become too fat for my favorite t-shirt. I cried, and then ate too much in a misplaced hope to sate a hunger for meaning and strength which could never be met that way. My body still bears — and will always bear — all the stretch-scars from those self-destructive days, and by body, of course, I also mean mind.

Wounds transform along with the body, though it takes a bit longer for memory to follow. Reckoning with those past fears, those moments of terror, so many nights of the nine of swords, when what others thought of me mattered more than what I thought of myself, seems best done by moving too-heavy pieces of metal around.

That last repetition on the bench press, when you’re at most risk of having your chest crushed in, reckons away all those memories of suffocating pressure from people whose problems were too heavy to be ever healed. The final stand from a barbell squat reckons away all those times it felt like others hoped you’d never stand up again. Dead-lifts, rows, and every other absurd back set re-minds you’ve not yet reckoned with how tall you can fully stand among others.

The body and the mind reckon and dance together in grunts, groans, and then sudden moments of unexpected clarity. They each become bigger to accommodate the other, because they are both each other, and they are both me.

It’s most often there, in the gym, when I find myself laughing at what I’ve done. “I caused that,” I say, shaking the sweat from my face. As if I’d hidden the reason for those rituals between muscle and bone, burying understanding like cursed treasure, to be found later by a later me. Jeder Mensch hat ein zweites Gesicht, but that second face is turned inward, not out.

I reckon I’m ready for this, for all what comes next.

Before sleep last night, I smiled about something I don’t yet understand. “I reckon I figure that out later,” I said aloud to the quiet room. I don’t know how I get to where — and to what — I keep seeing I’ll be.

Still tripping myself into the future, tricking myself into being what I will, thinking I was writing a book, while all the while crafting a spell.