What Endures

You really can’t see the shape of a long practice until you’ve put enough years between you and the beginning. It’s not that anything was ever hidden from view. On the contrary, everything you needed to see was always right there, showing up every time you worked, every time you showed up, in every bit of silence or focus. But when you’re in the middle of something, all you can see is what’s right in front of you. The problem you’re working on, the question you keep turning over, the way your habits look this month, this year. The big picture just isn’t visible from inside.

But stick with something for 20 years or more and the view shifts. It’s not about reaching some finish line, though. It’s about a change in perspective. All of a sudden, you can look back and actually trace the lines. You see what lasted, what drifted away, and what morphed so many times it barely resembles what you started with, but it still feels like the same heart underneath it all.

That’s my beginning thought for this week. Not what my practice looks like today, or what it looked like during a specific stretch of time, but what threads run through all those versions. Now that I’ve got some distance, what’s the real through-line?

Turns out, some things I thought would stick around didn’t make it. Some things I treated as core pillars were really just scaffolding. They were helpful while I was building, but pointless once I figured out what I was building toward. And a few things I barely noticed at first? They’re the real foundations, holding everything together no matter how the outer shape changed.

So I want to examine that question for a bit: What actually lasts in a long practice? Not the forms or particular rituals or traditions or sets of steps. Those evolve over time. The real question is, when you peel all that away, what remains?

I’ve found a few answers for myself. They might not be your answers, and that’s fine. But I think it’s worth taking some time with this question, no matter what stage you’re at. Because the things that survive, I’m starting to believe, aren’t just random. They’re clues. And they’re pointing to what the practice is really for.

In any practice, whether it is a ritual, or a craft, or anything else, it’s easy, at first, to cling to form like it’s the whole point. The order of the words, the exact way you arrange your tools, the steps you follow with obsessive care, it all feels critical, almost like the spell breaks if you get it wrong. There’s a certain logic to all this that definitely makes sense. The way things are done, the shape of the tradition, it all comes packed with the experience of people who’ve tried and tested and refined it. When you’re new, you need the form, because it teaches you what the practice actually is and gives you something to grab onto.

But after you’ve spent years doing the work, things start to shift. It’s more like a slow change in the background than a lightbulb ‘Eureka!’ moment. One day you go off-script just a little, and it still works. Another day you follow everything to the letter, and the air feels thin and empty. Sometimes necessity forces you to improvise, and the improvisation hits somewhere the regular form never touched. Little by little, you notice that maybe the form wasn’t the foundation, it was the scaffolding, the framework. You’d always thought the steps were load-bearing, but now you see they’re just holding up something bigger.

My approach to practice looks a lot like how I approach questions I really want to answer: almost like a scientist. Try it one way. See what happens. Change something, see what shifts. Compare notes. Keep the stuff that seems to actually do something, and toss what doesn’t. Always keep asking why. After more than twenty years, this curiosity—this willingness to experiment—has shown me something I probably wouldn’t have accepted when I started: the rituals, the exact wording, the correspondences, all those details, are just tools. They’re not the heart of the practice. They carry and focus it.

To be clear, I’m not saying form doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. There are traditions where every step, every detail, holds centuries of accumulated power and meaning. In those spaces, precision is the point; you follow the instructions to the letter because that precision does real work. I don’t ever want to dismiss that. The carefully recited Wiccan Rede, the ceremonial magic performed exactly so, the tradition held with absolute fidelity to its history? They all have power. Writing them off would be arrogant and stupid.

What I am saying is, in my own practice—the one I built from mixing traditions, studying, and just plain doing the work—I’ve learned that intent and focus matter most. The ritual tools, the specific phrases, the arrangement of space—they’re means to an end. They sharpen my attention, they channel my intent. When the form synchronizes with my focus, everything feels alive, connected. But when form turns into a checklist and my mind drifts, the magic feels hollow, no matter how flawless my execution.

Perfectionism started to loosen its grip because reality kept poking holes in it. Never with a big revelation. Just a slow wearing away. Each time something went a little sideways and still worked. Each rigid ritual that left me feeling flat. Each experiment that uncovered something the tradition had never hinted at. Over time, the nerves about “getting it right” softened into something real: I recognized I’m human, and I bring that messy humanness with me into the work. The practice asks for presence, not perfection.

Balance doesn’t mean flawless execution. That lesson keeps showing itself again and again, at deeper levels, as the years go by. A practice that demands perfection is confusing the map for the territory; a practice that accepts your effort and your flaws together actually understands what you’re aiming for.

So, what actually changes after all that time is your relationship with forms. You start seeing them as tools, not rules. But underneath them, something fundamental remains. The connections you build. The way you pay attention. The qualities of focus and presence that, all along, the forms have been nurturing and shaping.

The scaffolding was important. It did its job. But now, what it held up is still standing, and you finally see what matters most.

Some relationships stick around because you guard them, almost like tending a delicate plant. You put in work, care, attention, maybe even a bit of ritual, just to keep them thriving. Those bonds are important, sure, and you feel the weight of your devotion. But honestly, the ones that have lasted the longest, decades even, aren’t the ones I protected the most. They’re the relationships that kept returning, sometimes catching me off guard. They showed up during times I never expected, demanded things I wasn’t ready to give, and grew deeper in ways I couldn’t have mapped out back when I first started this whole practice.

For me, the Egyptian pantheon sits at the root of everything I do spiritually. Bast and Anubis are central to my practice. With Bast, there’s a warmth and familiarity that’s impossible to ignore. Devotion to her always feels like coming home, which counts for a lot when everything else seems to be shifting under your feet. There’s a steady comfort there. Even during chaos or uncertainty, working with her is like finding the lights switched on in a room you didn’t realize you missed. Anubis, though, is different. He’s quieter, patient, almost lingering at thresholds I never noticed until I crossed them. He doesn’t press. He just waits at the edges, catching me right when I need him most.

And then there’s Ma’at. She’s always present, even when she isn’t front and center. Early on, I grasped her dual nature: she’s both the cosmic principle of balance/order and the living deity who embodies it. But understanding the concept is just the beginning. Over the years, what’s developed is the depth of what balance means in practice. How it stretches past abstract ideas and becomes something real you have to answer to. Feeling the tug of Ma’at when I’m off balance? That’s part of it and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take years for that relationship to grow roots.

With Anubis, it hasn’t always been smooth. That relationship has been tested, sometimes unexpectedly. There’s this quote from Assassin’s Creed Origins I’ve had bookmarked forever: You cannot kill me, for I walk among the dead. Come forth by day and I will guide you home. It sticks with me because it gets at something I haven’t figured out how to explain any other way. It’s about being guided across thresholds, walking alongside others in grief, and developing this steady resilience through years of working with the one who leads people across the threshold. You don’t become fearless, but you do become familiar. The crossing is real and no one deserves to make it alone.

My relationship with Anubis has asked more of me as time’s gone on. At first, it was mostly philosophical. Things like thinking about death, talking about transitions, understanding the threshold in theory. Eventually, it got personal. Being there for others in grief, sitting with loss, realizing (sometimes painfully) that I’m much better at holding space for others than for myself and working, slowly, on closing that gap. Each time life threw something at me, the relationship got deeper, more honest, and demanded more truth than before.

That’s what it means for these relationships to endure. They don’t stay static. They change, get sharper, grow more demanding in the ways you need them to be. The relationship I have with Anubis today isn’t the same one I had two decades ago. Way too much has happened. It’s weathered, and because of that, it feels trustworthy in ways I couldn’t have imagined back at the beginning.

A relationship that only lasts because you keep it tucked away, safe and untouched by the world is very different than the ones that have been battered by life. When a relationship’s been out in the weather, you come to know it for what it really is. You see what it’s made of, and you trust it differently and that’s what really matters.

Generally, nobody sits down for hours of practice thinking it’ll make them invincible to heartbreak or loss. No one says that out loud, anyway. But let’s be honest: there’s this quiet hope whispering along in the background. Deep down, a lot of us practicing anything—spiritual work, a craft, even just being present—hope that all those years we’ve invested will pay off when life gets rough. We like to think we’ll be steadier, calmer, harder to knock down when things go sideways.

And you know what? There’s some truth in that. You do get more grounded. You stand a little stronger in the storms. But the real secret is this: a long practice doesn’t protect you from loss. Not really. What it gives you is a foundation. Something solid under your feet when everything else feels like it’s sliding away. The loss still comes. The grief doesn’t suddenly feel small just because you’ve spent years building a relationship with the mysterious, with gods or guides or practices. Pain doesn’t shrink. The difference is, when you’re rocked off balance, you know what you’re standing on. Even if it’s shaky, there’s ground there.

I’ve been asked to stand on that threshold more times than I could have guessed when I first started this work. I’ve found myself sitting beside people in grief, holding space for family and friends as they lost what they loved, whether that’s a person or a pet or even a circumstance. The work grew deeper over the years. A strange kind of familiarity developed; an honest ability to look right at the end and to see it as part of the story, not something to be skirted around or avoided. The more I practiced, the more Anubis, that old friend at the crossing, became real to me as a companion who teaches you to meet endings with open eyes.

But here’s something I didn’t expect: over time, I realized I was a lot better at holding space for other people than I was for myself. That’s a sharp truth to face. It’s like discovering that some of the spiritual strength you’ve gotten used to is really just clever scaffolding. Being the steady one, the one who holds things together for others, can also be a way of keeping your own feelings at a safe distance. You provide solid ground for other people, so you don’t have to stand right in the quake yourself. And then life comes along, and suddenly it’s you at the edge. Suddenly you’re holding vigil for your own losses, and those tricks of distance stop working. The grief is yours. The threshold is yours, and it’s not a theoretical lesson anymore; it’s painfully, undeniably yours to cross.

Those moments don’t destroy a practice. They expose it. You see, clear as day, the difference between what’s real and what was only temporary support. What was the scaffolding, not the structure. Scaffolding helps you build, but it doesn’t hold up the house when the storms roll in. At those most difficult points, the truth of your practice stands out. And that’s the most powerful part.

My relationship with Anubis—my practice, my prayers, whatever you want to call it—didn’t fall apart in those moments. If anything, it got deeper. Not because I managed those thresholds with grace every time. I didn’t. Some days, I was a mess. Some days, I avoided what I couldn’t stomach. But the strength of a real relationship, spiritual or otherwise, is that it holds you up even when you fall apart. The honesty between you and the practice means it carries you through avoidance, through deferred grief, through all the messy stuff that comes from standing at the center of your own loss instead of just guiding someone else through theirs. That’s not some failure to “achieve” enlightenment or peace. That’s what practice is for. It’s there for you when everything starts falling to pieces, so you can keep moving with the truth, even with shaky hands.

And here’s the gift, if you stick with it: all the threshold work I did for others slowly started feeding back into my own life. I didn’t suddenly become enlightened or fully at peace with death, not by a long shot. But I gained this slow, ordinary kind of courage. I discovered a way to meet the hard, the loss, without always turning away. Little by little, practice trained me to look at the crossings in my own life, to believe just enough that my guide knew the way, to trust that if I could hold honesty for others, maybe I could learn to bring it home to myself.

Practice gets put to the test, and that’s when you see what it really is. And weirdly, that’s not something to dread or run from. It’s the whole point. That’s when what you’ve built stops being theory and starts being true. It doesn’t always look graceful, but you get to see, for yourself, what you’re really made of. And that’s worth every moment spent on the mat, at the altar, or in silent company with your own heart.

Balance isn’t something I could learn from a book. Since the very beginning of my work with the Egyptian pantheon, Ma’at has been there. She’s more than just cosmic order or truth, more than a lofty concept about balance. She’s that, sure, but she’s also a real presence. Early on, I sort of got both sides at once: she’s the principle and the living force behind it.

What took me much longer, though, was figuring out what her “duality” means when life really pushes back. The basics come easy. You can read about Ma’at, about the myths, the scales and the feather and the weighing of the heart, the idea that truth and balance make the world run right. It makes perfect sense in theory. You absorb it, maybe even appreciate it, and use it as a framework in your practice.

But having a living relationship with Ma’at? That’s a whole other thing. Honestly, you only develop it by falling out of balance, again and again, and learning how to return. It happens in different ways, through all kinds of seasons, over and over. The balance I understand now, after decades of practice, isn’t fancier or more intellectual than what I figured out a couple years in. It’s just more honest and more rooted in real life.

Every episode we’ve delved into this season has circled around this idea: the narrow line you walk, the constant tension that true balance actually needs. Balance doesn’t plop you in a calm, stable spot and let you stay there. It keeps testing you. It keeps tugging, asking for something more. That thread shows up everywhere in my practice. It’s not some idea I dust off now and then. It’s the whole structure. The challenge of holding devotion and discernment at once, or mixing structure with letting things flow, or finding space for certainty and openness—those questions are always right there.

What’s shifted over time is how I see that core question. At first, I treated balance like a goalpost. Find it, stick the landing, and then just stop wobbling. I used to stress out about getting everything perfect, afraid that one wrong move would send everything out of whack. If I did things correctly, I’d keep that balance, or so I thought.

But, that’s only part of the story.

Years spent practicing with Ma’at—through the times when I felt steady and especially when I didn’t—taught me something important. Balance isn’t an achievement. It’s a relationship. It’s how you respond to all those forces pushing and pulling in your life, in your practice, in anything that really matters. You never “arrive” there. You keep finding your way back, coming at it from all different angles, with whatever tools you have at hand. Some days, it’s easier; other days, you’re fighting for it.

My relationship with Ma’at keeps changing because she always matters. Every big shift, every heartbreak that tested my practice, every stubborn patch and every time I finally loosened up? It has all come down to balance. How do you hold your grief without letting it swallow you? How do you keep a solid practice without becoming stiff and performative? How do you stay honest with yourself, especially when the truth stings? Those are all Ma’at’s questions. She’s right there, because those questions never really leave.

And she’s not just there as an idea you apply. She is also someone you’re accountable to. That’s the devotional piece. When I feel out of balance or notice myself sliding too far in one direction, something inside lights up. And it’s not just an intellectual thing. It’s more personal. It’s that gut-level sense that I’ve drifted from someone I relate to, instead of some rule I forgot to follow.

That’s what it means to have a living relationship with Ma’at. It’s not about her swooping in and fixing things. It’s that being in relationship with her gives you a kind of accountability. The longer you stay connected, the more you know it when things tip, even if nobody else would notice. You don’t need the scales to crash to feel the shift.

To be honest, that sensitivity and ability to see the imbalance is one of the real gifts of all this time devoted to her. I didn’t become some master of perfect balance, but I’ve lived with the principle long enough that I can feel its absence for what it is.

After more than twenty years, here’s what I have left: I’m not perfect, nor should I be. I don’t magically have a complete understanding. There’s still doubt, and the questions I started with? They’re still hanging around. That’s just how it goes. The years gave me something way more useful than all that.

I ended up with a practice that knows its own bones. Over time, some forms loosened up, because experience kept showing me which ones actually had weight and which were just there for support. Honestly, you need both. I’m not knocking the scaffolding because nothing gets built without it. But at some point, I stepped back. I looked at what was really standing. Turns out, the specific steps, the exact rituals, all that anxiety about doing it “right”, none of those were what mattered most. What held it up was intent. Focus. Presence. Relationship. That’s what stayed solid.

And the relationships deepened, because life kept pushing them. Bast, Anubis, Ma’at… we’re not the same together as we were twenty years ago. There’s more honesty now. Things got tested. These relationships carried weight I never imagined early on, and they didn’t break. You can’t manufacture that kind of trust just by being carefully devoted. It comes from living through stuff and coming out the other side intact.

So after everything, here’s the heart of it: I trust my practice. Why? Because it survived. It didn’t need to be flawless, it just needed to be honest. The pieces that fell away needed to go, and the ones that stuck around proved they belonged. Sometimes I didn’t even know why until enough time had passed.

There’s been a question running through this whole season. It’s the same one that popped up in Episode 0, and every episode since has circled it in its own way. What does it mean to live at the threshold? To sit with tension instead of trying to fix it? To keep practicing when your practice keeps shifting, when the forms keep changing, when the relationships keep demanding more?

I don’t have a magic, world-shaking answer. Maybe there isn’t one. But here’s what I do know: I’m still here. The practice is still here. And that threshold, whatever it asks next, is still in front of us.