Forest Wizard

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The Latest – ForestWizard

  • Recipe Dump #3 – Candles + Wax

    Recipe Dump #3 – Candles + Wax

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    Making candles IS SO FUN AND SATISFYING and if you haven’t done it, I highly recommend you do. The jar candles and wax melts I share in this post are incredibly easy to create.

    However, a few notes:

    First, I learned through this process that essential oils are so perfect for wax melts. The oils and the wax mingle, prolonging the scent, while they are gently warmed on an electric wax warmer. The candles, however, are an entirely mixed bag.

    Essential oils, remember, are volatile oils, meaning that they evaporate quickly at room temperature. If you increase the temperature, they will evaporate faster; hence needing a medium like wax to keep ’em around longer. An open flame, though, will literally just burn the oil. While the scent of the cold candle is, in each case, unfathomably delicious, the scent of the burning candle ranges from pretty ok to nonexistent to actively bad. Proceed with caution.

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  • Recipe Dump #2 – Perfume + Anointing Oils

    Recipe Dump #2 – Perfume + Anointing Oils

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    The perfumes and anointing oils I made required two things:

    1. Glass roller-ball bottles (0.35 oz)
      1. I used these ones.
    2. Fractionated coconut oil
      1. This is such a good choice for essential oil diluting. FCO is a cold-pressed oil that has had the long chain fatty acids removed. This means that the oil will remain liquid at room temperature (unlike whole coconut oil).
      2. This oil is also colorless, non-greasy, easily absorbed into the skin, generally scentless (or it has a light coconut scent, light enough to blend into other scents perfectly), and resists turning rancid for much longer than it’s solid-at-room-temp sibling.
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  • Local News – August 2026 – Rochester NY, Monroe County

    Local News – August 2026 – Rochester NY, Monroe County

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    As a forest wizard, I’ve largely given up social media, and find myself in an annoying position where I can’t yell my opinions into the void with as much ease. Hence, this new post category.

    My intention here is to share some news stories (with links to the stories) and share my feelings about them, specifically feelings of how we, as a species, can and should do better.

    I am not well-versed in policy or law, and am very open to being wrong about those things. Please correct any facts in the comments, and I’ll edit the post to include them. However, I won’t budge on my ethics and morals.

    While this particular post is stories that made me really angry, I also plan to post about positive things, and things that I can be more positively critical of. There is a lot of development going on around the city, and I want to talk about that. For this post, though, the theme is Remember Your Humanity.

    Headlines covered in this post are:

    • Six confirmed measles cases, 14 presumed infected across upstate NY
    • String of malpractice complaints preceded Monroe County Jail death
    • Román responds to jail report; GOP questions leadership
    • Wife of man killed by sheriff deputies claims 911 failed to relay that her husband was deaf
    • City says wife of suicidal man never told 911 operators he was deaf
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  • A Magical Update: My entry into the Golden Dawn system of magic

    A Magical Update: My entry into the Golden Dawn system of magic

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    Near the end of June I started keeping a magical journal.

    It was something I always intended to do, since every spiritual teacher and system instruct you to do so, but the blank page terrified me. What am I supposed to write in there? What if someone finds it? What is the purpose of this record? Is it a regular journal but with moon signs? Do I write in code? Am I gonna fuck it up?

    My indecisiveness and need to find “the right way” frequently keeps me from starting anything in earnest. It’s one of the demons I’m trying to exorcise.

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  • Why I abruptly dismantled the EAR / Recipe Dump #1

    Why I abruptly dismantled the EAR / Recipe Dump #1

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    For the last several years, the Esoteric Archive of Rochester (EAR) was my main “project.” I am passionate about very specific bits of local history, esotericism, and magic, and I’d been sorely unable to find the community I wanted to explore those topics alongside. So, I set out to start my own. However, in the way I had built it, the project was already a failure, if my goal was to actually build community.

    I was, in fact, building a space (physically and metaphysically) specifically for me. However, I had done so under the guise of “community building” (which I wasn’t doing), so there was also this weird belief that all of the work I was doing wasn’t for me, actually, but for a future visitor or customer. I found myself trying to make deadlines for that customer, stressing myself out attempting to do anything to draw the people to me I wanted to talk to.

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  • The (In)Stability of our Realities, and the Importance of Silence

    The (In)Stability of our Realities, and the Importance of Silence

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    Pretext: Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Reality

    As mentioned in the above linked blog post, reality is how an individual realizes the actuality. What we individually understand to be the real world is, in fact, our own reality, which is itself only our physical body’s interpretation of the stimuli around it.

    Think about that for a minute. We have spent our lives believing that what we see through our eyes is exactly the same as what every other set of eyes see. We believe we live in a physical, objective world based on facts and laws and math.

    The truth, though, is more complicated. We, instead, have created a world built on the assumption that we are all having the same experience, and we have created language in an attempt to share said experience. To make sense of the experience, we have created systems and structures (like math) to act as scaffolds, allowing us to climb closer to understanding.

    Our brains interpret stimuli that is collected by our sense organs (ears, eyes, skin, nose, tongue) and, together with the knowledge stored within it, our brains then turn all of that information into something we can make sense of: Reality.

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  • The Devil and the Terror of the Threshold

    The Devil and the Terror of the Threshold

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    When I started my journey into Rosicrucianism, I was made familiar with the concept of the terror of the threshold. It was brought up in the Neophyte degrees, as a warning that crossing the threshold into the inner chambers of the Order would be terrifying. A Dweller at the Threshold, or sometimes a Guardian of the Threshold would be there waiting for us, attempting to convince us not to proceed.

    In modern Rosicrucian orders, this guardian is one of many roles played out in elaborate scripted rituals intended to create an atmosphere of magic for the postulant. The script requires the guardian to yield to the postulant; otherwise the ritual would end, and the postulant would not be admitted into the given grade.

    However, because my own experience with Rosicrucianism has not yet involved a Temple or Lodge, and solely happens in my own private home sanctum, my understanding of thresholds as a concept has not had the benefit of elaborate plays and group study. Despite learning the material and advancing in the degrees, I had not internalized the importance of knowingly moving into another place.

    As is always the case, what needs to be understood is understood, at the right time, and in the right place.

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  • The Haze – an observation

    The Haze – an observation

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    Concepts

    The Haze

    Noun: A state of being; typified by a lack of feelings of agency, and a desire for numbing behaviors. It may feel like one is floating through life, and that it is difficult to focus your attention on anything.

    I first became of aware of the Haze in the summer of 2025. In between jobs, living in a legal state, I spent tons of time stoned in nature, just observing and existing. I allowed myself to float to and fro, and to drift where the wind took me. It was liberating, but somehow dissatisfying. I was never nearly as relaxed as I thought I should be. Despite having no schedule, no immediate responsibilities, and a little spending money, I consistently felt strangely empty.

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  • New Riverdale; an introduction

    New Riverdale; an introduction

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    Background and Facts

    New Riverdale is a midsize city of around 170,000 residents situated amongst the salty ocean coast and several fresh-water rivers. Today, New Riverdale sports world-class universities, an international airport, many active and well-funded cultural institutions, a massive park system, and plentiful jobs spanning everything from ore mining to space exploration.

    The bustling and buzzing city we see today didn’t pop up overnight, of course. The first settlers put down roots in today’s Financial District around 180 years ago. Like many small cities, New Riverdale was initially grown with the help of heavily polluting industry. In the almost two centuries of its existence, the city has pushed the industry farther and farther outside its boundaries and has worked diligently in rectifying the natural abuses it committed. In fact, much of the area that most recently served as industry and refuse processing has been decontaminated, reforested, and incorporated into Victoria National Park, a massive natural preserve designed to prevent future environmental destruction, as well as to educate visitors on the value of protecting our environment.

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  • Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Reality, Magic, and the MAGA Mindset

    Concepts

    Reality

    Studying Rosicrucianism introduced me to the concept of actuality vs reality. The problem in using the concept of reality as a measure of truth, they say, is that none of us can experience the reality of another person or being. The reason for this, of course, is that each of us can only interpret the environment around us with the help of sense organs integrated into our physical bodies.

    I use my eyes to identify a color or shape, for example. You use your eyes to do the same. We can communicate and agree that what we see is a given shape or color. However, we cannot literally see through another set of eyes. We cannot interpret that visual stimuli in the way another does. In short, we have no way to know if the way we interpret the world around us is the same way another does.

    Of course, there are methods of dealing with this, if there weren’t, we’d have a much harder time creating stuff like language and society. In fact, we have all agreed (by way of early childhood socialization) on foundational Truths, such as the real-ness of the physical, and the un-real-ness of the non-physical.

    Despite these large-scale shared Truths, they are still, at the end of the day, a part of our own, unique, personal reality.

    Actuality

    So, if we all experience our own unique reality that no other living being can experience, what, if anything, exists outside of that? What holds our shared realities?

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