u/oddreyjo

I'm in my 8th year of teaching, 10th year in education, and today is the first time I got the news that a student I actually knew well has died. It was the first day of classes. Everything else went well, but I feel so down. There have been student deaths at our school before, but none that hit close to home for me. I taught him in an English learner support block, three times a week, and got to know him and his friend group well. They ended up eating lunch in my room a lot. In the last weeks of school they brought an Xbox (or something like that) and I let them hook it up to my projector at lunch to play Super Smash Bros, and I remember him insisting I should join for a round at some point. When I said I had no idea how to play, he was like, "We have Mario Kart too!" 😭

He was such a kind, friendly kid. He has a younger brother at this school who's rough around the edges with a lot of behavioral issues, and he was a real support for him. A lot of his friends were like that too, and they looked up to him. He and his friends were the last I said goodbye to when school let out a couple months ago. I remember it because they were there an hour after release time, playing with a giant metal slinky and I was teasing them about it.

He passed the English proficiency exam at the end of the year and was so proud of himself. I administered his speaking test. He was working hard through a tough final question, and afterward he was like, "Honestly, I feel like I killed that one, Ms. [Oddreyjoy], don't you think so?" I always imagined I'd see him around for two more years and teach him again as a senior.

I keep oscillating between extreme pain and despair, knowing I'll never see him again, thinking about his friends, his little brother, his parents, the fact that he'll never grow into an adult - and then going numb, like there's no way this is actually true. Intellectually I know the reality. But right now some part of my mind is insisting, there's no way, he's a child, you'll see him tomorrow or next week. It feels impossible. I know a lot of you have probably been here before. This is my first time, and it's so hard. I had such a good start to the school year, and everything else has been going well, but this completely upended the start of my year.

I don't have regrets, and there's nothing I wish I'd said to him differently. We had a great rapport. I just miss him, and I'm so worried for the people he left behind. He was sixteen, a baby. I still teach several of his close friends, who feel like babies too, and it feels like their innocence is being taken from them. What an awful thing to happen. It would help a lot to hear from others who've lost a student. This is my first time, and it feels so devastating.

I hope this is allowed, since it's not strictly magic-specific, actually kind of the opposite. I'm curious who you all are outside of your Quareia practice: hobbies, lifestyle, what initially drew you here. I know this isn't meant to be a community in the traditional sense, so what I'm really looking for is common threads across our experiences. I have a hunch that a particular kind of person resonates with and is drawn to Quareia specifically. If this post isn't allowed, let me know. I'm asking out of personal curiosity and a desire to know the people I'm talking to here a little better. A bit about my journey - I'm in my early 30s and had been unintentionally engaging with magic throughout my life - was a very odd kid, basically. My early childhood was beautiful, especially the spiritual experiences, but also quite lonely. Adolescence and early adulthood were turbulent, and in my 20s I had a couple of genuinely frightening spiritual experiences. It wasn't until my late 20s that I began actively studying occultism after a lifetime of feeling essentially atheistic/skeptical and interpreting all of my experiences through a psychological lens, and once I intentionally engaged the magical path things really started to click into place.

I found Quareia while researching witchcraft (lol), and was equal parts thrown off by its intensity and length and drawn in by it anyway. M1L1 was the very first occult work I ever did. My life was still pretty unbalanced at that point, and after about half a year I had to step back and reckon with my mental health and lifestyle. I needed to make some real changes before diving back in. That all started in late 2023/early 2024, and it's only this summer that I've really returned to it with the intention of finishing Module 1. I've done everything except Lesson 7, which I've mentioned here before. I don't have a fixed endpoint in mind for how far I'll take the course. My magical life is going to happen regardless of whether I give it structure, so the structure is really there to keep me safe.

Outside of magic, I'm married, no plans for kids, several cats. I teach high school literature, which I love. I live in a big city I have a love/hate relationship with. My other loves are visual art, film, zoology, indie/narrative/art computer games, reading, and poetry. Zoology might be my single biggest passion. Animals are endlessly fascinating and beautiful to me, and it's deeply tied to my spiritual life. As kids, my brother and I spent hours pretending to be different animals and watching documentaries about them, and I still feel like I can't get enough. I've even toyed with the idea of spending a month at a time studying one local animal, plant, or fungus and making lifestyle changes based on it, trying to understand how that being actually lives. There's so much wisdom in the animal world, from the smallest protozoa up through primates like us. Anyway, I'd love to hear who you all are outside this practice. I suspect there are more common threads here than we'd expect, and I have a few guesses of my own, but I'm curious what you'll say.

I had a breakthrough on the North/composting direction and wanted to share it and hear how others have worked through this. (Speaking only from my own experience here, not Josephine's or Quareia's official teaching.) I'm only as far as M1/some M2, so take this as one student's current understanding. I'd always felt resistance to North because I read it as fundamentally chronological, the past as something that becomes inaccessible, off-limits, done. And a lot of my past isn't done. Pieces of it are still energetically and spiritually active for me right now. North felt like it was asking me to declare those pieces "over" before I was ready, which felt wrong.

My understanding today started from an absurd place - a song came on shuffle that used to matter to me enormously, spiritually, in an earlier chapter of my life. I skipped it, and found myself thinking, I love and respect what that song meant then. I don't think I need to hear it again. I've taken everything from that time that there was to take. And I realized, that's it. That's what North/earth is about. I thought through other periods of my life. One of the most intense stretches of my early twenties, so vivid, painful, and formative, came up the same way. The wounds don't hurt anymore. I'm not pulling anything further from it. It can be composted. I just don't have any interest in dwelling on anything from that period anymore.

But other periods, including ones much further back, are still alive in my present. They're still feeding me and there is clearly more to glean. So the distinction isn't "past vs. present" but something more like "extracted vs. still extracting." Composting is more about integrating what's already been fully taken in, so it stops occupying active attention and becomes soil instead. Both of the periods I mentioned are essential to who I am. I wouldn't exist as this person without them. But they're finished as sources. Like a bone with all the meat sucked off, you don't have to throw the bone away, but you can also stop gnawing on it looking for more.

I hope this makes some sense. Curious how others have sat with this direction, especially anyone further along than M1/M2.

EDIT: I wanted to add an example to avoid ambiguity. I'm a high school teacher. My adolescent years were turbulent, strange, heartbreaking, and lonely. I eventually dropped out of high school. The memories from that period are both beautiful and sad. I don't think about it specifically often, but there's an open pipe to those experiences that I can access easily, and it helps me in my teaching and connecting with kids. Teaching is a spiritual occupation for me. I'm known at my school as the person best at understanding teenagers. I believe that if that tap were fully shut off, I wouldn't be as good at my job. These experiences don't hurt anymore, they're well integrated. But being able to drop back into that mindset, those memories, on demand is actively useful to me now. I haven't felt any negative effects and if anything, it has given me a sense of wholeness and "rightness" in a way I can't fully describe because it's not necessarily emotional but just part of me now. That's a piece of the past I'm still drawing on, not composting.

EDIT EDIT: One more piece that just occurred to me, the periods I'm still drawing on artistically and spiritually aren't just times I happen to be nostalgic for. They're all times I made big, intentional changes in my life, very South/fire energy. Even the early childhood piece follows this, all of the really early ones are tied to a formative, turbulent move to a new city/house, not just "early = important." They're all threshold moments, not just old ones. And yeah, I assume these will eventually be composted too. I don't want to cling to anything.