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Of Course Things Feel “Off” Right Now

Of Course Things Feel “Off” Right Now

Last updated on: February 11, 2026 at 3:00 am by John Beckett

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Of Course Things Feel “Off” Right Now 2026-02-10T19:15:56-06:00 John Beckett

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I’ve lost track of how many times someone has told me “something feels off” in recent weeks.

But the number is large, and they’re all experienced Pagans and witches. Most are of a certain age – they’re not overreacting to the ordinary ups and downs of life. Which is not to dismiss the concerns of younger and less-experienced people, who often notice problems the rest of us overlook because “things have always been this way.” The point is that this is something I take seriously.

Their details are vague. Troubling dreams, difficulties staying focused, feeling like something is about to jump out and grab you. Your intuition sending warning after warning, but nothing actionable.

The naïve tell us not to worry because it’s all part of some divine plan. The skeptics dismiss it as overactive imaginations. The materialists explain it away as an evolutionary adaptation: seeing lions where there are no lions may make your life stressful, but not seeing lions where there are lions removes you from the gene pool.

Those of us who are experienced Pagans and witches have no such illusions.

Both tradition and personal experience have taught us to ignore our intuition at our peril. We’ve learned to cross-check our observations against those of people with similar worldviews on different paths and in different geographic locations. We know that Ian Fleming – who served as an intelligence officer in World War II before he wrote the James Bond novels – spoke the truth when he had one of his characters say “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Something’s going on. What is it?

Franjo Tuđman Bridge – Dubrovnik, Croatia – 2025

Other people’s greater suffering doesn’t reduce your pain

I do not claim that what I and others are experiencing is universal. It isn’t.

But…

Roughly 80% of Under the Ancient Oaks readers are in the United States. Plus what happens in the Unites States impacts the rest of the world, especially the parts of the world that make up that other 20%.

And while I hear and sympathize with those who say “it’s always been this bad for minorities” – and people of non-preferred classes – that doesn’t reduce the stress and suffering of the rest of us.

The goal isn’t to rank who’s the most oppressed. The goal is to find context for our current situation so we can understand it, locate our place in it, and figure out how we’re going to deal with it.

The political situation is unprecedented

We’ve had bad Presidents before. We’ve had do-nothing Congresses before. We’ve had courts that cared more about order than justice for most of the time we’ve had courts.

But we’ve never had a President who so consistently rejects not just the dignity of his office but basic human decency, who is literally and physically destroying national institutions, whose idea of negotiation is weaponized chaos, and whose primary goal is self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

And it’s not just what we’re seeing from the highest level. It’s the hatred and mean spiritedness and violence he encourages and enables in a significant percentage of the population.

For those of us who’ve lived our entire lives in a period of near-continuous progress, the sudden lurch backwards is disconcerting, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of trauma. And for some, it is traumatizing. It’s not our place to evaluate the impact on everyone, but it is our place to deal with the impact on ourselves and our communities, whatever it is.

What to do about our political situation is beyond the scope of this blog post. Which is not to say that political action and activity isn’t important – it is. The point I’m trying to make is that the political situation influences the spiritual and psychic situations that are the subject of this essay.

We’re living in a bad environment, and we do ourselves no favors when we attempt to ignore it.

We’re still in Tower Time

In the early 2010s we were warned that Tower Time – a period of sudden and dramatic change – was coming. Lots of people tried to dismiss it and called it fear mongering.

By 2016 it had arrived.

10 years later we’re trying to build a post-Tower future, but some of the Towers aren’t finished crumbling. And while I strongly encourage everyone to vote for people who will put us back on a positive track, this isn’t something we’re going to reverse in one or two elections.

More importantly, the spiritual aspects of Tower Time are still strong. The currents of magic are as strong as they’ve been in centuries, if not millennia – and the people who work magic for nefarious reasons understand this well. However you envision what separates this world from the Otherworld, that separation, that difference, is getting less, and persons who belong there are finding it easier to come here, and vice versa.

And some of those persons who move back and forth between the worlds just want to see this world burn.

Our spiritual environment mirrors our political environment. That’s not always the case, but it is now. We can’t hide in one to avoid the other.

We have to face them both head-on.

Divination and “analysis paralysis”

Whether I’m teaching divination or reading Tarot for someone, I always begin by making sure everyone knows that divination can’t tell you what you should do. Divination is like turning your headlights on when you’re driving at night – it helps you see what’s in the road ahead of you. You still have to steer around any obstacles you discover.

Turning your headlights off and back on or replacing them with brighter bulbs isn’t going to make the fallen tree in the road go away.

I’ve been doing a lot of divination lately. Some of it is for insight into a personal project I’ve got in the works. And some of it is for insight into what we’re discussing here. I’m trying to see what I’m overlooking, and what options are available that I haven’t considered.

If you read Tarot for very long you soon learn that the cards have a mind of their own. And a personality. Lately what I’m hearing is “we’ve already answered that question at least a dozen times.”

I pray to my Gods and what I hear – especially from the Morrigan – is “you know what you need to do – go do it.”

In business I sometimes hear the phrase “analysis paralysis” – when you study a problem and develop alternatives and run simulations and take due diligence to the point that you never actually make a decision and never actually do anything to fix the problem.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself: I don’t need more information. Oh, I want it – I just don’t need it. What I need is to do what I already know I need to do.

What I need to do

That personal project? I made a plan last year. I just need to keep working the plan and not let inertia or fear of change derail me.

Religiously? Devotionally? I need to keep doing what I’ve been doing, without letting things become mechanical. Rote prayers can be helpful, but a healthy spiritual practice is a living thing.

I talked a bit about my public Pagan work late last year. That work is actually rather busy through Beltane, but I need to spend some time in mediation and especially on long walks thinking about what experiments I want to try. And then doing them during the middle of this year.

I need to get another book written. I’ve been talking about this since Paganism in Depth came out in 2019, but I’ve got what I think is two thirds of a draft already written. I need to write the other third and then do the editing… this year.

I’m working on a model for what my spiritual work needs to be in the next segment of my life. I’m not there yet, but it’s getting close. I need more experimenting and less doing what I’m already comfortable with.

How does any of this relate to the political and spiritual environment we’re in? It keeps me grounded. It keeps me too busy to fall into malaise. It reminds me what’s most important for me, to me.

Not so I can pretend “all this” doesn’t bother me.

But so “all this” doesn’t change who I am.

Adaptations: ordinary and spiritual

So if this has been going on for at least a decade, why do things feel off now?

Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures. Our closest genetic relatives – chimpanzees and bonobos – live only in a very narrow band near the equator. We live where ever we want from pole to pole. If the conditions aren’t to our liking, we adapt.

Our environment changes and we adapt. Bad things happen and we adapt. Not always quickly and easily – and there are always some individuals who cannot adapt and perish, either figuratively or literally – but sooner or later we get used to the “new normal.”

And then something upsets our new normal.

Perhaps the people who feel off right now are especially impacted by the chaos and brutality we see from our government.

Perhaps they’re impacted by something or someone moving from the Otherworld into this world and doing things we can feel but not see.

Perhaps it’s both. I tend to think it’s both.

I’m sure some are hearing / feeling / sensing something specific to themselves that I know nothing about. But I’m guessing that many had developed an uneasy balance, and now that’s been disrupted.

Again.

Changing ourselves, changing our environment

Another thing about humans: we’re resilient. We’re persistent. We’re stubborn. And if the conditions aren’t favorable for us, we don’t just adapt to them.

We change them.

We look past what’s wrong and see what could be right.

If we can’t see it, we imagine it.

We start moving in that direction.

We find other people who want the same things and we walk alongside them.

We turn our dreams into visions, visions into goals, and goals into plans.

We start working the plans.

When our plans succeed, we keep moving.

When our plans fail, we figure out why and then we try again.

We keep moving.

Along the way, we keep being who we are and what we are. We keep living according to our values. We keep strengthening our connections to our Gods, our ancestors, our communities, and to all the other persons with whom we share this world, and the next.

Will this enable us to build the kind of world we want?

I don’t know.

Will it help us build the kind of lives we want?

Life is uncertain, but determined people have a history of succeeding.

Will we become the kind of people we want to be?

Yes. Yes. A million times, yes.

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