the grimoire of tiny rebellions

in april 2025 we were already writing about spells. not as metaphor — as methodology. we'd been exploring what keeps potential energy trapped in yearning, and kept arriving at the same place: words can function as spells, as things that crack open reality. we floated "a little free spell box that offers magical instructions for local change." wrote it down, moved on.

a few months later we were writing about front porches. about strangeness as a tool. about how embodied action precedes cognitive shift — how you can't think your way out of stuck patterns, you have to act your way out, starting with small gestures that prove different arrangements are possible. "stop trying to think your way into new ways of acting," we wrote, "and start acting your way into new ways of thinking."

we meant it as a principle. we didn't yet have the form.

the form started arriving at a funeral.

february. angie gave the first eulogy in a clown nose — she'd taken up actual clowning — and came to bury the fear of cringe. the voice that says you're being too much. tracee delivered a part-eulogy, part-roast for the passive hope that the arc of history bends toward justice on its own, asked everyone to clench their fists and feel the exhaustion of holding it up. on the count of three: drop. squid buried the idea that community is somewhere you live, not something you tend.

caitlin opened a miro board — the funeral garden — and everyone began to write. blue and green stickies for what you were letting go, music playing, everyone muted. dirt piled on top so the text still showed through. visible but buried. then the flip: pink and orange stickies for what became possible on the other side. fru closed three hours with a sigil practice — a hand-drawn mark, from the latin sigillum, to seal.

we looked at what the garden had grown and something surfaced underneath all of it. earnestness becomes possible when you stop performing certainty. learning in public stops being cringe when not-knowing stops being failure. the permission you never knew you needed was always there — you just learned, very thoroughly, to stop looking for it.

everything in that garden required unlearning first.

so we took that as the question for the spring. what does it mean to actively host unlearning — in yourself, in community — when the whole environment is set up against it?

we thought we'd figure it out by thinking about it. we were wrong. (we'd already written this down.)

what we kept finding, across a lot of different fields, is that unlearning doesn't move from insight to change. mostly it works the other way — the act comes first, the understanding follows. the capacity to be otherwise is usually already there, latent, waiting for a prohibition to lift. layla shaikley put it plainly: doing is the most effective mechanism for being. your behaviors don't just reflect your identity — they create it.

so we started asking: what if you come at it sideways? small enough to slip past the part that knows better?

we went looking for forms that had already figured this out.

fluxus had it — those absurdist event scores from the 1960s that didn't explain their point. they just got you to do the slightly weird thing and let the experience carry the meaning. yoko ono's grapefruit is full of them. the act was the art.

the grimoire tradition had it from the other direction. pam grossman points out that the word grimoire is an outgrowth of the word grammar — a spell isn't a description of transformation, it's the technology of it. jessica dore calls it "using the subtle to influence the dense." daria condor, approaching the same thing from neuroscience, calls ritual "a technology of symbolic repetition that can rewire thought, emotion, and identity." not esoteric fringe. an interface.

and we were noticing something in the cultural air. jessa crispin has named this "a moment of spiritual revival" — the mainstreaming of astrology and tarot, the taking up of the witch as an acceptable archetype. diana helmuth names the hunger underneath it: witchcraft as "a DIY ingress to divine comfort in a world of superstorms and daily economic uncertainty." but most of those tools are still navigable. still designed to be understood. tarot has a guide. astrology has a chart.

charm casting is older and messier. a practice found across traditions — appalachian, west african diasporic, and others — where objects are scattered on a cloth and meaning is read from what catches your eye first, what sits near what, what lands at the edge. not predictive. orienting. alyssa polizzi describes it as "the art of activating the archetypal psyche and interpreting its forms — we project insights that emerge onto the mediums we interact with, the clouds, the bones, the tea leaves." the meaning isn't in the objects. it arrives through attention, through proximity, through what catches you.

adrienne maree brown has a version of this: "the more i pay attention, the more i see order, clear messages, patterns, and invitations in the small or seemingly random things that happen in my life."

we'd been circling all of this. the spell box. the small strange things. the gestures that prove different arrangements are possible. charm casting gave it a form.

so we stopped trying to design a framework and gathered in miro to write spells instead.

we called them scores — borrowing from fluxus, from the grimoire tradition, from what we'd already been doing for a year without quite naming it. small instructions organized into three types: permission (something the body already knows how to do, once the rule lifts), perception (what becomes visible before it changes what you believe), witness (what makes change socially real — the act becomes more itself because someone else sees it).

small acts create small openings. and through those openings, different ways of being sometimes appear.

the grimoire of tiny rebellions is what came out the other side.

a small, strange site. you land on a field of scattered objects — a marble, a key, a wishbone, a match. something catches you. you click it. you receive a small cluster of scores. you take one with you. before you go, you leave a note.

you've crossed a threshold. it doesn't mean anything yet.

see if it starts to.