Artists moving into new mediums are often spooked. That spooking is important and necessary, but it's not necessarily pleasant. I have felt deeply spooked almost every day since early December 2003.

I'm not exactly changing exterior mediums — I'm still a photographer, webguy, writer and editor. Internally, however, there's massive change going on.

I may not be a whole new person, but I'm working at being a significantly changed old person here, 8 months shy of my 60th birthday.

This transition, which is sometimes utterly joyful, can also be fraught with frightening moments and disturbing thoughts.

Yes, I am heavy into not worrying — and that's a story unto itself. As in a phrase I coined some years ago, "Change is Scary and Fear Hurts."

Jim Franklin - Under Aries

Which is a pretty roundabout way to find our way to magic.

I believe in magic.

I know better than to even think about casting spells, and I incineraed the last voodoo doll to cross my path for several hours — burning it out. There is, after all, a built-in, semi-automatic karma that takes care of fools who mess with those devices.

No, my magic is more passive. Like most of the other parts of my life I am changing, my magic is gentler and more colorful than most.

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I pray.

Of course. Everybody prays — even those who say they don't believe in God. We all pray. It's a gentle form of magic that most people won't admit as actual magic, but of course, it is.

Then there's The Transubstantiation.

I was raised Catholic, and they generally frowned on magic, which they thought of as Black. Yet the words Hocus Pocus came from the Latin "Hoc Est," meaning "this is," as in "This is my body. This is my blood," which the priest says during the daily miracle Catholics believe occurs in every mass — the transubstantiation from bread and wine to the Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ.

I never once believed that was even possible. But Catholics accept that bit of magic as a matter of course.

JR Compton - Stick Circle

This piece, shot on one of my long solo tours
in the original Turtle, white Mazda pickup
was of a bunch of sticks stuck in the sand on the shore
of the upper portions of Lake Superior.

I always assumed
the sticks were placed by kids — who make the
best magic, anyway. But it's a gentle image,
perfect for sleeping quarters or a writing room,
which my bedroom serves as both.

Sometimes, when I pray, I write my prayer on a piece of nice paper then light it aflame, then put the burning piece into an offering bowl gifted to me for that purpose by the late Dallas artist Mary Iron Eyes.

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I concentrate on the message of the prayer and watch the flames transform my written words into blackening paper and spidery, glowing embers dancing along the torn edges.

I have smoke alarms throughout the house, and I don't want to spook those noisy things any more than I want to spook myself. But burning prayers and other gentle magic soothes my soul.

On the recommendation of a dear friend, I bought Scott Cunningham and David Harringon's The Magical Household, which is brimming with spells, rituals and other magical hints for the home.

I already had Denise Linn's Sacred Space: Clearing and Enhancing the Energy of Your Home, which I find a little further out into the New Age deep end, but it contains many valid, non-magical suggestions, also.

This week, I rearranged my bedroom (again) — I'd been wanting to for years. My recent transition just made it so much easier and more essential.

I made my first stab at reformatting that room last week. Nice, but there were empty, open spaces left over that nothing would fit into. So, following some of the possibilities suggested by the books, I tried again, to much greater success.

Now, my head points North and East instead of South. Supposedly, it is healthier and more spiritual to be aligned more approximately along the daily path of the rising and setting sun.

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I have been plagued by recurring illnesses, including a nasty cough — I even spent a day in the hospital with pneumonia last year. We'll see whether that changes.

Thanks to another recent change, I already feel healthier. And I expect even more improvement when I get down to my hereby stated weight goal of 170 pounds. I've already left 20 behind. That's only 30 more.

I like the change for the sake of change almost as well as for the sake of better magic and better health. But I know this kind of magic is a subtle and cumulative quality.

Magical Household suggests artists point their sleeping heads West, and I would like to, but bedroom doors open directly onto the bed that way, and said bed would block quick passage to the rest of the house.

Actually, everything in my neighborhood is off from north/south alignment by about 30 degrees, so all this is approximate. But symbols, magic and metaphors are all approximate, anyway.

I like many of the suggestions in both books. Household is written as a more practical guide and Space is denser with more spells, herbs and purification rituals.

Perhaps the most useful suggestion in the latter is that I decide ahead of time what the overall purposes of rooms I am reclaiming will have.

I've known for the last dozen years that my bedroom needed to be primarily for sleeping, not watching the big TV that was stuck in there for far too long. And that it should be a place where I could easily and comfortably read, write, study or meditate. Now it is.

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The Nature Spirit Room, for another prime example of repurposing, has been — for at least the last decade and a half — a final repository for everything I didn't want to deal with yet.

It still has that ultimate purpose. But in the early days of my owning this house — I paid it off early, just 4 years and 3 months into the mortgage — the Nature Spirit Room was a charming spare bedroom and where quiet conversations inevitably sparked and kept glowing all night long when I had parties here.

I've only rarely had anything actually growing back there — no actual Nature Spirits. I tend to overlook plants in general, and lone plants in far back rooms are all but forgotten. But there's something gentle and quiet about that room on the east corner of my home. Cool, too, in the mid seasons.

Then it jagged into disuse after I complicated all its issues by stashing boxes and boxes of unknown and often unrelated crap there for more than the last decade. Needles to say, fewer and fewer friends chose to crash in my spare bedlam anymore.

Bumble Bee Quilt Pattern

Now, in this great paring of my possessions, it is that room that is, once again, the final repository for most of the data-bits of my life. I have rededicated myself to cleaning it out completely several times already, and I am in the big middle of trying it once again.

It is a daunting task, however, and I have been defeated by the sheer immensity of the project. Thanks to a comment I read last night in Household, I am back at it today. I've probably put in a full 8 hours already, and it's only 6 pm as I type these words.

What the book told me was that any activity, especially cleaning and organizing, can be a magical ritual. That gave me the needed impetus to get going on it again. Knowing it is magic helps my mood.

I have, between stints sorting through photos and pages today, walked my mile, shot up my daily dose of insulin, rested with my back on my industrial strength hot pad at least a half dozen times, done my sit-ups, then gone back into the Nature Spirit Room fray.

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My Past, Present and Future exist in fewer and fewer dilapidating cardboard boxes back there. I've retired about seven so far, and I expect to delete four or five more today, and even more tomorrow.

I don't want this once onerous task hanging over me for much longer. The next room is my office, and it'll be the last one in this massive reenginering of my home. Then comes more re-engineering of my physical and spiritual self.

Sorting through the masses has been visually fascinating. I used to think I knew every image I've ever printed. But there are images in those stacks that I was certain some other photographer had taken — until I found my rubber stamped "Must Credit; Photograph by JR Compton" on the back of some pretty strange images.

I've punctuated the gentle din from my CD player several times with outright laughter at some surprising image of some nearly forgotten former friend doing something really strange several times today. I expect a few more such visual epiphanies into the night.

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There, sure enough, was Robert Goodson smoking hash out of a weenie, from the early 70s at Hooka, when we'd try smoking almost anything in almost anything we could find. Actually, the weenie was one of our more successful hash pipe attempts.

Sweet, quiet and other photographed moments with old friends remind me exactly how I felt the moment I pressed the shutter, ten, twenty or more years ago.

And there's a photo of my dear departed friend, the nationally acclaimed poet and imagist Gerald Burns in the wrought-iron gateway to the old D-Art building, looking like he's been incarcerated there for a lifetime...

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