Helps improve the overall health of your local ecosystems and native wildlife.

Allows you to build a better relationship with the spirits of your area.

There is no such thing as overharvesting, so if you worry you’re the type when foraging for ingredients to go heavy handed; go to your invasives.

Inherently these plants when used in spell work will be fast-working, highly adaptive, and dominating.

You likely already have an invasive in your area that has the intentions you want to use in your next spell.

Allows you to not rely on massive monoculture farms that over-farm and hurt the environment.

Gives you the excuse to go outside and get moving which has been proven to have positive impacts on mental health.

Invasives aren’t hard to find. You can find them at the park, school campuses, any patch of grass along the road, etc.

The baneful possibilities are endless, like you can get so creative.

Depending on what exactly is your invasive and where you’re foraging from it’s free food.

Some Important Reminders

Research what are your natives and your invasives and learn to identify them, especially if they are similar to natives or have dangerous look-a-likes.

Read up on your area’s by-laws to ensure you are foraging invasives in a legal and safe way.

When harvesting invasives harvest carefully and be aware of how this specific invasive spreads, so when harvesting you’re not possibly helping it spread.

Don’t compost invasives.

Some invasives are poisonous or toxic, so research and be careful when handling. Please don’t consume or use in any workings that would require burning them or skin contact.

If looking for edible invasives or invasives you plan on using in salves or bath rituals, don’t harvest from polluted areas and ensure it is not toxic.

Start with the gaze, because this is where most of it goes wrong. You are not staring. A hard stare fights you, your eyes water, you blink, you reset, and you never settle. What you want is a soft, slightly unfocused gaze that looks through the surface rather than at it, the way your eyes drift past a window to the street beyond the glass. The surface should lose its hard edge and go a little vague.

Then the surface starts to change, and beginners almost always misread what happens next. Within a few minutes it tends to cloud, go smoky, darken, or seem to breathe. People take that as their eyes playing tricks, snap back to a sharp focus to check, and that ends it. The clouding is the doorway, not a glitch. Part of it is simply your vision softening on a featureless field, and that softening is the exact state you are trying to reach. Let it fog over and keep your attention loose inside the fog.

It also helps to know what a vision is actually like, because the expectation is the thing that blinds you. It is almost never a clear picture floating in the glass. It is shifting shapes, a color that was not there a second ago, a shadow moving against the grain, a face that assembles for a moment and dissolves. Sometimes it is not visual at all, just a feeling, a word in the mind, or a flat knowing. If you are holding out for a sharp image, you will look straight past the real signal, which tends to be quiet and partial.

A lot of what people call a block is really the setup. Work in low light with a single candle placed behind you or off to the side, never throwing a bright reflection straight into the surface. Use a black mirror or a dark bowl of water set on a dark cloth. Sit so you cannot see your own face clearly in the surface, because a sharp reflection of yourself locks your eyes at the glass instead of through it. Fix the light and the angle and half the I cannot scry problem tends to disappear.

On patience, the honest number is that most people need somewhere between five and twenty sessions before a first real impression. The early sittings where nothing happened are not failures. They are you teaching your eyes and your attention to hold the soft state without bailing out the moment it gets strange. Ten quiet minutes a few times a week will take you further than one heroic hour.

There is a discernment line worth holding too. Not everything you see is a message. Floaters, the afterimage of the candle, the surface graying out, that is ordinary eye behavior and it is the doorway, not the content. The scried material is what comes through that state, the shape that carries meaning, the word, the pull toward something. You learn the difference by keeping a log and only trusting what recurs or genuinely lands.

i think in the occult, people sometimes have a similar impulse. i have seen people explicitly say they avoid reading and learning about other pathways so their spirituality is more authentic to them. yet i dont think thats what ends up happening. i think a lot of the time, limiting the ideas you come into contact with only works to keep you stuck within the perspectives you already know. maybe you come up with things you havent heard of yet, but theyre often things people have thought of before.

i think independent thought is important. you, occultist reading this, should absolutely do things that you havent heard of others doing. but then afterwards, you should try to find other people doing that thing. something being done before doesnt mean its less valuable. it means others have also sought to explore truth. there is a certain joy and humility that comes with struggling to understand a concept youre intuiting but cannot put into words and then finding that someone else already written about your idea better than you could have.