🏮 Checkpoint: My First Lantern Release

“I feel like I’ve come to a completion moment.”

~

As I was writing those words, a notification popped up on my phone: “Step Goal 100% Complete.”

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

The notification came from a tracker I built myself, through the iOS Shortcuts app. It was a system I created to monitor progress, encourage movement, and track my own rhythms. It’s funny. I was just about to write a blog post about how I’ve had to build my whole spiritual growth system from scratch—and here was the universe (or my oversoul, or future self) sending a wink of validation.

This is what integration looks like and what balance feels like. I now see that Chapter 8 is all about the checkpoints.

🏁 Checkpoint Activated

This isn’t the end of the book. I haven’t published any of the Chapter 6 or 7 scrolls yet. But I do know this is the end of an arc.

A threshold moment. A lantern release checkpoint.

This post marks the completion of Act I in my life. The "Before Fires of Alchemy" part and it marks the beginning of Act II: the part where I finally live fully inside the system I've been building. Not just in theory. Not just in dreams. In action, every day.

The steps I took to get here weren’t always pretty. Some were clumsy. Some spiralled. Some repeated.

I just kept walking anyway.

I learned to meditate on the bus home from a temp job I thought would break me. I learned to journal while crammed into a morning commute. I made space for spiritual insight in the cracks of a life that used to feel void of it.

I learned to let go of the rigidity that used to define my healing.

I realised I don’t have to quit something completely to grow. I don’t have to be perfect to be in alignment. I don’t have to wait for the right time to create something sacred.

It’s all about perception and intention.

It’s all about letting go of the idea that you need to do X first before you allow yourself to do Y.

🫴 The Outstretched Hand

The whole project—Fires of Alchemy, the app, the blog, the bootcamp, the cards, the council, The Archivist, even this chapter—is a living ritual about time.

About reaching across it.

About helping myself, and maybe helping others, collapse their different timelines into their highest vision of them.

I always wanted to reach a hand out to my past self, he really needed it.

Lately, I keep feeling like my future self is doing the same for me right now.

When I speak to people, when I write these posts, when I make the app or film the behind-the-scenes clips, it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to be a teacher or a healer. I just want to show people how to remember.

How to reach for the hand that’s already reaching for them.

So here’s the question I now carry with me:

What if your future self is already reaching out - through me, trying to get your attention right now?

...

Would you take their hand? 🤝

🌀 Integration Isn’t Perfection

I still have healing to do, as we know by now - healing is a spiral. There are still patterns I get pulled into, though they are shorter now. There are still days I need to forget everything and numb out for a bit.

Today, I was standing in the last beams of sunlight for the afternoon and noticed my shadow.

I saw it reflected twice: once in real life, cast across the leaves of the hedge. Then again through my phone screen, where I was about to take a photo.

It felt like a message.

Like I was watching myself being observed by something beyond me.

Not in a spooky way. In a witness way. In an Oversoul Observer kind of way.

It was me seeing me. The Self behind the self.

Sometimes all our points of view overlap now.

🧙‍♂️ This Is My Final Spell (For Now)

This chapter wasn’t written in order. It didn’t come out after 6 or 7.

It arrived now because it’s true now.

Because I’ve lived enough of the cycle to light this lantern and hang it on the checkpoint.

And maybe that’s what the journey is about: Not waiting until everything’s fixed. Just recognising when you've completed a cycle. And knowing when it’s time to move forward.

This is a checkpoint.

Not the end of the path.

Just the end of this beginning.

---

As I finished writing this scroll, the final song from my favourite musical came on shuffle—a quiet bow-out, a soft reminder.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t even need to feel good all the time.

You just have to let yourself be here. Alive. Awake. In motion.

And you find some way to survive

And you find out you don't have to be happy at all

To be happy you're alive

— Light, Next To Normal 🎭