February 16, 2026
The Scattered Sparks of a Wish Fulfilled Too Soon
You set the intention, performed the ritual, made the offering, took the action. You were specific. You were sincere. And yet, you still haven’t gotten what you want.
Or at least, not yet.
But what if something did arrive but it passed right through you like water through a net?
Most people, when magick seems to fail, go back to the beginning. They revisit the petition. Redo the ritual. Wonder if they mispronounced something or used the wrong potion. They assume the problem is upstream, in the logistics of how the magick was performed.
But that is often not the case.
Sometimes, the problem lies downstream at the point of reception. You don't have a magick problem. You have a containment problem. The magick worked. You just don't have anywhere to put what came back.
There's a Qabalistic concept called Shevirat HaKelim, or the Shattering of the Vessels. The story goes like this: when the divine light first poured into creation, it was channeled into vessels designed to contain it. But the force of what flowed into them exceeded what they could hold. The vessels broke. The light scattered. And the shards of those broken containers fell into the lower worlds, carrying sparks of the original light trapped inside them.
Essentially, this is a description of what happens when current exceeds capacity.
The failure point was at the moment of reception. The container couldn't match the scale of what was moving through it.
Here’s an example of how this applies to real life.
You ask for creative recognition, and something you created goes viral. Someone with reach shares it. People respond. The audience you wanted starts forming. But instead of building on the momentum, you go quiet. You start second-guessing the thing that worked. You pivot to something safer, more palatable, less yours . Now that people are actually watching, the exposure feels like standing in traffic. The vessel couldn't hold it.
So what is the vessel, practically speaking? Because it's easy to let this slide into abstraction. The vessel is the actual structural reality of your life. The things that would have to bear weight if what you asked for showed up right now.
Sometimes it’s your nervous system's tolerance for intensity. Sometimes it's your relationship with sustained discomfort. It may even be the flexibility of your identity.
The vessel is everything that determines whether you can keep the thing, not just attract it. And most people have never examined it, because for most people, the conversation around magick stops at the moment of arrival and never asks the harder question: then what?
The alchemists understood this. The vas hermeticum. The hermetically sealed vessel. Nothing could be transmuted in an open container. Without containment, there is no transformation. There is only evaporation.
Because transmutation begins with heat. The material has to be calcinated, dissolved, separated, and recombined. It has to pass through stages of destruction of the form the substance held before. And the only thing standing between that destruction becoming transmutation versus becoming waste is the integrity of the container it's happening inside.
So when your vessel shatters, when what you asked for arrives and you cannot hold it, the work is not to stop asking. It is to rebuild the container so it can withstand the heat next time.
This repair has a name: Tikkun. It is the restoration of the vessels so they can hold what they were always meant to hold. It is the gathering of the scattered sparks that fell when the original containers shattered. It is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing practice of reinforcing the structure, patching the cracks, and expanding the capacity, not so that you deserve what you are asking for, but so that you can physically, psychologically, and structurally hold it when it arrives.