WASHINGTON — For nearly twelve months, pagan writer and journalist Alan U. Dalul vanished from the digital pages of The Wild Hunt. To his readers, the silence was unexplained; to Dalul, it was a period of enforced stillness dictated by the rigid gears of the United States immigration system.
Dalul returned to the publication with a deeply personal and vulnerable essay detailing the psychological toll of waiting for a green card, navigating the strict prohibitions placed on undocumented income while petitioning, and discovering entirely new paradigms of witchcraft under duress. His story sheds light not only on the personal trials of the modern immigrant experience in America, but also on how systemic administrative pressure reshapes spiritual and esoteric practices.
Main Facts: The Anatomy of Bureaucratic Silence
The core of Dalul’s year-long absence stems from a precarious legal reality familiar to many families navigating the U.S. immigration system. As an immigrant from Venezuela married to a U.S.-born citizen, Dalul was caught in the lengthy petitioning process required for lawful permanent residency.
Key facts of his ordeal include:
- The Employment Interruption: Dalul’s employment authorization expired in November, legally barring him from generating any form of income—including freelance writing and journalism—under threat of severe legal penalties, including deportation.
- The Burden of Proof: The petitioning process requires assembling massive amounts of evidence to prove the validity of a marriage and life together. Concurrently, any perceived external work or independent income generation can be flagged by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), making the process a high-stakes legal tightrope.
- Psychological Toll: The constant threat of administrative rejection or forced separation resulted in chronic anxiety, severe insomnia, nightmares, and a reliance on crisis support centers.
Despite these hurdles, Dalul utilized the forced hiatus to reevaluate his relationship with his craft, ultimately synthesizing six profound spiritual lessons from his time in bureaucratic limbo.
Chronology: From Final Columns to Spiritual Rebirth
To understand Dalul’s return, it is necessary to retrace the timeline of his silence and the internal pressures that accompanied it:
- Late Autumn (Prior to November 7): Knowing his authorization was expiring, Dalul entered a period of intense focus. He wrote and stockpiled columns for The Wild Hunt, operating under a bitter countdown where every completed piece meant "one less to go" before the legal system forced him into silence.
- November 7: Dalul’s employment authorization officially expired. Communication with his readership ceased, and he entered a nearly year-long period of restricted economic and professional activity.
- Winter and Spring: Marked by compounding stress, anxiety, and depression. Financial constraints limited access to professional therapy, forcing Dalul to rely on minimalist spiritual practices, such as nightly candle-lighting, to maintain psychological stability.
- Summer: A period of deep internal shifts regarding prayer, linguistic theology in his magical practice, and re-evaluating his relationship with his physical body and creative roots.
- August: Following the eventual progression of his immigration status and a return to baseline stability—though acknowledging ongoing mental health recovery—Dalul stepped back into the public eye to pen his return essay for The Wild Hunt.
Supporting Data: The Broader Landscape of Immigration Stress
While Dalul’s story centers on the spiritual and internal transformation of a single writer, it mirrors a broader, well-documented crisis within the American immigration apparatus. Statistical and investigative data underscore why administrative limbo frequently crosses the threshold into clinical trauma:
- Backlogs and Delays: According to data from immigration policy think tanks and USCIS workload reports, millions of applicants face processing times that stretch well beyond estimated timelines, leaving families in protracted states of legal uncertainty.
- Economic Vulnerability: Rules prohibiting work authorization renewals from being processed concurrently with primary applications often leave applicants with multi-month gaps where they cannot legally work, driving reliance on partners, savings, or informal networks.
- Mental Health Impacts: Public health studies consistently show that individuals undergoing protracted immigration proceedings suffer from elevated rates of generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), compounded by the fear of detention or deportation.
Official Responses and Systemic Realities
The agencies governing these processes—predominantly USCIS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—operate under mandates dictated by federal statute, focusing strictly on compliance, background vetting, and document verification.
While federal agencies maintain that stringent rules are necessary to preserve the integrity of national borders and legal immigration channels, advocacy groups and legal watchdogs have long criticized the human cost of systemic delays. Reports from organizations such as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) routinely highlight structural flaws in detention and inspection infrastructure, while public debates continue to swirl around the psychological impacts of bureaucratic family separation and employment restrictions.
Dalul’s account bridges the gap between these macro-level systemic failures and the micro-level human experience, illustrating how federal red tape reverberates directly into the domestic and spiritual lives of applicants.
Implications: Six Lessons from the Crucible
For the pagan and witchcraft communities, Dalul’s return offers a rare window into how adversity reshapes esoteric philosophy. Rather than presenting witchcraft as a tool of absolute control or manifestation, Dalul reframed his practice as a survival mechanism:
- Radical Minimalism ("Less is More"): When energy and mental health are severely depleted, elaborate rituals become impossible. Dalul found that stripping his practice down to lighting two simple candles—one for the Divine and one for his blood ancestors—was enough to anchor his hope.
- Transcending Limiting Names: Moving away from specific divine names toward broader concepts like "The Great Divine" or "The Great Spirit" offered him comfort when traditional prayer structures felt inadequate to his despair.
- Redefining Prayer: Shifting away from petitionary prayer ("asking for things") toward spontaneous expressions of gratitude helped him cultivate resilience, even in moments of profound isolation.
- Accepting the Fragility of the "Temple": Rejecting the toxic positivity often found in wellness circles that frames the physical body as an unbreakable sacred temple, Dalul embraced the reality of bodily and mental decline—gaining weight, battling depression, and accepting that survival sometimes means simply keeping the structure standing until rebuilding is possible.
- Mindfulness and Accountability: Becoming a father while navigating external stressors sharpened Dalul’s critical eye regarding how he spends his time and energy, fostering a rigorous mindfulness about his public statements and creative outputs.
- Musical Witchcraft as an Anchor: Reconnecting with roots did not just mean traditional folklore, but immersing himself in "music witchcraft"—utilizing headphones and artists ranging from Faun and Lindsey Stirling to Lady Gaga and pop music as a primary tool for emotional regulation and spiritual grounding.
Conclusion
Alan U. Dalul’s reemergence in the pages of The Wild Hunt serves as both a personal milestone and a poignant reminder of the unseen struggles endured by immigrants within the American legal landscape.
As he notes, quoting the dual adages that diamonds are forged under pressure while bread rises only when left to rest, the past year was an undeniable crucible. Yet, by choosing to focus on spiritual resilience rather than letting despair win, Dalul returns not only as a survivor of bureaucratic limbo, but as a writer endowed with a deepened, battle-tested wisdom.
