I don’t have the normal space and accommodations now as I have moved to New York City. Time, space, nature and privacy are all pretty rare right now.
Seeing as the ultimate tools for working and transformation are the body and mind… what are creative and simple ways of working out of a suitcase?
Pathworking aka working in vision. Only requires a calm mind and the ability to focus for a few minutes. It’s simple, but can have a profound effect on your world.
You can also create an astral temple via your imagination, and perform all your rituals there.
I’ve travelled for work before and it wasn’t uncommon for me to have to split up the different parts of a ritual. I made the request in my room, got the affirmation. Blooded a sigil. Burnt the sigil in a parking lot between the two doors of my vehicle, and called it good.
Done it several times.
Time- if you can’t make time for magick, that’s all on you. You either find some or don’t.
Space- I’ve done rituals sitting on my bed. I’ve done them sitting on stepstool using a nightstand. I’ve communicated with spirits at work, on the bus, in cars, you name it.
Nature- Nature is wonderful, but you don’t have to be in a forest to hold ritual.
Privacy- Privacy is nice, but not always needed. As long as you can focus, that’s what matters.
Speaking as someone who is travelling a lot as part of her current working schedule: a travel altar. Mine is a small wooden box that is filled with a tea light, a little sachet filled with herbs, a sigil of my patron and whatever is currently on my priority list material wise. I am also making sure to carry a divination deck with me. Meditation isn’t a matter of the setting; a closed door and ear plugs suffice.
I do the tool free pathworking and astral temple like @DarkestKnight mentioned, and I also have perfectly innocuous looking statuettes that are vessels for entities that can go on a mantel that happens to be an alter, but doesn’t look like one.
It’s nice to have a temple, and I do use that too, but I like to make everything magick, so it’s “as well as” not “the only way” I can do things.
Also jounaling in dream diaries and grimoires, this is magic practice too. I use boring old composition books, no one would look twice at this on a shelf for sleath grimoires.
These are some great ideas - especially for me as someone who needs to be a bit more careful with my magickal practises than I have in the past.
Welcome! Fellow New Yorker 
I live in BK, but also in the process of moving to another neighborhood/settling a lawsuit with the current landlord and spend most of the week in NJ now.
I started practicing when I was living in NYC full time, though
What people have already said: pathworkings, sigil magick, dreams, meditation, basic candle spells, and astral workings all don’t require much space
In a way I’m in the same boat. I have basically only my room to do most of my rituals and the bathroom when I go to take a bath. I can not burn candles or have incense so I’m having to go back to the drawing board to come up with ideas.
So far my to go is sigils. I used them, anoint them and meditate on them. I also use the battery candles to help with my focus. Not the same in a long shot but it does help. If you have a tub you could do ritual baths. It does make a huge difference. I do tarot readings and is recently doing experiments on readings. You could spend this time as stated above to sharpen your astral senses and have a temple as well. I enjoy using music to help me.
I suggest to spend this time to read up. I know you must already have read quite a bit but this would be the best time to get in and read up.
I practiced in the city of Toronto (it’s like Chicago) and you’ll find that other practitioners offer you a lot of space to do your own thing.
Check out the city and incorporate the city into your magic.
Roads and streets are leylines of magical and emotional power. Churches, hospitals, imposing government structures are temples to various powers. The whole city warps and twists like a nest of snakes and worms on the power coursing through it both of people, spirits, and technology. It is heaven and hell as one just like any other place in the world and it is nature in its own style. A walk along a street past sacred sites of the city can be a dance calling up the spirits of the city to your will or redirecting the currents of power to your advantage. The tapping of a pattern in your step or on the wall of an alley can open up gateways to various underworlds. The subway are borrowing wormtunnels through space and time and various realities that you can travel along if you can just sync to those currents of power flowing through that. Enter at one reality and leave in another.
Many ways to use the city like mystics and shamans of old and modern time. After all they often had to do with whatever sticks or rocks they found on the ground and deal with their annoying tribes people and the silly superstitions they had you at least are anonymous and are just another nameless nobody who amounts to nothing in the city so you might as well take advantage of that view to do your work in plain sight because everyone else has other things on their mind than what some random person is doing among the mass of nameless faces that mean nothing to them.
If you need space for a ritual, I would suggest just doing it in an Astral Temple (if you have made one, if not do a quick search around the forum and I am sure you will find some stuff.) As long as you can visualize, you can just have all the tools in your temple as well.
Hello New Yorker! What are your deities and practices ?
Spirits wise, most long term: Azazel (who brought me to this site in the first place), Beelzebub, Lucifer, Lilith, Arachne, Samael, Hecate, Isis, but less frequent with some of them now.
I used to practice like 3-4 hours a day, which I kept up for a year and could be why I went crazy last year (a whole thing/story for another time), but I went back to school recently and always busy now. I still try to do something everyday, just not like before, even if it’s just a short meditation or making some herb stuff (oils and dry mixes for candles that I make when I find free time)
Most recently, I’m doing more of herbal / plant stuff. Starting to work with Buer now for that and also for some healing I need.
hbu?
I carry a briefcase, but you can do the following with a suitcase too. Open it up and either hang your sigil or a scrying mirror from the inside of the lid of the case. Anything else you can use (incense, a candle, etc…can be set up in the bottom.)
If you can charge some kind of cloth to use and lay down on the bottom of the case even better- I use a black velvet cloth with a pentagram. But you could also build a small make shift altar to arrange things on also.
When it’s time, just open up the case, set it up, and presto, you got a makeshift temple.
***Then, after you’re set up, take a few minutes and lock this makeshift temple/ altar in your mind’s eye, so that you can see it when you close your eyes.
Tie a dark blindfold around your head and over your eyes for total darkness and focus on the image of your altar in your 3rd eye.
Do whatever ritual you want in your new astral temple.