Are you simply staring intently at the macros, trying to make sense of them, or are you actually utilizing the macro-expanding feature in your editor? Or perhaps you're grappling with writing macros yourself? Macros can be tricky, which is why Clojurists often avoid creating new ones unless there's a compelling reason to do so. There's an old book called "Mastering Clojure macros", it's tiny - fewer that a hundred pages. It helped me back when I was learning Clojure.