Some people don’t believe in magic. But how could I not believe in magic? As Mary Oliver says:
How could I look at anything in this world
and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart?
What should I fear?One morning
in the leafy green ocean
the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body
is sure to be there.
May it be so for you.
I attended an interesting presentation today that wound up being, in part, about how one establishes conditions that allow The Sacred to become more perceptible, especially in places where it might seem unlikely — the example given was of a dangerous neighborhood in urban Detroit. There was an informed discussion about how one begins such a process: should you do a cleansing, should you ground, what do you do first?
The answers were all worthwhile, but no one said what I think has to be the first step: ask the landbase. It has an opinion, it desires relationship, and it’s willing to help — if only it’s asked.
Too often we assume, even when we want to be magically involved with a place, that we’re acting upon a passive object rather than approaching a living landbase.
Picture found here
Landscape Guy was telling me the other day about this research. Mycelia really do connect almost all trees and plants with each other. Try noticing them when you ground as part of your daily practice.
Mushroom Man | Leslie Iwerks from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.
Lots Going on Underground
Here in the magical MidAtlantic, the period just around Imbolc is when Nature is very busy, but almost all of the work is done out of sight. A quick scan of the horizon shows trees that still look dead, ice on the Potomac, and leaden skies. Yet, in the mountains, mother bears have given birth to their cubs and are no longer hibernating. They’re staying in their caves, but there’s activity there. Foxes are building dens for the kits that will be born in a few weeks. Bulbs underground are growing green shoots that will soon pop out of the Earth and then begin to make buds. Trees and shrubs are covered in tight little buds. You can see them, if you look carefully, but it’s difficult to imagine that, come September, that hard bit of stuff will be, for example, an apple or a fig, much less that it will be a blossom in May.
And it is often the same way with our own growth process. We may have been working with our Word of the Year or List of Goals for a month now, but it can be difficult to see much progress. And that’s when it starts to seem as if it might just be easier to forget the whole thing.
Here’s a good post (hat tip to: @druidjournal) that provides some outstanding advice for exactly this time of year. For example:
Of all the skills I’ve learned in the past 7 years of changing my life, one skill stands out:
Learning to be comfortable with discomfort.
If you learn this skill, you can master pretty much anything. You can beat procrastination, start exercising, make your diet healthier, learn a new language, make it through challenges and physically grueling events, explore new things, speak on a stage, let go of all that you know, and become a minimalist. And that’s just the start.
Unfortunately, most people avoid discomfort. I mean, they really avoid it — at the first sign of discomfort, they’ll run as fast as possible in the other direction. This is perhaps the biggest limiting factor for most people, and it’s why you can’t change your habits.
Think about this: many people don’t eat vegetables because they don’t like the taste. We’re not talking about soul-wrenching pain here, not Guantanamo torture, but a taste that’s just not something you’re used to. And so they eat what they already like, which is sweets and fried stuff and meats and cheeses and salty things and lots of processed flour.
The simple act of learning to get used to something that tastes different — not really that hard in the grand scheme of life — makes people unhealthy, often overweight.
I know, because this was me for so many years. I became fat and sedentary and a smoker and deeply in debt with lots of clutter and procrastination, because I didn’t like things that were uncomfortable. And so I created a life that was deeply uncomfortable as a result.
The beautiful thing is: I learned that a little discomfort isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can be something you enjoy, with a little training. When I learned this, I was able to change everything, and am still pretty good at changing because of this one skill.
Master your fear of discomfort, and you can master the universe.
The entire post is well worth a read.
And it’s true, isn’t it? Lots of growth does feel a bit uncomfortable, especially at first. Change isn’t always easy. And when the change is still happening underground and outside our field of vision, the discomfort can seem to be a lot greater than the reward.
One of my tried-and-true tactics for dealing with the kind of discomfort discussed in the post is (no surprise here) breathing, grounding, centering, coming back to my true self. When I do that, it’s much easier for me to remember why I’m putting myself in an uncomfortable situation in the first place. A second strategy is to personalize the discomfort. Give it a name, an appearance, a personality. And then talk to it. Invite it in. Acknowledge it. Ask for its help on your journey (you did read fairy tales, right?)
For one of my goals this year, my discomfort is the Woodwose from the Wildwood Tarot. We’re developing quite a relationship. I wouldn’t call us friends, exactly, but I do think we have a healthy respect for each other. I’m learning to recognize him even when he hides as my tiredness, busyness, appetites.
What does your discomfort look like? What does s/he say when you invite hir to come in and sit down? Is it easier when s/he doesn’t always have to hide?
I like this definition of poetry. Whyte could just as easily be talking about the practice of magic, as well, I think.
Do you agree?
Fairy-tale Logic
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—
You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
Picture found here.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve blogged this poem before, but it’s a good reminder, here at the beginning of the secular new year.
As noted, I spent yesterday at the Chihuly exhibit in Richmond. It was wonderful and we had a great time.
I firmly believe that beauty is its own reward and that time spent seeing art needs no “practical” justification. But I do know that my daily practice and my magic both get a big boost from exposure to creativity. One of the first magical skills many Witches learn is visualization. Raise your hand if you were early on exposed to the exercise where you look at, smell, peel, and taste an orange and then close your eyes and repeat the experience in your mind. Me, too. And, I continue, from time to time, to practice those exercises, both because it’s good to return, occasionally, to the basics and because I’m just not good at visualization.
I’m fairly weak at a whole host of what are sometimes, and perhaps less-than-accurately, called “right-brain” skills. Knowing where my body is in space: Nope. Rhythm: Nope. Drawing: Nope. Visualizing: Well, I’ve worked at it and gotten somewhat better with practice, but it’s still not a strength, by any means. Seeing art helps me to fill in the gaps. I spent as much time as I could yesterday gazing at the fantastic sculptures and then closing my eyes and “seeing” them again, so that I’ll be able to use those images in my daily meditations and in my magic work.
What’s your magical weakness? What helps you to become more proficient? How might you use these images?
Boat on River Styx with Forms
Ceiling
Sea Forms
Globe
Energy
Photos by the blogger; if you copy, please link back. The captions are mine; Mr. Chihuly has different titles for these works.
Although the liturgical year begins, for most Pagans, at Samhein, the secular new year, January 1st, is just around the corner. Now’s a good time to make manifest all of that introspection that we’ve been doing for the past few months. And if magic is, as Uncle Aleister averred, “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” then establishing goals and objectives for the coming year — adopting New Year’s resolutions, if you like — is one of the first steps in what can be an important magical working.
Of course, the standard thing to say about resolutions is that they don’t last. People start off with good intentions and, within a few weeks, they give up on going to the gym, or reading every night to their child, or sitting daily in meditation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Stories of people who have changed their lives are legion and those changes started with a determination to cause change to occur in conformity with will — whether at the New Year or at some other time.
Here are a few things that I’ve found helpful at changing my own life in conformity with my will:
* Christine Kane‘s “Word of the Year” worksheet is a really valuable tool; I do it every year on secular New Year’s Day. She offers it free, although you do have to give her your email. She’ll send you an occasional inspirational post and/or ad for her coaching, but you can unsubscribe if you don’t want those.
If you try it, let me know, in comments, how you like it. What’s your word for this year?
* I’ve written before about calendars. The calendar is, IMHO, the most important magical tool that anyone can have. A calendar lets you control your time (How many times have we all read that putting down exercise appointments will help us to schedule regular exercise? And it may seem quite simple, but it’s also effective. “No, I can’t do the call at two o’clock; I have a previous appointment. How about four, instead?” Works for daily practice, too). It lets you track your progress (a simple check mark next to each kept exercise appointment, a tally on the last day of the month, a star or pentacle next to every fifth success). It lets you break your goals into doable chunks (noting on the 15th of each month that it’s time to put money into savings, writing weight goals at the beginning of each week, scheduling the dates by which you’ll have found a yoga studio, registered, gone to the first class, etc.) Find a calendar that you like — electronic, desk, or wall — cast a circle, and start causing your life to change in conformity with your will.
* A friend of mine puts the two ideas together and writes his word on the year on each page of his desk calendar. There it is, reminding you what’s really important each time that you check to see what appointments you have and whether you have time for another one.
* Donald Michael Kraig suggests five magickal keys to achieving your resolution to change your life.
* I’ve always found clearing away clutter and getting rid of the detritus of the prior year to be a great way to let my Younger Self know that I’m serious about making changes. In Thinner This Year Chris Crowley suggests starting off the first day of a diet and exercise program by doing a big physical project — a really long bike ride, for example — just to convince yourself (I’d say “Younger Self”) that you’re serious and that this is the beginning of something big.
How do you convince Younger Self that you’re serious?
* And, then, there’s this very good advice from my brilliant friend:
Picture found here.
Burning the Old Year
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
Asters
Theodora Goss, who is brilliant, has been writing about what it means to really live fairy tales, or, as she puts it, to live a fairy tale life. Many Witches, in my experience, grew up on fairy tales and Witches from the Reclaiming tradition, in particular, focus a lot of their practice upon fairy tales and myths. Theodora Goss says:
[There are] two things [that] fairy tales give us that the real world doesn’t: magic and meaning.
In the real world, things don’t happen by magic. Or most people believe they don’t, but I have often felt magic in my own life. It has felt as though a good fairy is looking out for me, helping me. Living in a fairy tale is often difficult — there are ogres — but there is also help, there are also speaking animals that will tell you the way, good fairies that will show you what to do. And in fairy tales, your actions have meaning. Sharing your food with an old woman will eventually save you. To be honest, I believe that’s true in our world as well. Perhaps what really happens is that in our world, which is not a fairy tale world, we act as though there is no magic, and no meaning, and so they disappear. After all, our perceptions shape, if not reality (and I believe they do, to a certain extent), then our experience of it.
This morning, I was driving, through sun-infused mist, along my beloved Potomac and realized that the wild asters are now in bloom. I once had a very magical experience that involved asters and, this morning, I was thanking them and telling them how much I love them. But I didn’t say anything about it to anyone (except to the asters). This evening, the Green Man came over and made me close my eyes. “Tada!” He had been gifted some asters by the director of a lovely local garden and brought them over to plant in my woodland, next to my magical rock. It was a fairy tale of sorts.
Later, over wine, we were discussing a recent experience that we had of a very magical portal (because to be a Witch is to pay attention and to pay attention is to realize that, of course, we are all living with meaning and magic) and I was saying that the real take-away lesson for me was: that magical energy, that power, that way to move between the world (where what we do between the worlds can change the worlds) is actually available all the time. It’s available when I’m stuck in traffic, when I’m frustrated trying to submit my insurance receipts, when I can’t find time to schedule the appointments that I need, when I imagine that I’m too tired for my daily practice.
Theodora Goss says that:
living a fairy tale life is not easy, or for the faint of heart. But I think what you get at the end is magic, meaning, and maybe even happily ever after.
And, she’s right. But she also puts up a graphic that’s equally right. Its inscription says:
If you want to live a fairy tale, you have to be willing to climb the glass mountain in iron shoes.
What she doesn’t say is that living a life without fairy tales, which is what too many of us do too much of the time, is also like climbing a glass mountain in iron shoes. Just without the magic and the meaning.
And, speaking of climbing mountains, you do know how Sisyphus kept rolling that big ball uphill over and over, don’t you? Because he found meaning in it.
How’s your daily practice?
Picture found here.
