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Mutual magic? I magic you and you magic me: done. It sounds like sex. It sounds like seduction. And it is. Except not quite.
First Approach
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? sings Mary Oliver, one of our beloved human bards, in her poem “Singapore”. (Yes, there are others: ever heard a bird-bard? A fish-bard, swimming in the endless shining sea. A tree-bard, playing the green silence of leaves.) Likewise, if this world were immediately subject to our magics, it would manifest competing visions and versions of everybody’s shifting ideal: intermittent chaos, tugged this way and that. In fact, it would look remarkably like … our current reality.
Sandbox reality, to use an image from beta testing and draft versions of programs. Try it out under carefully constrained circumstances to see what happens.
If I’m disposed in the midst of a period of trial and suffering to cry out to deity, and I have no words, sometimes another’s words make do. “Brenhines y nef*! Queen! Lady who loves and makes all things. Modron–Mother!” say the birds of Rhiannon in the story of Pwyll in the First Branch of Evangeline Walton’s glorious Mabinogion.
Only by courage can you grow great, replies the Lady.
I gave my children freedom and the price of freedom is hard. It is mistake after mistake, pain after pain. Yet if my care surrounded you always, you would be as caged birds forever. Men and women could never grow up, whatever their bodies did. To make all of you sharers in My wisdom and My strength, I long ago yielded up supreme power and let evil come into the world.
Is this the courage to take up magic, or to turn away from it as cheat? If my pain is great enough, a cheat starts to look pretty damn good.
Second Approach
I took a break from this post to hang the laundry on the backyard line and on the way, I poked my head into my wife’s work-space. She was staring at a sketch pad. I had it in my head and I lost it, she said ruefully, turning briefly to me. My wife’s a weaver, with an excellent eye for color. Most of us have faced this experience in some form. However vivid and beguiling the inward vision, it can dissipate like mist once the sun rises.
How do we manifest it? Well, yes. But how do we hold on to it long enough even to see it clearly, never mind manifesting it?
Third Approach
“To be conscious means to act from humility and compassion”, says one of the Wise. Wow, I think, looking in the mirror. Kinda redefines wokeness. This invites others to be my teachers.
More to come in the next post.
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*Brenhines y nef: (Welsh) Queen of Heaven
A Druid Way 