[1|2|3|4|5-6|7|8|9|10|11-12|13|14-16]
[17-31]
Here we are on a day credited to be magical in the West — superstitiously, it’s “badly magical”, if we can say such a thing and mean anything coherent by it.
With a daily post in a series like this, it may feel like I often am making notes to and for myself, and it can admittedly ask for an effort sometimes to be clear for others. But the mutual magic of the previous posts does in fact mean something coherent, at least to me.
Our first and most profoundly magical act is to exist.
We’re in reciprocal or mutual relationship to absolutely everything around and within us, so anything we say, think, do or feel has its effect. In a time when people may quite justifiably feel “unheard” and “unseen”, we forget or have been taught to ignore how profoundly all the worlds witness us — see, hear, feel and respond to us. It’s only in the human realm that we can feel invisible and inaudible. The experience of Druidry can prove healing and restorative for many, because in the natural world we are not usually drowned out by others. In natural spaces and silences, we can often expand to feel heard and seen, because we are doing so much hearing and seeing ourselves. This outward flow is half of magic. Jump-start the current within us by skillful means, and then ride it, follow it, heed its pointing.
I wrote in yesterday’s post how we have remarkable freedom of choice — and that freedom brings with it considerable pain. If it’s true no one gets out alive, it’s also true no one gets out pain-free.
Pain is often the creator of awareness, says one of the Wise. We’ve evolved very human ways to deal with pain, some more adaptive and some less, some creating secondary pains as consequences, some opening doors we didn’t know were there. In the hands and arms and thoughts of those who love us, we learn more effectively, so that our relationships take on an importance we see in love song after love song. And those sometimes less fraught and dramatic loves, of dear friends and family, also move us by long and winding roads towards greater humility and compassion. Magic works best there, most powerfully, most spectacularly. Not surprisingly, that open, loving and curious state of being also invites creativity, wonder — the capacity to be amazed, to marvel, to be astonished, to feel awe — and to express these things through our skill, our voice and eye and hand and foot and heart, in art, song, words, dance, caring. Our response to “magic” is also what creates magic.
Magic’s a human practice. (Other beings have their own versions.) It’s something that becomes — or can become — a flavor, a melody, a soundtrack to our lives. But Magic, once sensed, is also the background music of the cosmos, so it’s little wonder (or a very great wonder indeed) that it also seeps into everything we do and know and are. We see it in the eyes of animals, the whorls of tree bark, the shape of breaking waves, the spiral arms of the galaxies, the wrinkles and lines on a beloved face, that run of notes in our favorite song, the sunrise and sunset of each day, the first fresh foods of summer, the colors of autumn. We keep forgetting it to our evident and deep and repeated peril, but it is always there to recover. It can no more forsake us than the sky.
We need a practice because of fading. In a world where everything is temporary and transient, the experience of the lasting can only be accessed inwardly. Outwardly, whatever we’ve gained, perceived, learned, discovered, has to be re-won daily in some form, to fix it in our awareness. Here today and gone tomorrow. A practice is spiritual food — it sustains the inward vision in a world of time and space. A practice helps us steer by changing winds to where we wish to go.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Welcome to our most recent visitor from Suriname.
A Druid Way 