I read a line in my book today, as I tried desperately to take 10 minutes of psychological downtime from the barrage of internal and external stress rampaging within.
I say I read a line - which is almost accurate. It took me several attempts to finally relax and be fully present enough to read a few pages. But the line that jumped out and arrested me was this:
“You’ve entered Everwood from one of the worlds where enchantments are confined to the rank of bedtime tales for milk-fed infants, where magic is but a story and everything is dull and straitlaced as a result… Those worlds are rare, rarer still to find the doors within them.”
- Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar
An hour or so later as I drove to school, the veracity of this fictional statement reacted with the raging/sad/disbelieving turmoil within and bubbled over.
How can we be so absolutely, dutifully blinded by what we are told to believe?
Why do we limit ourselves so completely, even whilst crying out for air to breathe and space to be ourselves?
Why are we so compulsive about “proving” the non-existence of magic instead of accepting what we know in our bones?
Why do real-life scenarios of war, poverty, death, illness and destruction somehow give us evidence that magic does not also exist?
When did we become so squashed and banal as a species?
These were just some of the questions I asked my car / the universe on my drive to school today.
Have you felt any of these too?
It’s questions like this which have plagued me in one form or another - subconsciously at first - since I was very little. Despite growing up as a very rational, evidence-based thinker, I felt magic.
Not me personally - I’m not that narcissistic. No, I mean in any given situation or with specific people, I could always FEEL the magic. Everywhere.
But it’s only in the last decade I’ve begun to accept it as an equal truth to my ‘other reality’. And it’s only pretty recently I’ve actually started to understand it. It’s like trying to look directly at the stars at night. You have to side-squint and then believe what you think you’re seeing.
If we forget, deny, and ridicule the intangible in our lives, then what are we left with? Imagine dismissing the felt-power of love in all its variations wholesale. Take away the significance of felt-love for a child. For a partner. A parent. That feeling of being in love with the whole world in a given moment of intense beauty and awe. Those things can’t be seen or measured, yet they are stratospherically significant.
Our current culture wants us to believe we cannot possibly hold both things to be true: if you dare to believe in magic (and even love), then you are not acknowledging the reality of the concrete, the “actually happening now” horror-tickertape running incessantly along the bottom of our screens.
And yet, I believe we all know it to be true that we absolutely can (and do) hold both these things at once. Moreover, between the culturally-induced dualism of nihilistic apathy and psychopathic megalomania, there lies another parallel world: the immense, immersive, viscerally-felt-reality of magic.
It does not serve us - either individually or collectively - to believe only in “The Real World”. Doing so only squashes us into a 2D version of ourselves, resulting in a soul which cries out so frequently we attempt to pacify it at every turn with an incessant supply of trinkets and treats. And when those fail to work, we turn up the volume on anything which can numb the pain.
Why do we choose this life? Why do we promote this way of living? Why have we effectively become our own suppressors?
The intangible aspects of life connect us - to our self, to each other, to the planet and the universe. They help us make sense of it all. They allow us to actually feel all the many aspects and levels and variations of our humanity - even/ especially when they seem to contradict each other! We are not made up of 1s and 0s - thank the cosmos! And our lives are - or at least can be - infinitely richer as a result.
Magic is not just a story for children which they must necessarily grow out of. Magic is the energy of everything we are here for. If we don’t want a Brave New World then it’s up to us to defy it. In our cells, in our bones. With what we infuse every particle of energy within and around us.
And if that’s not reason enough to devote yourself anew to the magical realm, know this: when you commit to trusting and honouring the multi sensory and multidimensional aspects of yourself and the world around you, you begin to see how this shifts reality. Whether it’s sending unconditional love to a struggling friend, or envisioning a huge project coming to fruition.
Magic works. Period.
And it all begins with us. We are creating our future through every action and interaction. So what do we want our future to look and feel like?
Let’s feel that. Now - in our bones.
Happy Samhain to all,
Zoë