What does the word “magic” invoke for you? Do you think of musty black felt hats? white rabbits? A woman with well-worn, bejewelled hands shuffling a deck of tarot cards? While you sit down at her table, with a thick air of scepticism … but also hoping you don’t pull an unfavourable card at the same time.
I don’t …
I am gently flooded with images of cooking; lingering over that bubbling pot of goodness, thinking back on my ancestors of the distant past, and how amazing and wonderful this accessibility to food would seem to them. I think of making art with my own hands, I just think of hands in general, how every finger is linked to a planet, how the pointer finger of the right hand should have it’s own special ring, that is only worn when manifestation needs to take place (I am not talking about the buzz word linked to a new age movement, or a bumper sticker from the crystal shop, I am talking about real, serious, shifting, which is not all incense and coffee shop chatter, or a social media status, in fact no one needs to be told at all). I think of fire, I think of the porcelain lamp on my desk, which illuminates the tree branches I have carved … I think of trees … how incredible are they?
I think of Washing my family’s clothes, the water not clouded with dirt, but with moments and experiences, I think of poems of birds; one raven is bad luck, two is good luck, three is health, four is wealth, I think of all those medicinal plants I grow in my garden, the ones I have planted and the ones who have come to me on their own, the ones that silence my mind and the ones that can heal a wound of any kind, I think of you, or am I thinking of me? What do those words even mean? Never mind, at their core they amount to the same.
So why are we so quick to dismiss all that is unseen? Or even what is right in front of us, as being nothing more than optical illusion, something can be explained away; and only explained away by our level of perception, or worst of all … as a pathology; is an elder speaking to the ancestors a pathology? Is an Indonesian Dukun in a heady fragrant, smoke-filled room, summoning and healing, a pathology? Is the fear that Dukun invokes in people aware of his power, a pathology? … well maybe that could turn into one, I have seen that power, and even rejecting the belief that it can get to you, in your dreams, in your body, and make you unwell, that shielding of yourself … because as anyone versed in the esoteric knows, you have to let it in first, through fear or guilt, even that shielding, for the most powerful, knowledgeable wise man or woman, means nothing, it is not going to help you.
Explain that away.
Let’s also take a moment to acknowledge, that modern western psychology, has only been around for just over 140 years, and the last lobotomy on record … was performed in 1967 … let that sink in. The fact that Western psychology also has such deep roots in colonialism is another topic all-together. What about trance states? What about disassociation? I can’t help but wonder, if all these individualistic pathologies, are just a somewhat miss-guided and possibly unintentional tool, to pull one away from the collective conscious. Maybe disassociation, another huge buzz word at the moment, is a necessary journey that needs to be taken, but where are the guides? In the Western world, they will be in short supply, and if you do manage to find one, there will be something called an “exchange” attached, and a short online course, with a token certificate with “shaman” at the top, may be the only real experience they have (Yes, I have really seen this), I am not trying to single people out who need to make a living, I get it, we all have bills to pay, but when you really let it all sink in…it’s madness…right?…luckily lobotomies are no more.
Why are guides so important? I mean real guides, they know the beasts, they know if you need to take a left turn into the ocean or a right turn into the desert, I met a guide once, around a smoky fire, in remote bushland, in the pitch black of night, I must have been only thirteen. She offered me lemon water, and had thick grey hair, a scratchy woollen jumper, and a round ruddy face illuminated by flames, she told stories of meaning, and was like the gatekeeper of the other worlds, watching over the people who played in the lapis lazuli, blue night, now that is a guide … she had no constrictive sterile office, no big words regurgitated from text books, most-likely written by white men in their 60’s, who learnt it, from all the white men in their 60’s before them. She had lived experience, she had heart … she also did not ask me for a couple of hundred dollars per hour.
Now I am not telling people to turn away from professional help when they need it.
But the way diagnoses are thrown around … people diagnosing themselves and others, as a way to fit into a box, make an excuse, find an identity or to try and make sense of a world we cannot control, where does the wonder fit in? where can the magic in front of your eyes, exist? It seems we may be making the dukun versed in black magic irrelevant, because we are making ourselves unwell, remember what I said about letting the sickness in through belief? Are you following still?
Then there is the realisation that anyone who does not fit into this life we have manifested, through an unwell society, will be treated as if it is them who is unwell, who needs to be fixed, cured, changed … a society built on the monetization of everything, greed, to desperately want to achieve, to want more…and more… and more… what is at the end of that exhausting striving and clawing?… how much… stuff… does one need? Why are we still in this “who dies with the most toys, wins” mentality. It is as if the realization that the earth does not have an infinite amount to give us, has not been realized yet. It only takes putting a teenager through high school, to see that worth is measured by obedience and fitting into a very narrow acceptable margin, before there is a need to start diagnosing, because of perceived unacceptable traits. Because being intuitive, creative, kind … that does not serve a society with one main agenda.
No wonder we are shut off to magic, we have taken wonderous things for granted, been told they are not wonderful. Animals, rocks, oceans, space … had no name, no desperate need to be explained away, and then humans started shifting into our current state, all the names you can think of, and explanations given, have just been thought up and named after, another human, like you or me, with very short lifespans, not enough to understand anything really, we are but a blip, and all those amazing wonders had no name, they just were … they just are… and they will reclaim that status again when we are gone …so put that in your pipe and smoke it!
I can tell you, my two-year-old staring at the tiny fish, swimming around their underwater kingdom, is experiencing magic as I write these words, so where did it go? Why is it now invisible to most adults, and now sadly seems to be hidden from children, at younger and younger ages. But it is still there… go on … look …I’ll wait … can you see it yet?
Magic can be in the conversations of birds … can you hear them?
Magic can be a glass of water … a very good friend of mine, was trying to soothe me in a moment of angst, we were oceans apart and we were talking on the phone, it was a stormy night in my dark lonely street, compared to his busting, balmy village, always filled with friends and family. Anything he said to me would have been the wrong thing at that time, and I was years away from mastering my own mind.
He told me this “Go and get a glass of water, and drink that water to calm yourself” those words, did not make me feel calm, in fact I thought it was so annoyingly simple, that it was a joke he was playing on me, it actually made me angry … fast forward a few years, and I finally understood what he meant, water holds the magic you put into it. For the ones who need things to be explained away, there has been a study on water, by Dr. Masaru Emoto, that discovered when water is told varying phrases, the molecular structure changed. Of course, there are critics of this. Magic held in water is no new concept, look at the holy water of Christian churches, Hindu temples, the cleansing power of sacred seas.
In a desperate moment, all those years later, I took that advice, I poured my water, all the while speaking to it, always asking for healing or calm, and it turns out, my friend was actually on to something.
For those who have never even had to sperate magic from the everyday, through culture or upbringing, these things are not seen as needing explanation in a logical sense, they are not seen as a pathological illness, they are embraced. In the west this rejection of magic and connection to nature can be severe, and judgement can pull people even further away from that connection. It was part of my ex-husband’s culture to keep the placenta after the birth of a child, the placenta was to buried in the ground under a tree, as the placenta was seen as the spiritual twin of the new baby, and as the tree grows, it becomes a place the child will visit throughout their lives, to bring offerings to the tree, and to speak to their twin in times of need.
When we asked to keep the placenta after the birth of our son, we were made to explain why … why should I be “allowed” to keep this part of myself, this sacred part that I, in this sterile unwelcoming place, apparently had no right over. When we explained the cultural and spiritual reasons why this was so important, we were met with mocking, I remember vividly laying in a bloody broken mess, feeling like a cornered, wounded animal, with two nurses gossiping right above my head, about how they will never understand why people want to bring the placenta home with them. We did get to bring home my son’s spiritual twin, in a sterile plastic bag marked “Hazardous bio waste”, and that right there, I am sure begs no explanation, to the ripping away, of any kind of magic or sacred space in this landscape, where magic is just not acceptable.
My children will always know magic, my son will visit his twin, waiting patiently for him on my parents untouched, wild block of land … my daughters will know what it is to weave magic into the very fibre of their art, to know intuition, and to speak to the women who came before them.
There is no magic in the everyday, it is just called today, and is it not the most mystical experience?
