The world is full of magic

As a child, I craved magic. There was a hunger in me for wonder, for awe and for something to take me beyond what I saw as the ordinariness of everyday life. Fantasy fiction featured a lot, alongside fairytales, folklore and mythology. I wanted actual talking animals, walking trees, women of flowers who turned into owls. Her especially.

I thought that maybe there was an age at which the magic would just turn up. A lot of fiction aimed at children suggests this, and as an adult I don’t think it’s a very helpful idea. There was no door in the back of the wardrobe – I checked, repeatedly. The Goblin King did not come and take me away, despite repeated requests. It felt like the magic was always somewhere else, somewhere out of my reach, promised but never given.

All too often, the ‘magic’ aimed at children is just a marketing strategy. There’s a lot of money tied up in buying the magic for the young humans, and not just around Christmas. And for every adult trying to sell you fake-magic there’s another one ready to crush the breath out of the magic you found for yourself. Trapped between the two, so many people grow up jaded, and disenchanted.

When I was a child, I had a cat who always knew when I was in trouble. She was a little black cat called Holly, and she would invariably turn up to comfort me when I was distressed. Now, cats are often sensitive creatures and will move towards people to comfort them in times of distress. Purr therapy is most assuredly a thing. Holly would do that for anyone who came into the house who needed cheering, and was reliably kind to angst-ridden teens. 

It went far beyond that, however. There were times when I stood at the window, looking out at my parent’s garden and crying, only to watch that little black cat appear. She spent a lot of her time out in the field, or the wood beyond it, far away so that she could not have heard me. But she’d known, somehow. She’d known when I needed her most, and came running to me, repeatedly. Her affectionate headbuts and purring comforted me more times than I can count. She might not have been able to talk out loud, but she spoke with her whole being.

It’s funny looking back at my childhood perceptions of things. I grew up with ghosts, but it bothered me that I could not shoot sparks out of my hands – although what I’d have done with that, I do not know. I wanted to see things other people could not see, and know things other people did not know. I think in essence I needed some justification for why I felt so at odds with the world, and with most of the people around me. Magical powers would have been a good explanation for why I never felt like I fitted or belonged.

There was one book which particularly helped me, though, and that was Paul Gallico’s The Man Who Was Magic. What stuck with me most from that book was a comment about how the cows were magicians, making grass into milk, and that the world is full of magic and transformation. It really is. Magic is everywhere, life itself is a wonder and a miracle, and you don’t need to be able to shoot sparks out of your fingers for it to be true.

I didn’t get to the sparks bit until I was a teen – it turns out I’m good at building static charges and in the right circumstances I can give people little electric shocks.

The essential nature of dreams

As a young human, I dreamed vividly, and much of my waking life was threaded through with daydreaming. I think that’s an important part of that stage of life. Having the time to wonder and imagine, while trying to figure out who you are and where you are going is really important. We know creative play is a vital  part of child development and I think it’s still very necessary as people try to figure themselves out in their teens. I’m not convinced there’s any point in a human life when dreaming of what might be isn’t relevant.

The younger you are, the easier it is to imagine possibilities. The more privilege you have, the more scope there is for change, adventure and novelty. If we don’t have hope, it’s really difficult to dare to want things, or to imagine things being different. Without being able to do that, we won’t have the means to change things. Humans tend to need to imagine things before we try and enact them. Crush the imaginative capacity out of us and it is more likely we will stay as we are and go along with whatever is done to us.

I don’t dream much when I’m depressed. I go into a sort of survival mode where I can only bear to think about escape. Rather than playing with ideas of what could be, sometimes I want to hide in safe places that never were and never will be. There is comfort in this, but it doesn’t usually allow me to sort anything out. When I’m depressed I most need to be able to imagine what could change to help me, and I’m least able to do it at that point. I suspect this is fairly normal. 

There’s a lot wrong in the world right now, and dreams are such wispy, ephemeral things. It may seem like madness to invest in dreaming as the climate collapses and societies are pushed to the brink. Even so, I think it may be our best hope. If we can dream of something better, we stand some chance of creating it.

Inviting the magic

One of the things you’ll hear a lot from magical practitioners is the importance of doing the practical things. It’s no good doing some fancy spell for a new job if you don’t also fill in the job applications. There’s no point doing magic to transform your life if you aren’t willing to roll up your sleeves and put in the work to transform your life. Magic is an expression of intent, so if you don’t act on your intent, you aren’t going to persuade yourself (much less the rest of the universe) that you take what you’re doing seriously.

However, there are more layers when it comes to doing the practical things, and those in turn call for being alert to the risk of unconsidered magical thinking. When we don’t know how something works, we may unconsciously conclude that it is in essence a sort of magic. I see this a lot around the idea of talent – this irrational belief that people are good at things because they have innate powers that magically enable them to do things. What really gets things done is enthusiasm and a willingness to work. You won’t magically become a great singer or artist by doing spells to become talented. You can however focus your intent on developing your enthusiasm and willingness to dedicate time and energy. 

I am inclined to relate to magic as something I want to invite, rather than control. This is very much related to how I feel about life. I don’t need to control everything. I don’t need to make things happen in a specific way. I’m also an animist and I don’t feel easy with the idea of imposing my will on anything other than myself. When I invite magic, it is often because I’m trying to figure out how best to do things. Trying to clearly see the present is often an issue for me. If I can act well, and harmoniously with what’s going on around me, my scope for getting good outcomes greatly increases.

I invite magic in the form of inspiration. I seek ideas for my creative work, and for my life as a whole. Inspiration relates to all aspects of life and everything we do benefits from us having ideas. I find that having a flow of inspiration helps me feel enthused about life and improves my motivation, which all also helps considerably with keeping the depression at bay.

I’m interested in inviting magic as it manifests in beauty and wonder. Experiences that give me those feelings also give me a sense of enchantment in my everyday life. The more open I am to being enchanted by what’s around me, the more scope I have for noticing the small joys and wonders.

There’s also a great deal of magic to be found in experiences of relationship and connection. Moments when wild creatures meet my gaze. Feelings of synchronicity. Finding I’m on the same wavelength as the other humans around me. Any time I’m doing something tangible there are opportunities to feel connection and for something to be shared.

Inviting magic is an everyday choice. It’s about deciding to have a particular kind of relationship with the world. It’s not enough to want wonder and enchantment, we have to do the things that make it possible. Showing up in a way that invites magic also means we’re more likely to be able to be magical for the people we encounter, and that’s entirely wonderful when it happens.

Nurturing Inspiration

Inspiration can seem like something that happens by magic. However, if you’re not acting because you don’t have that rush of inspiration, you may also find that it doesn’t show up. Inspiration often has to be courted and invited, and it helps a lot of you do that deliberately.

Find out what kinds of things inspire you, and then seek that out.  Live music does a lot for me, and so does reading. I read a lot of non-fiction so that I know things that can become the clay my inspiration turns into forms.

Decide what kinds of things you want to create, and learn about them. Learn the technical stuff, the skills, the forms. Again, this means that if inspiration strikes, you’re ready for it. Nothing is going to happen if I get a really good idea for an opera because I don’t really understand opera and don’t have the technical skills to write one.

Make time for doing the things, you have more chance of being inspired when you’ve got your guitar in your hands, or a notebook in front of you, or whatever it is you work with.

Also make time when you aren’t doing anything too deliberate with your brain. You can pair this with any gentle activity that doesn’t demand your concentration. Walking, gardening, domestic stuff, gazing at the sky, doing some unchallenging crafting… it all works for making the space where you can have those flashes of inspiration and develop ideas.

When you have a flash of inspiration, hang on to it and make time to develop it. It’s not enough to be inspired, you also have to act.

I think this is true, broadly speaking, for anything that looks like magic. There are elements of many things we do that can feel like a flash of lightning out of nowhere. However, in practice if you’re putting in the time – prayer, rituals, spells, conversations, research, etc then there’s nothing random or inexplicable about the inspiration that comes to you, because you have invited it into your life.

Healing and sacredness

My sense of the sacred is something that has shifted a lot over time. It’s not a hard pattern to trace. In my teens and early twenties, I was infused with feelings of possibility, open to a sense of wonder and able to imagine divinity and magic as part of the world. 

Things happened in my twenties that closed me down. It’s a long and unhappy story – which is perhaps all anyone really needs to know about it. I became uncertain, depressed, anxious, and I lost much of my sense of wonder and possibility. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which hope and confidence are necessary for feelings of faith and wonder. At the times when I’ve been least able to believe in myself, I’ve also been less able to believe in much else. With the current political state of the world and the looming realities of the climate crisis, it is not easy to stay open to beauty, to find joy, to be hopeful. Without that openness, the scope for experiencing anything numinous is much reduced.

This autumn has taken me on a transformative journey that is steadfastly changing my life. At this point I’m confident in naming it as a healing process, but I can see it will be more than that. I’ve faced up to many of the things that have locked me down. I’ve made my peace with many things, I’ve gained insights and I’ve changed. I feel more like the person I am supposed to be and considerably less like a ball of scar tissue. Alongside this I’ve seen my creative output increase dramatically and take new shapes I’m excited about.

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry. There are themes through it about connecting with divinity. It’s become a process of re-enchantment, for me, and rediscovering what it means to feel wonder, awe and inspiration. Being able to feel those things is changing how I feel about myself. 

I’m taking this winter to look inwards (a surprisingly conventional response to the wheel of the year, but there we go!). I have a lot of inner work to do, alongside keeping doing the things that are supporting this whole process. I am investing time in following the calls of inspiration, and seeing where these emerging feelings of wonder and hope might take me. At the moment, I need to hold carefully the process itself – at some point I might be able to talk usefully about how all of this has happened, but not while I’m in the middle of it.

What I can say is that all of this growth and change is fundamentally rooted in experiences of peace and safety. I know the theory is that we do our best growing on the edge of the comfort zone. I’ve lived for a long time outside my comfort zone, sometimes not even being sure where the comfort zone would be anymore. Folding into peacefulness, into security and gentleness has been transformative. Sometimes the healing part has been brutal, but it is the feeling of safety that makes it possible to go through that.

Music and magic

Writing and performing music always has the potential to delight and enchant others, but there’s also an aspect of being enchanted by the process.

There comes a point when a piece of music is so entirely learned that it doesn’t require thought. Hands, breathing and the shapes your body must make to bring the music into the world become so embedded that the sounds emerge from a state of flow and presence and it feels as though the music is passing through you rather than being deliberately made. 

I don’t know to what degree anyone listening can tell the difference between that level of engagement with a piece and performing in a more conscious and deliberate way. From a performance perspective, it’s a dramatic difference and allows a person to enter a very specific kind of space. Playing in this way feels intensely magical.

I’ve had a lot of years where problems with my body have limited my scope to play musical instruments. I’ve also had limited incentive – I’m not that keen on playing on my own. Opportunities to play with other musicians have recently appeared in my life, which has motivated me considerably. Re-learning tunes on a slightly different instrument has been a bit of a process.

Yesterday, there were moments of pure flow. There were tunes I’ve had inside me for many years that settled back under my fingers and started to flow properly when I played them. It was a glorious sort of feeling and made me realise how much I have missed this part of myself, and this relationship with tunes.

Most of what I play comes from British folk traditions. I’m also very interested in the work of Irish composer O’Carolan, whose music folk musicians have kept alive. He should more properly be recognised as a baroque composer and be taken more seriously on the classical side – as he was during his lifetime. I’ve been obsessed with his music since childhood, and having some of his melodies back under my fingers is particularly exciting.

Love and magic

Love is supposed to magically save you. The mere existence of the right person is supposed to make everything right. I’ve had people ask me in the past why being in a relationship hadn’t cured my depression. I’ve had people who love me distressed because they believe their love should be enough to fix me.

Love is magic, and can fuel magic, but at the same time it isn’t a magic cure for all ills. It also isn’t reliably enough. Love isn’t enough if you are cold, hungry, exhausted and in pain. Sure, love might carry you through a short bout of that, but it will not let you live there long term. Nor should it. Love is not a substitute for all your other basic needs. 

Depression has many causes – massive stress being a common underlier. Love won’t save you from a toxic work culture. It won’t fix your financial insecurity necessarily, or cure your health problems. It also won’t undo past trauma. Your lover is not your therapist, not your life coach, not your psychoanalyst, not a substitute for your parents… It is not the job of the person who loves you to make up for everything in your past, fix all your problems and sort your life out. 

When we think love is supposed to magically fix everything, we can end up putting impossible pressure on the people we love.

What love can do, is provide a safe space where people feel able to fix themselves. The love, belief and support of another human can help us feel resourced enough to square up to our problems and see what can be done about them. Love opens us up to the idea of helping each other and supporting each other. Rather than a hetranormative romance take where one person magically saves the other, we can have networks of support and care. Love doesn’t have to mean romantic love, and the idea that the person we are shagging is supposed to meet our every need is questionable. 

There are many ways to love. In that love, we can grow together and find shared solutions. Most of our problems are not individualistic. It’s just that keeping us focused on individual solutions that don’t really exist keeps us from making real change. I don’t think this is an accident. Love can save us, but not in the way that happens in movies. Love of life, of community, of friends – that can save us. Love of fairness and justice, compassion and dignity can save us. We can definitely save each other, but not by magic. It’s going to take work.

But then, it’s when you show up to do the work that both love and magic become truly possible and truly powerful.

A guided journey

I asked the universe for help.

Sometimes you are given

What you need.

Nothing is more terrifying

Or ecstatic.

Dreamwalking lucid

Through the night

To change shape, 

To become.

Awestruck, transforming

At every turn.

You walked me into memory

On paths that led relentless

To every place of my wounding.

And although I claimed readiness to heal,

Although I asked for this

I was not ready.

No one could be ready.

So many places to revisit

So much grief to face

Some I had forgotten although

I still carried the weight of them.

You crushed me down 

With wisdom, tenderness

Showed me

What past crushing had done

To this body, this troubled mind.

I found I could still breathe

The fear died, finally

And I lived.

(Some experiences are difficult to convey through prose.)

Enchantment and Consent

At what point does it become too much emotional pressure and too difficult for a person to say no? Not everyone finds it easy to say no – in all kinds of situations. So there are questions to ask about how we might support each other in holding healthy boundaries. If you’ve survived abuse, or been raised as a people pleaser, you might have a hard time saying no to people, especially if what’s being asked of you is emotionally loaded.

I have spent a long time trying to be someone it’s easy to say no to. That’s not been going well for me. It means I end up playing down how serious or urgent things are. It means something can be incredibly important to me and I’ll bring it up like it’s no big deal. I don’t want to be a nuisance, or an inconvenience, or make anyone uncomfortable or ask too much. But at the same time I’ve had a very rough time of it with suicidal ideation, and there are things I really need. It’s also not workable to have the people closest to me in a state of hyper-vigilance in case one of the things I casually mention turns out to be massive and loaded.

In terms of the things I need to function well, intensity is really important for me. I need to be emotionally overwhelmed, swept off my feet, blown away and otherwise captivated and enchanted. I need to feel so excited by things that I have no desire to decline even if saying yes has issues. In a world where everyone made it easy for me to say no to them all the time, I would struggle. 

There are no simple answers to any of this. I can be quite an overwhelming person when I’m not masking and muting myself, and that’s not for everyone. There are people who clearly like getting me on full blast. 

Enchantment isn’t safe, and anything emotionally loaded can lead a person to do things they might not otherwise have done. Somewhere in that misty landscape there’s a hard edge and beyond it what happens is definitely manipulation and definitely not ok. Sometimes enchantment looks far too much like dancing yourself to death, or heading off towards certain doom in the wake of the pied piper. But it doesn’t have to. Often growth and healing necessitate being outside your comfort zone but it does not follow that if you are outside your comfort zone you are growing or healing.

I’ve had plenty of experience of having my ability to consent compromised in all kinds of contexts where that was horrible. I’ve been swept off my feet as well. At the time, it isn’t always easy to tell what’s happening, or where the experience will take you or how you might feel about it with hindsight. Are you being love bombed in order to soften you up for manipulation, or have you truly found someone who can speak to your soul? Hard to tell. Is this tide going to carry you to new adventures, or drown you? There is no knowing.

I don’t want to be the tide that drowns anyone, but I’m not sure that I can both follow the call of enchantment and play safe in all possible ways. All I can do is try to make sure that people who get close enough to me that I could seriously impact on them also get some kind of vote.

Visualising Yourself

One of the many things that I learned from traditional witchcraft author Lee Morgan is how good it is to explore yourself through visualisation. When we’re working meditatively in a deliberate way, how we picture ourselves is very much part of what happens. We can choose who, or what to be without making any kind of commitment. Visualising yourself as other than you are can be a great way to develop empathy. It can also be incredibly liberating.

I’ve never been especially comfortable with the body I have. I’ve experimented with all kinds of ideas about shape, gender and species. On the whole I think I’d like me better with pointed furry ears. I think I’d like the kinds of legs that fauns and satyrs have. There are days when I’m fairly certain I would make a very good dragon.

One of the things I can do with all of this is put it into stories. There are plenty of us who, for all kinds of reasons, need the escapism of imagining ourselves as something else entirely. My most formative encounter in this regard was reading Clive Barker’s Imajica as a teen. In that novel there is a character whose gender expression changes in response to who they are with. How they seem is exactly how you want them to seem – which really would be the ultimate in people pleasing and I have issues on that score. Only one character sees this person as their whole self, and that for me was a defining moment in forming my ideas about love and romance.

I write nonbinary characters because it is one way of having that space for myself. What I’m most drawn to are the kinds of fantastical nonbinary characters who can be all genders or no gender at all, and whose physical realities transcend what regular human bodies do. I’m working on one at the moment but it might be a bit of a spoiler to say which book that’s in!