dynamics

an invitation to plug in

If stars were not constantly being born and dying, we would not be here. The sun is a third-generation star. It was only after three generations of stars that we had the chemical abundance to make an amoeba, to make primitive life forms, and then through that to come to ourselves. -- Vatican astronomer Father George Coyne (from an “On Being” interview with Krista Tippett)

Our existence is so unlikely. Billions of stars in gazillions of galaxies, and somehow BOOM. Earth. Us. Scientists have discovered another planet that appears capable of sustaining life as we understand it. That planet is 235 trillion miles away. Two hundred and thirty-five TRILLION miles away. If life as we know it is the best thing we know -- and given how hard we work to stay alive, I assume that it is, or seems to be -- then you are the best thing in 235 trillion miles. You are the best thing in 235 trillion miles.

And you are magic. Have you forgotten that? Who took your magic, tucked it into a box and buried it under a tree the horses refuse to face even when the wind would turn them that way?

I’ve spent months, sometimes whole years, out of power. Forgetting or only half-believing in my magic. Unplugged from the cosmic socket and wondering why everything was so deathly hard and grey. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a long way to go before I become one of those enlightened creatures whose being is entirely porous to the universal and eternal Divine. But I have practices that flag me down when I wander too far from the path that leads inward to eternity, and rituals inherited and invented that settle my spirit, bringing me back to my self, my selves, the universe, you.

Eight times a year, I meet with seven women for a circle – eight holidays marking spots on the wheel of the year, tied to the seasons outside that mirror the seasons within. Each circle a gentle reckoning, an invitation to pause amid the bustle and clamor and tap into the deep why, to get quiet and then work some magic with a group of humans in love with who we are and who we are becoming.

My life has been saved four times. Once a wave and undertow off Cape Cod took me and my dad jumped into the cold ocean fully clothed to pull me out. Once I fled the city of my youth and landed in New York City’s grimy and saving embrace. Once beloved friends walked me out of a despair that put me at the bottom of a bottle wearing love’s name like a occluding hood. Once I felt that despair at my neck again and gathered good women around me to witch it away. For good, I hope.

Does the idea of magic unsettle you? What does it stir in your body?

If someone from the 1700s were to show up in this room today and see me turn on a light, they would call that magic. Watch an airplane leave the ground: magic. Pick up a boxy object and hear someone’s voice emerge: magic.

What I mean by “magic” is drawing power from the fully embraced inexplicable. A mystery pulled close, drawn on and accepted for all of its complexity and shadow. You can’t plug a phone in halfway and get a charge, and you can’t manifest much of any significance by drawing on a connection with a divine source into which you only halfway buy.

One of the great gifts of art is the idea of “suspension of disbelief.” Artists are world-makers who invite us to experience subsets of our reality so that we can move through the broader world differently thereafter. When I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” I occupy a world in which priests levitate and myths are as factual as history. When I read “Animal Farm” or watch “Babe: Pig in the City,” I abide for a time in a space where animals can talk and reason and lay elaborate plans.

I’m not here to convince you to believe in magic. But what if, just for today or this year, you decided to stop NOT believing in magic, specifically your own? What if you practiced moving through the world with a suspended disbelief—which is to say, with at least a shrugging acceptance that because you are part of an all-powerful universe, a component of the Divine everything, you have the ability (should you choose to use it) to change the world around you, and the world within you?

I think that some of our resistance to the idea of magic is based on the mistaken notion that magic exists outside of us, so believing in it disempowers us. Much of this comes from our experience of organized religion, institutionalized religion, the kind that says God is in charge, God is outside of us, God is sometimes merciful and sometimes wrathful but always unknowable and all-knowing and all-powerful. Even those of us who’ve broken with traditional capital-R religion fall into this pattern: the Universe knows, the Universe wants, the Universe provides.

But what we are doing when we are making magic, in ritual and spell and invocation and other intentional acts of manifestation, is aligning ourselves with an immense unknowable power source—call it God or the universe or Source or whatever—so that we are operating in concert with and drawing on something far vaster than us and of which we are an inextricable, sentient, and conductive part.

Sometimes this alignment is as simple as shifting a little to the left or the right, the way I have to at concerts when I’m invariably behind the tallest man on the planet wearing the very largest hat. I have to angle myself so that I can see the stage from the sweet spot between his shoulder and hat brim, which can provide a lovely frame for the singer I’m here to see. Sometimes a pushing past is required, tapping the tall man on the shoulder and sliding past for a clearer view, a more direct line to the source of the music.

I don’t have to understand the way electricity works to turn on the light, and I don’t have to completely comprehend magic in order to shift the energy in a group for which I’m holding space, or to know to bring up the memory of a grandfather to a client I’ve just met who’s struggling with what’s holding her back from pursuing her beloved career path. I just have to align myself the best I can, plug in, and let it happen.

There’s a way that magnets work, and a scientist can describe it to you. That’s a kind of story. Both the way that magnets work (polarity, attraction, repulsion,) and the telling of it are magic. Because there’s a way that magnets work, and that’s important. And then there’s the investigation of that, the inquiry into it, the sharing of what’s discovered, and that becomes something else, something dynamic, in the sharing, the newly communal knowing.

I just looked up the etymology of the word dynamic and found this: 1817 as a term in philosophy; 1827 in the sense “pertaining to force producing motion” (the opposite of static), from French dynamique introduced by German mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) in 1691 from Greek dynamikos “powerful,” from dynamis “power,” from dynasthai “to be able, to have power, be strong enough,” which is of unknown origin.

Force producing motion. What better definition of magic? I think a thing, I create a ritual (lucky socks, always putting my keys in the same place, lighting a candle before saying a prayer or casting a spell,) and something happens. A motion. A gesture. Force producing motion. And then, motion producing force. A ripple. Out and out. In and in.

From the French introduced by a German (mathematician) from the Greek from unknown. Introduced how? Why? Magic! To be able, to have power, to be strong enough.

Someone said to me recently, “Magic isn’t going to save us.” And it’s true. Magic won’t save us. Unless we know, believe, integrate down to our marrow that we are magic, in which case magic is the only thing that’s going to save us.

Magic, real magic, comes from us. From us and through us, because we are not separate from it, and have only to tap into it. Us as channel, us as lightning rod, us as listener, maker, doer, thinker. We are not separate from magic. Magic is not separate from us. Therefore, magic is only scary if we are scary.

And we are scary. We have shadows, we have traumas, we have self-destructive impulses that defy the entire idea of evolution. How have we survived? How are we even here? How is it that sometimes we are awful, and often so beatifically powerful, so full of light, so shining?

Magic. Dynamic existence. To be able, to have power, be strong enough, which is of unknown origin. We are of unknown origin. The scientists can take us down to neutrons, can trace us back to animals, to dinosaurs, to plankton, and still the question lingers: what animates us. What makes us dynamic. The mystery within us. The embraced inexplicable. Magic, I say. Magic. Magic.