The Magic of Us
I always know when I've hit on the right thing to write about for the week when I feel the itch in my brain that says it's time to get down to work. When I try to do other things, because there are always other things to do, and I keep feeling drawn back to the thing I'm avoiding putting down in words. I don't know what it is in me that shies away from the work, that finds a thing I want to tackle and then repeatedly wanders in other directions. Impostor syndrome, maybe. The belief that I'm not the right person to say what I feel called to say, that I don't have the required skill to say it clearly or effectively, that other people have already said it better than I ever could. That's why I quote so many other writings in these.
Anyway, this week I want to talk about magic. Witchcraft. The sincere, un-ironic belief in my ability to shape things, to effect the trajectory of the universe, with nothing more than my own will and a few objects imbued with the power I give them. Magic as survival, magic as comfort, magic as care for the self and for the community. Some of you will find this uncomfortable, and that's fine. You can view it as fiction if that helps. I don't mind.
I was a different person in my 20s. I don't mean the howling void of mental illness I was trapped in, I've spent enough time on that. I mean the way I embraced my belief in my own innate magic, without self-consciousness, without apology or deflection. No winking acknowledgement that I knew I was a little bit ridiculous. Just, yes, obviously I have the power to command the energy around me. Why wouldn't I? Yes, obviously I'm weird. Why shouldn't I be? I wore animal bones on elaborately beaded necklaces, collected fairy tales and their retellings and kept them on my shelves, spilled poetry from my fingertips and said it was good. Everything was significant. Some of this qualifies as what the kids call cringe, and I was deep in avoidance and denial, but I was also somehow more grounded and present in my life and body than I have ever been since.
It's hard to hold on to this way of being. It gets lost as you grow and learn to temper it. Now, when I talk about witchcraft, it's with a grin and a shake of the head and an assurance that I'm in on the joke. I know it's silly, unlikely, out there. And I do., but that doesn't diminish it or make it any less real to me. All spirituality is out there and unlikely, and I have never been an atheist, or even an agnostic. I believe firmly that there's something, somewhere beyond the bounds of our rational understanding, something sensed and felt but never directly seen. I don't necessarily believe, as Christians do, that it governs us or that it guides our lives. I don't believe in predestination or forces working in opposition to one another to claim our immortal souls.
I've tried to follow Christianity. More than once throughout my life, I've fallen into its breathlessly rapturous arms and tried to make its God something I could get behind. I tried to carve a space in its tenets and teachings where I didn't feel stifled. I tried to expand its boundaries so that it could become the wild, limitless thing I have always known spirituality to be. Because the thing is, I find so much beauty in it. I love rituals and repetition and the high church trappings that feel, to me, very interlinked with witchcraft. What else is the Eucharist but ritualistic magic? What are prayers but passive spells? There is even a hierarchy to the structure of the church that echoes certain branches of witchcraft, albeit not ones I subscribe to. Hymns are so beautiful. The communal aspect of the church when it's at its best is what I crave from all spiritual experiences. Feeding the hungry, sheltering the houseless, caring for the sick, working in concert with others to make the world better in real, tangible ways.
But it never lasts, because Christianity is rotten at its core and despite all the people working tirelessly to bring it into this century, to update its doctrine and make it the thing I've always wished it could be, I don't feel like it's worth saving anymore. Too much evil has been done in its name. Too many monsters claim it as their own, loudly and confidently, and too few voices are raised to oppose them. And why struggle to make it fit me when there's already something that does? That always has?
I'm thinking about all of this because August is a bad month. Not the worst month--that's a tie between November and February--but a bad one. It's so hot and volatile and it sticks in the throat, a breath you can't quite take. I'm thinking about heat, the heat of summer and the heat of anger and the heat of passion, all mixed up together into a cauldron of explosive chaos. A man recently invaded my personal space in a way that has left me feeling shaken and unsettled in my home. This is absurd because he didn't even enter my home, just came up to my porch, and I think he's harmless and just very awkward and bad at social interaction. I can relate. But what I can't relate to is the way he went about interacting with me, and regardless of whether it's rational, this is how I feel and I'm mad about it. My home is the safest space I have. He doesn't get to ruin it.
I've gone through the stages of grief with regard to unrequited love for the friend who doesn't love me in the way I might wish, and I've arrived at acceptance. It is what it is, and life keeps going, and I am alone. I wake up and I am alone, I go to sleep and I am alone, I talk to friends and I am alone, and maybe this is another reason I'm drawn to witchcraft. I have no interest in communing with my ancestors as some witches do, but it gives me a sense of connectedness to engage in rituals and practices that countless others before me have also done. It offers me a feeling, maybe an illusion and maybe not, of power in a world where I largely feel powerless. It brings me comfort. I won't do a cord cutting ritual, though I've known them to work before, because I don't want to sever ties, but I can release some of what I've been holding. It's not for me and it's not going to be and I have to make peace with that. I can find other outlets for this fire that burns beneath my skin and often nearly consumes me whole.
Witchcraft brings me peace. Not always, because balance is necessary in all things and there must be space for dark and heavy as well as light and airy, but often. Bathing is a spell for self-care and loving my body. Cleaning is a spell for freshening a space and ridding it of negative energy. Writing is a spell for too many things to name. This is the kind of magic I have always been interested in, the small, quiet, domestic kind. Hearth magic, kitchen magic, and, by extension, green magic. There are so few safe spaces in this world, and all I want is to create even just one more of them for my loved ones.
I've been reading A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck, a lovely person I followed on Twitter for many years. In it, there's a section for each month of a single year, with little spells and rituals after each one, and August's just happens to be about protection magic. A coincidence, perhaps, if I believed in coincidences, which I don't. I believe in confluences. It's right that I should read this now, when it's August and I feel in need of protection. For my home, for my heart, for the people I love, for all of us and everything. It's an unsafe time in so many ways and this is what I can give. I wish I were brave and I'm not, really, but loving people makes me braver. Feeling close to them. This is why I have a kind of makeshift altar on my dresser, populated with objects I've received as gifts. Not even always from people I still love or speak to. A small figurine of a fairy sitting on a mushroom, bought for me by my sister when we were teenagers. A glass cat that Elijah found at a thrift store once and got for me. A giant padlock with a goddess on it, from an ex when he was visiting me and we saw it at a metaphysical shop and I wanted it. And, in among those things, a self-love jar my mom helped me make a few years ago. Nothing flashy. Nothing important, except to me, which is what matters.
Magic is a little bit selfish, or maybe self-centered is a better word. The more specific and personal it is, the more powerful, as far as I'm concerned. This whole newsletter is a spell, and I'll let you know what it's for as soon as I figure it out. It might only be a mirror spell, to help me see myself more clearly. Or it might be a summoning spell, a manifestation spell, to write into existence the world we all deserve. Or, perhaps, a love spell, not to attract a specific person but to reveal the love that already exists all around us and to harness its energy for the things we need.
Whatever it is, it's not just mine. You're a part of it too. Writing means little to me without willing readers, and so, as ever, my endless refrain: thank you for giving me that. Your interest in my words feeds your generosity with your dollars, which in turn feeds my ability to keep producing the words, which in turn feeds this newsletter, which I hope feeds your souls. And that's a spell, and you are magic.