making room for magic…

Hullo Sweeties

As some of you know, I’ve been hanging out with Jennifer Louden over at the OASIS for a while now. I just passed into my second year as a member and I am still loving up the space that Jen creates and holds for us and her most excellent, gentle, way of leading us down fascinating paths of inquiry.

Our theme for October is “Make Room for Magic”
Mmmmm – isn’t that delicious?

I sat out on the step this morning thinking about magic and what it means to me these days. What I think it IS.

I’ve always liked Starhawk’s definition of magic in The Spiral Dance: “the art of sensing and shaping the subtle unseen forces that flow throughout the world.”  Though I lean more to the sensing these days than the shaping.

I feel magic in the moments of… expanded consciousness… that come with the remembering/seeing again how radically inter-connected everything is. I say “radically” because I think that this way of seeing is radical. We humans tend, so much to FORGET this inter-connectedness as we cling to our individuality.

As I sat and considered how I invite magic into my life these days, I realized that it is with my meditation practice.  Vipassana.  The noticing of the sensations and the constant flux of these sensation.  Always changing changing changing.  And the joy I feel in the noticing and, even more so, in the lack of needing to CHANGE anything myself — by any type of act of will.  Right now, anyhow.

I see that I block magic by…getting “busy” with work that is not creative (and/or challenging) and by sliding into my old shadow comfort of tooooooo muuuuuuuch television 🙂  The things that take me away from… simple mindfulness.

Jen asked us to think about the last time we experienced magic in our lives. What happened and what it felt like.
I wrote this lil ditty in response…

Road Magic

Seeing the sandhill cranes yesterday—a pair of them standing in a marshy spot just off the road.
That flash of red over their eyes—like a brushstroke—shifted the entire world for me
into the most glorious painting.
Like I could see it—more clearly. Just for a moment.

And then, I spoke to tell you that I had seen them
and the spell was broken. 

But the beauty stayed with me awhile.
The noticing.
—the colour of the leaves.
—the road ahead of us freshly paved and painted with yellow lines.
—your smile. 

The way the water lay on the river when we pulled into the yard
home from our travels.

I look forward to inviting more magic into my life this month by…

NOTICING the beauty of this place I am so fortunate to live in.
I will take some long walks up the lane and at least one into the bush along a trail, just to notice.

Yummmmm.

May your month be filled with magic as well.
Go easy ~p