Winter Quarters: Hibernation

Oh, friends and beloveds, I know. These lengthy lacunas between posts…well, what can I say. I’ve been hesitant to blog lately…posts half-started are eventually deleted. Thoughts half-formed are eventually given over to sleep and dream and fust and burn.

I thought that when I finished moving and settled into my new place here in the smoky and assuredly wild southeast that I would take up the mantle of blogger once again with some kind of regularity, but in fact it seems that there is a greater Liminality to my life right now than even these obvious life-movements. Angsty evenings framing the occasionally blissful morning or afternoon spent washed in sunlight. The re-evaluations of a life and its trajectory. Fairy tales and bread. And while blogging is the place where ostensibly I should be examining these movements (seein’ as how that’s how I used to go about it)…I find instead that I have been ensconced in doing more than writing. Celebrating Samhain for instance, which I did this year with a vengeance. It seems that in the storytelling world, Halloween starts in mid-September with relentless requests for ghost stories. And, in the witchcraft world of course, Samhain doesn’t end until mid-November, when the winter finally seems to settle its bones in for the long sleep and all candles have burned down to smoke and soot, and all prophecies have been uttered, and all beloved ghosts have been given their due and all feasts have been lain at the roots of old trees and the frost and the cold rain and the snow gathers in over the mountains. So it is, with the combination of these two movements, storytelling and witchcraft, my Samhain/Halloween was…long. And lovely. And brilliant. And full of stories, songs, and candlelight.

But now it is the winter project sighing in between the trees, and the music moves from autumn dark and hollow to the delicate breathlessness of snow and silence. We give final thanks in late late last harvest for family and for food. This in-between time, this cusp.

And that’s where I am. I started a project of autobiography but lost interest after the chronicling of my magic-hungry youth. I’m sure someone somewhere wants to tell me that means something. And maybe it does. But skipping the long and totally relevant years between that girl and this woman, let’s talk more about magic for a minute, and why it seems I am ready once again to abandon blogging for a spell.

Magic is important to me. In fact, it’s so important to me that it’s hard to say where Beauty (the theoretically paramount organizing theological principle of my life) ends and Magic begins. So again, maybe we’re all just playing at semantics here. Beauty and Magic are synonymous in many ways, yet they are their own things. Magic exists and I know this because I’ve experienced it. Beauty exists and I know this because I’ve experienced it. Both are notoriously difficult to define, pin down, categorize and quantify. You know, like god and poetry and religion and mysticism and etc. etc. important ineffable thingies. But all that aside, let’s pretend for a moment like we can grok magic as a unique Thing. Or rather, as several unique Things.

First, there is the concept of Magic as a theological principle, which is the category where we get into the discussion about its relationship with Beauty. This might also be said to be natural magic. Magic as Force, as Movement….as one of many words we use to grok the ineffability of the Isness. This is the magic I contemplate when faced with the Mama’s myriad miracles – the organic response of my sensate body to the same-yet-otherness around me – to the wind and the snap of frost. The breath of spring, the smoke of autumn. Mountains, deserts, music. In the middle of last month I sat in the student center on campus, outside but beneath an enormous concrete overhang, and next to a gas fireplace installed in the center of the space. It had been a rough day, and my eyes were tired. I had, in my fatigue, wisely acquired a cup of strong caramel coffee, and in front of me I could see the steel-dark and stormy sky framing an enormous tree. The tree was in the throes of November – heartbreaking glory of death rising. Every single leaf had turned the color of bright golden coins, and the wind was stripping them in huge numbers from every branch, so that with each gust, the world became some great, booming cascade of fire-treasure-breath from the Dragon in the earth. A torrent of rain began to fall, so violently and so fast that it filled the air with sound. And all these things combined: the smell of the coffee and the fire and the rain and the wind all suddenly reminded me of some other beautiful moment in my past…and loneliness vanished, a sweet candle blown out at the end of prayer. And for a moment, though the day had been long and difficult, I laughed out loud. For a few exquisite seconds, the Mama had been so full of glory and memory and fire that every cell in my body sang in response…like honeybees rallying around the Queen in winter. So…you know…that’s Magic.

Second, there is the concept of Magic as the human application of illusion in order to elicit wonder. Some consider this the sole realm of the stage or entertainment magician, but others such as David Abram have argued that the boundaries between “stage” magic and “real” magic are far more nebulous. I agree. This could be said to also be the magic of human doing – the magic of acrobatics, of scarves and rings and doves and rabbits, of spinning fire, of the creation color and light and sound. The manufacturing of delight. Or the attempt to confound in order to reveal. I have long been fascinated with the concept of the small (and ethical…by which I mean zero tolerance on animal cruelty) traveling circus or carnival, which seems a perfect place for such Magic to thrive. Which is why I am regularly consumed with an all-encompassing desire to run away and join one. Someday, friends…someday.

And then third, there is the realm of the miraculous. Sense-defying and wonder-inducing events/happenings/objects/visions that call into question the nature of Reality and seem to come from sources outside the human being or the human doing, but can also sometimes be…invoked, conspired with, bargained with, begged, interacted with, cajoled, and applied towards human need or desire. This is the realm of Magic in which contemporary alchemists, folk healers, witches and rootworkers truck. The realm of spellcraft. The realm of “supernatural” beings (who may be completely and utterly natural, just difficult to perceive…I’m just saying) and Things Unexplainable by Science.

Of course, all things we might call Magical can and often do fall between these categories, or into more than one simultaneously. For example, I would argue, there are stories, and specifically fairy tales and other magic/wonder tales or fantasy (only because this is the medium in which I primarily function – there is much to say about the magic behind the ostensibly non-fantasy-based story, but I’m just going to limit it here for my own sake) which tread the soft boundary between the second and third kinds of magic. The transmission of stories, whether oral or written, comes from human beings – we are the arbiters and mediators of stories. Yet there seems something living in the back of the story that is alive and real and marvelous in a way that defies, or maybe reifies and rarifies, the human words of the tale. Also, music…which could be said to fall under any and all of the above.

So what does this have to do with where I am at the moment? Well, I’ll tell you. Somewhere in the course of my life, Magic, on any of these levels, got elusive. More so than ever before. Depression had something to do with that, and while I like to believe, and have plenty of evidence to back it up, that I am through the darkest part of the woods in that area, it’s a long process. When I first began to feel alive again, the first thing to return to me was anger. After anger, I experienced joy again, and that was marvelous. What I am hoping is that now, after joy, magic.

This week I celebrated my 35th birthday. My beloved sent me red and white tulips on that day, as well as an exquisite hand-made journal, adorned with honeybees and words calligraphed by his own hands in gold ink. The snow began to fall for the first time that day as well, and as I stood watching it from my doorway, I saw a hare dart across the wood. Jasmine incense and candles. I read folktales about dragon-women and rosemary bushes. And I thought…for a while, why not this?

So this is the new project. The pursuit of magic in its many and beautiful and sundry incarnations. The winter beckons with Her long fingers and I am inclined to follow her into foxholes and wooded thickets, looking for stories instead.

Blogging was and remains a delight, but I have once again lost the fire for it for the nonce. There are other projects in the future for sure (for example, I am really excited to be working at this very moment on a second collection of poetry with Scarlet Imprint), but for now, I am inclined to withdraw into the smoky, breathing world full of hares and hibernacula. It does feel like I do this often, this retreating and resurfacing, but that’s the dance, and I’m starting to see that as no terrible thing.

Peace out, friends and beloveds. All grace of winter to you. All poetry, all light in the teeth of darkness, all fairy tales and bread. All magic. All beauty.

Pray without ceasing.

• December 1, 2011
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