It's Time

It's Time for Magic

Artwork by Rithika Merchant

It’s Time. It's time for Magic.

This phrase landed in me several weeks ago and has been working on me ever since. I received it first as a kind of proclamation, then as an observation and now have been relating to it more as an image. I have been learning and seeing so much as I enter into conversation with Magic, and this is the journey I'd like to share about here.

What is Magic?

Magic is a loaded word. People have so many associations with the term that point in widely different directions. I have very strong skepticism and wariness that come up when I hear the word, and also deep vibrations of resonance—some not fully traceable sense of identification.

My first attempt to describe what I mean is that which lies in the realm of subtle sensing, the realm of the liminal and the unseen, the realm of the beyond human. When "something happens" in a space that catches the attention of those present, even when it cannot be seen by the eyes, but can be felt distinctly in the body. There is an alchemical sequence of events, leading to an energetic movement. We may be able to observe and make sense of much of it, even participate in it to some degree, but magic always seems to be somewhat beyond our full grasp. One of its particularities is that it defies being captured completely by our analytical minds, resists being measured. It always asserts that it is larger than us, extending beyond the limits of our human perception.

Over the last few months, I started being struck by this kind of phenomena happening quite regularly, in one meeting after another, through the course of a normal workday. I recently said to my roommate, somewhat dumbfounded, "In every meeting I was in today, magic happened!" I was pointing to an impressive level of attunement, a traveling beyond the bounds of time and space, inexplicable movements of release and healing, and interactions with non-visible beings that would infuse me with lifeforce. Most of these journeys took place in less than two hours and on a computer screen. I have a sense that we have learned a lot in a short amount of time and we are beginning to taste the fruits of what can open when we practice together intentionally with some of these emerging "technologies."

Where I See Magic

As I gaze out at the landscape of my life, I see that in each of the projects and collaborations I am currently engaged in, there is some form of practice that seems to induce this magic.

In Gather the Women, a circle of 9 women are in a laboratory, inviting feminine wisdom back into the field. At some point in not-so-far-off history, the feminine was exiled from the field. We are sensing that it is time for it to make its way back, not into a dynamic of matriarchy, but in order to be integrated with the clarified masculine. We are exploring the arts of channeling, subtle sensing, ritual, and energetic attunement. We have noticed that we all carry very strong feminine and very strong masculine energies in balance and are interested in how it may be time for these polarities to play in full harmonic dynamism in individuals, organizations, and our culture at large. I'm wondering if most of what I'm calling "magic" might also be called the feminine wisdom arts.

In the Church of the Intimate Web, we’re responding to the Metacrisis by finding our way back to a sense of Sacred World. We’re refamiliarizing ourselves with the language of the Soul, elevating the potent technology of friendship and intimacy, and awakening our Poetic Attunement—an orientation to truth, beauty, and goodness. We‘re relating to all of this as Art-Making, the endless, generative activity of co-creating a beautiful reality.

In an Imaginal practice space I've been participating in, we've been exercising our capacity to collect our attention together at the middle and invite image to enter the space. We take turns voicing what we are sensing, and often it constellates into exquisite beings or spaces that feel very real, sending waves of energy through our bodies. I continue to be struck by the power of perception. It is especially noteworthy what takes place when you “try on,” relating to this activity and the images that visit as sacred. These entities seem to come whispering pertinent messages and offering medicinal resourcing.

At Frith Farm, we are involved in the humble magic of coming into intimate relationship with the land, calling forth food from the earth and centering lunch as a daily ritual for building group connection. These activities could be brushed past as nothing special, but I am beginning to grasp the power of each of these technologies. What happens when you acknowledge the land you are in relationship with as being sentient? That it contains a multitude of lives, has so much to offer, and responds well when treated with care and respect? What happens when you concentrate your time, energy, and care into a focused space? It tends to flourish, be infused with lifeforce, and produce armloads of gifts of the sort that feed you back...What a marvel to watch closely as a piece of land goes from hibernation, to budding, to spilling forth cycle after cycle of glorious vegetal offerings. What happens when you take those very vegetables and transform them into lunch, feeding those who grew them? Take an hour to sit down together, day after day, pausing for a moment and turning towards each other, engaging in the ritual of a shared meal...It grows love. Not the glittery idea of love, but the gritty, earth-under-the-fingernails kind.

I sit with a medicine community four times a year, for three nights at a time. This is one of the spaces where the magic is most tangible. The explicit acknowledgement of cultivating relationship with the unseen realms and with “the plants,” as sacred allies. Collectively walking through the gestures and layers of ceremony, the veils progressively thinning, reality becoming liquid, shapeshifting in and through its boundless dimensions. Learning to surrender to the unknown, to continue to pay close attention, and to ride through this landscape has introduced me to levels of trust that this body has never previously tasted.

Why Now?

And what does it mean "It's time?" I thought at first this was a calling to the masses. I have come to realize, though, that I don't need to convince anyone of anything here. I am more so naming something that I am already seeing moving in the field. It's already happening. I am playing with the art of alchemy here, adding my breath to a mysterious wind already blowing through. When I have spoken what I am noticing, "It's time for magic," into some of the spaces I am seeing it, my eagle eyes watch it land in the bodies present. I see it in their eyes. In their breath. In the frequency in the space. In the responses that follow. It stirs something that is already present.

It’s time because the Metacrisis has become primary in our experience in the Western world. The political situation has escalated like a storm with a quickness and a scale that is impacting lives in enormous and painful ways right and left. I have sensed this recent shift as a powerful entity rearing its head up out of the collective unconscious. It has been working under the surface for a long time now. Many of us have been devoting our lives to addressing its presence. Now that it has erupted into visibility, it is no longer possible to ignore. It commands our collective attention with an urgency that cuts through the elaborate avoidant strategies we've accumulated over generations. This reflex to sidestep is understandable—these energies and truths can feel unbearable to hold, to witness, to stay present with.

It feels clear to me that reason and science will not get us through this stretch. I am not proposing that those of us carrying magic are going to figure it out or save the world. And yet, our participation matters here. Those of us holding this energetic posture of listening, turned toward the center with our hearts open and aching—the world is calling to us to employ our magic. To join together and create coherent spaces to move energy and receive resource. These forms of magic offer ways to enter into deeper connection with ourselves, each other and reality than our society has yet been able to access, to tap generative energy at a time when it is easy to collapse into helplessness, and to ask for support from forces that want us to be here and want us to be well.

My Internal Journey with Magic

I want to pause here and track the internal process I've been navigating as I've come into this relationship with magic. As I named earlier, I first encountered the protector part that is skeptical and wary of that word, magic. My head is cocked as I eyed the territory. Might be Woo. Might be delusional. Not sure if it's trustworthy. I then met a protector part warning me that it's dangerous to speak this kind of language in the wider field. Might be dismissed. Might be (deep vibratory frequencies from low down in my body) PERSECUTED. One last protector swooped in when I finally made contact with a hurt one who had been cut off from her magic. Lights started flashing behind my eyes, and my inner experience was flooded with WARNING. This part wanted to prevent me from remembering the immensity of her pain. It knew that it can be overwhelming to come close to the horror of being cut off from one's lifesource.

I was granted access to move deeper and walked down a stone stairwell, into the inky darkness. I found a being crouched in isolation in a dungeon-like space. Alive, but lost inside herself, vacant. I was carrying a flame of presence and when she felt its warmth, she was slowly infused with trust in my steady presence. I watched the light flow back into her eyes and lifeforce ripple like a stream through her body. She came over and embraced me, gazing deep into my eyes with the fiery light of gratitude and celebration.

When I look out at the magic I see moving in the field and the magic makers sprouting up all over the globe, I wonder if there is some cycle of collective healing underway. Could it be that enough of Western society has come to realize that at this moment in time, we desperately need the one we cast out? The one who practiced magic and was violently exiled in our lineage and in our collective psyche? I am somewhat in awe, to see space being made for her, her being invited back in, her being honored for her fierce heart and her commitment to support life. She is being recognized for her immense, clarified power.

When I look out at the field, I can catch glimpses of her, still repressed in the psyches of those trapped in the corporate world and the seductive security of secular materialism. Their inner magic pushed down, denied, coming out sideways.

It is the magic makers that I call out to, those who’ve surfaced up into the light and are flickering out there in the field. As I’ve been writing, I’ve caught my own old conditioning in this territory, of trying to convince the rationally minded. Trying to gain validation for my way of being from those who hold power, and who have a hard time understanding it. So I sing out here, to those who vibrate with spirit, those whose bodies light up with resonance when this image lands, who extend their open minds and curiosity, who listen and smile knowingly. And I welcome, respect, and honor all the parts in you who need to keep their distance.

A Mysterious Unfurling

It is time for magic because this cycle does not have to end in annihilation. It is the healing arts of alchemy and transformation that know that the moments of upheaval and coming apart, of dissolution and shedding are the most likely doorways to new beginnings. But individual egoic selves cannot make magic alone. It is by exercising these forms of allowing the walls of the self to become permeable, of connecting with our beyond-human allies and with whatever sense of Source resonates for you, that we will tap the abundance of support that we need to get through this birth canal.

I had a second phrase drop in after "It's time for magic." It's time to come out as a witch. Deep breath. Oh boy. Really? This is a big ask. You know why. In many ways I have been walking as a witch for decades now. The witch is what is ancient in me, what my friend described as the ashes underneath the fire, when the fire has burned away. The witch in me is the great-great-grandmother who gazes at me totally trusting my path, the other great-great-grandmother who knows how to dance fluidly between the world of form and the world of spirit. The witch in me was born of my mother's capacity to swim with her clients through the unconscious in her psychoanalytic office. The witch in me is the one who stirs the pot on the stove, the medicine woman, the lover of circles, the one who never stepped onto a career path, the one who is a professional friend and a weaver of relational webs. The witch in me survived intolerable pain and honors the darkness, knows her way through the Underworld and finds poetry in the entangled dance of the dark and the light. The witch in me is rising up. She stands, reclaiming her honored place amongst the other archetypal energies in my body. She smiles in that gorgeous trickster way, gazing out at the field. And she speaks. She says, "It's time for magic."

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