Alchemy is. It’s our nature and nature’s nature. It’s the delight of noticing the substrate of reality and smiling even if I was locked up in dark thoughts or just regular thoughts. Alchemy invites us out of ourselves into the lovely world. For it is lovely. Apples are lovely. Dogs are lovely. The quiet evening is lovely. The rock concert is lovely. A misunderstanding can be made lovely by gently conversation a little bit after. Coffee is lovely, the ritual of it, the first hot sip. Going to bed at the end of the day is lovely. Getting a check in the mail is lovely. Telling a story and hearing a story are both lovely. While loud things happen, quiet things happen, too. It’s listening for these.
Alchemy is the way we see two worlds at one time— paying attention to what a friend is saying as we part ways after tea as well as the particularly puffiness of clouds over us both. It’s seeing the waves rough the day you arrive at the shore for a brief holiday, and it’s seeing the waves quiet the day you depart. It’s seeing a bird every time you look up from a task. It’s wondering how a spider balloons its way across a distance. It’s the moon at 3 a.m. and the moon in daylight and any other time. The moon is always alchemy.
Alchemy isn’t discipine. It’s allowing everything in. It’s the way things make sense later on in amazing yet tiny ways. Alchemy is massive and it’s small. It’s distant and immediate. It’s directly personal, so much so that you catch your breath, purse your lips, and want to tell but also hold that golden sensation alone. It’s beholding rather than seizing and explaining. It’s the strange phrase someone says that lets you know something else is at work here. It’s going to sleep at night knowing many unseen parts of you are just waking up and preparing adventures you may or may not get gossip about when you wake.
It’s knowing there is so much more than the “key phrase” and the “action steps.” It’s knowing something of the gadgetry keeping everything in motion. It’s knowing at time you’re a gadget in the making of something you can’t ever know. It’s relaxing into the soul when everyone around is trying to be smart. It’s sending love out to people who will never know and still benefit. It’s letting go of control and certainty and instead stepping off the world into something deeper. It’s your childhood nobody stepped on.
Alchemy is an invitation to walk outside of reality while still showing up in photographs and answering emails. It’s the glimpse through even the horrifying thing. Its a fan even if you are not famous. It’s encouragement from the other side when you are sure you’re failing. It’s a basket carrying you. It’s a buffer zone between time and space. It’s what happened and what Happened. It’s the echo before the word. It’s a back flip from the spinning world. It’s what you saw in the corner of your eye and what you heard in the yourself think before it’s spoken. It’s ten minutes or ten years later and before. It’s the assurance you were never there alone.
It’s coming back after a long time too far away. It’s the “Yeah, you would” when you’d never do that again. It’s the oldest thing in the universe yet it sings a hit song it thinks you like. It’s immensity and all-knowing come through in a tap dance roughly done but with joy. It’s the imperfection that makes things real. It’s the accent of eternity and the thing that just occurred. It’s you upside-down but making it. It’s you without the worry. It’s you with a pretty stone in your pocket at the serious meeting. Its the backbeat of the present and the promise that present is five seconds late. It’s the cosmos in worn denim showing up at your door with a board game in one hand and a jump-rope in the other.
It’s saying you made it through that one, now let’s try something else.
Image from https://www.alchemyguildohio.org/seven-operations-of-alchemy (there are a variety of these because alchemy).
And sitting on a park bench with a friend at dusk and Canada geese honk and V their way overhead.