Real Magic
I always wanted to know. The instant my grandfather explained to me that on my birthday, if I could blow out all the candles (three) on my cake, I could make a wish and have it come true.
Wait. What?
I remember vividly thinking, “Well, if that’s how this place operates (meaning: the world), I want to be the one that makes wishes come true.”
I made my wish, “I want magic.”
I didn’t tell anyone this wish. Poppy made it clear, “Never tell your wish.” Years passed. I kept my wish secret. Everybody else did, too. That’s why we never talked of magic. We carried on. I never told anybody at summer camp, for instance, that I had placed my hand on the water of the lake and made the water still. I kept the night I stood on a high rock in a strong wind while on my “survival trip” in the Northwoods and felt so connected to all of it I couldn’t bring myself to go back to my tent to sleep. “Come into me,” I said, sort of embarrassed but also feeling like I had nothing to lose. If magic was out there, this was a good opportunity to let it know I’m here.
I never told anybody, until these past couple of years, about the owl that flew out of my heart and cast the shadow of its wings on the water as it, the invisible owl, flew away over it. I had many of these moments living alone in my cabin on Sequim Bay. I mentioned them a little when I was out there because it took me a while to know that not everybody lives this way. Not everybody chases magic. The wishes everybody else was making on cakes and fire wasn’t the same wish after all. In fact, a surprising number of people, I realized, had no idea magic exists at all. They’d read books with it in a plotline, but when the book closed, magic did too.
I cannot fathom that life.
I found the ones who did know of it. Mostly dead. All in books. I never went for any of the “New Age” stuff. What I felt in the Northwoods was my “gold standard.” If it came with doodads, it wasn’t for me. I wanted raw nature—cake and fire. When I could not find the key to my father’s Audi (while my parents were on a trip and when I didn’t have a driver’s license) in the miles of sand on Siesta Key, I said a prayer, “God, if you help me find this key, I will belong to you forever and will serve you with my every breath. I collapsed in panic and placed my hand directly on it (I tell this in more detail earlier in this series). That was a big moment for me. You’re there!
Poppy asked me one afternoon as we hung laundry, “Are you going to be a poet, pet?” I told him yes. We kept hanging the laundry, and I felt like I had caused this lovely smile on his face. Had he just spilled the magic beans? Poetry? Was that related to the wish? Cake, fire, and words? I never told a soul. But I felt by the time was 15, I was starting to see some return on my investment.
Three years later I was walking across a bridge in Interlaken with a boy from California when the wood cracked under us. California Boy was fine, but I had turned to look at the shadow of a crow projected by moonlight and branches onto a cliff. I nearly drowned in the glacial river at midnight, lost my money, I.D., ticket home. Something spoke to me deep in the river, something that saved my life. I carried that in me, too. You’re there. Thank you. And it spoke. No one could explain the river to me. I learned not to talk about it. This wasn’t a child’s secret anymore. This wasn’t “grown-ups don’t get me.” This was I don’t get grown-ups, and I am very soon going to be one.
In my senior year of college, I lived near an orange grove. A great old oak tree stood in the middle of it. On full-moonlit nights, I prayed at it. I prayed to God, to Poetry, to the oak tree, to the scent of oranges in the dark. Whatever spoke in the river might listen in the oranges. I didn’t ask for anything. (Remember the key. I got my favor.) I prayed my thanks for the poetry that was streaming through me. I wrote constantly about everything. No experience was complete until it had been made into poems or reflections. Reflections made more sense, but poetry broke me open. It wasn’t reflection from me or within me. It was something between me and something else.
I went off to London for junior-year autumn. I crawled out onto the little balustrade veranda outside my dorm window on bitter nights to write poetry until my mind calmed. I built my capacity. The more of myself I could turn into art, the stronger I would become. I felt everything right down to my core. When my room-mates with their George Michael and Richard Marx life-size posters over their beds headed out to Covent Garden to get drunk with off-duty soldiers in busbies, I downed a bowl of custard in the dining hall then headed to the hardcover collections of Metaphysical Poets under the library. The Faerie Queen. Dr. Faustus. George Herbert and his Easter Wings getting all funky on the page as he melds Easter rebirth onto poetic consciousness. John Good Lord Donne. Voltas in sonnets spoke to me of an ability to face the world’s hardness and by turning inward to find interior passageways for resilience and amazement. I was getting the good stuff and wished for all-night custard stands rather than chippies. In a storage room at the National Gallery (no idea how I ended up there) I stood face to face with Seurat and Van Gogh while eating my ploughman’s lunch and sipping a Ribena. You’re there, too.
Back stateside, I took up painting. I sang in the chapel choir and felt the magic in the music. I got the feeling that the Latin Mass was either a cover or a clue to what Mozart, Beethoven, and Vivaldi were so passionate about that, centuries later, they made me feel passionate about it, too. When larger, more experienced choirs sang Mozart’s Requiem, I couldn’t sit in the pews. I felt I could explode. I went up the stone steps and lay down on the triforium terra cotta screaming into my body while not making a noise. Such magic. Like the high rock in the Northwoods. Like poetry in the winter air. Like a voice in the river. At this point, friends told me I was too intense, they needed a break even though they experienced this stuff, too, when they were with me. I let them walk away. I understood completely. All along, I was gathering. By the time I shoved off from the everyday world that had so far only shown interest in kicking my ass, and moved into my little cabin on Sequim Bay hours and a ferryboat north of Seattle, I was ready. I had nothing. I was gutted. Heart-broken. I was exhausted. I was 26.
A customer at the dress shop where I’d been working had out-of-the-blue invited me to come teach Basic Education with her up on the Olympic Peninsula. I felt it. The name of the shop was Intermezzo. I had felt I was in an intermezzo. I only had to wait for the themes and variations part to kick in. And there it came. And that was when earth taught me magic. Quiet. Subtle. The owl flying out of me was a stunt for which I was made to suffer by having a boring dream wherein I sat on a small broken wooden stool aaaallllllll night eating bazillion saltines. I still can’t pass a box of them in the grocery without wincing. Never did I try anything like that again. When Dr. Strange in Marvel or whatever universe acts all big and cloak-y I worry for him. Magic’s not like that. It’s never big. That’s its power. Nature is magic, and all things are nature, from this laptop to the farthest star concealed in infinity. All of it just waits for us to slow down and notice what’s going on within and around us, above, below.
Its power was so beautiful and true that I could not write about it. It stopped me from doing so. I could feel it shy away. If I went into the part of my brain that formed words, I lost the signal of my secret sacred radio station. In Sequim, the brain that wrote was not the brain that experienced. I could write poems but never about it. That was forbidden. It wasn’t forbidden for any learned reason. A rock didn’t fall on my hand when I tried. There was just nothing there. It, itself, did not speak. It, itself, had no language. It itself was poetry. To be with it was to write poems about what I was looking at, and in the volta, in the turning inward, was the awakening, the new eye, the new heart, the healed self— but not any power to change anything, only the intimate experience of being in a constant state of change myself and being able to observe it in its reflections in poems. That was the turn. That was the Faerie enterprise even far far away from custard and the scent of very old books. It was alignment with it. It was in being shown how the language can kick out a dimension or two in under twenty words. It was a sentence shape that fused to nature. And with that sentence shape, my sentence I still call it to myself, I was safe. There was a rest in that sentence. “A pause in the out-breath,” says Pema Chodron, “rest in that pause.” In that rest, I was restored. So quiet. So gentle. So encouraging. This was what Poppy was pointing to. Cake and Fire. Can I use it to tear down toxic systems? Can I make other people’s wishes come true? As my Northern Irish grandmother, Nanny, once said when I asked her to use her magic to make a man I loved love me, “Oh, no,” she frowned, “I can’t make nature do anything that nature doesn’t want done.”
And yet, thirty years on, that man and I still love each other.
Sequim wasn’t so much a place as it was a tempo, a long flow into beyond while standing on a rock, a tempo I would let go of and lose and wait decades either to return to it or for it to find me again. Every month of those decades was painful. I had known something out there truly worth knowing. I filled the decades with servitude to beauty and justice. I wore myself down. I wrote constantly.
When the brain injury happened twenty-five years after Sequim, it was a fall not just on the slate kitchen floor but through. In mid-air, I sensed this was connected. I knew it was another wild event extending infinitely from that childhood wish. One of the rules of discovering magic is we can’t cherry-pick our lessons. Magic is rough and primordial. It’s outside of time. We’re comfortable and protected. We are tied to this world. Magic has to rough us up in the way a potter scores clay to attach clay to clay. To attach, we must be scratched up considerably. To deeply attach, we must be destroyed. As unpleasant as it was, I knew the darkness was holy the way the Requiem is holy, the way the wind and the paintings and the custard were all holy. Those instances that pierce us, skewer us—watch out for those. The wood can fall from underfoot suddenly and entirely. The slate floor can cave into corridors of liminality, catacombs where our deep nature awaits. Our task is to welcome it and move on through bearing whatever it wants to place in us. Another rule of magic, the most important one, is to from deep inside our suffering, say thanks.