Practical magic
On process
When I’m ready to write, I take out the cards, shuffle them, cut the deck with my left hand, and pull the top card from the bottom half of the deck. This time, I draw the Cow. She has long, curved horns and a shaggy, brown coat with a curtain of hair covering her eyes like bovine bangs, a highland cow. Her tail hangs straight down, the end tapered like a paintbrush. Udders peek out from her furry belly. According to the little booklet that comes with The Druid Animal Oracle, her Gaelic name is Bó.
Bó opens us to an awareness of the Goddess. Her generosity, healing and nourishing power is present all around you — in your friends and children, in your food and drink, in your dreams, and particularly in the natural world that you are blessed to live in.
I have always struggled to keep up a regular writing routine. When I sit down to work on a piece I hope to publish (as opposed to a journal entry), I still freeze, even though I’ve been doing it for more than 15 years now. This newsletter has felt different, but still, when I tried to write this post, about the rituals that have made it different, I froze again. Maybe to write about process as if I’ve found one that works for me felt like hubris. Maybe I’m just scared to lose the magic.
Having Aya has made me more committed than ever to the idea of magic. Maybe for you, magic feels like the wrong word for what I’m describing. Maybe you could call it presence or close attention or joy or feeling connected enough to the physical world that you can feel the spiritual world on the other side — that is, the stakes of the physical world, love and death and beauty and grief, the infiniteness and fragility of each of us.
At the same time, I have also become more practical than ever. As soon as Aya was born, we began creating a system of routines — how to feed her, bathe her, diaper her, wash and fold and sort her clothes; how to pack for parenting classes, swim classes, a multi-day trip; how to clean her bottles, high chair, nose; how to help her fall asleep. Our family became like a machine powered by these small and endless tasks.
The routines sometimes feel punishing — especially those that aren’t about Aya but surround her: the dishes and laundry and trying to leave the apartment on time. But many of them are soothing, empowering, beautiful. Sometimes even the most mundane of them begin to feel like rituals, a kind of spellwork that translates love into a concrete, visible form. I think this as I comb Aya’s hair in the morning. While she sits on my lap, I work through the tangle at the back of her head, inhabiting her scalp so I can predict what will hurt, holding her hair close to the root with one hand to keep from pulling it with the comb.
By opening yourself to Bó and her sacred quality as a manifestation of the Goddess on earth, you will be connecting to the perpetual stream of nourishing energy that flows from the Goddess to each one of us. To experience this, there is nothing you need to do.
Part of the writing process for me includes putting myself into a kind of dream state, a mental space where I am open to my own ideas and how they might surprise me, where I can organize my thoughts in a nonlinear way, maybe into a type of sculpture. I love that creative writing is right on the line between mind and heart, concrete and abstract. Or, at least, that is the kind of writing I like, the kind that moves towards mystery and explores it, creating a feeling that echoes within the reader, opening possibility.
Another spell: singing Aya to sleep at night. In the dark, I lie beside her, making my way through our current rotation of songs. The English and Japanese words, some from my childhood and some learned more recently, wash over her until her eyes close. The way my voice takes a new shape for singing is like the way it changes to write. In this new space, the words become both prayer and response.
I love Aya, I love Aya, I love Aya very much… 大きいな栗の木の下で、 あなたと私、仲良く遊びましょう / Let’s play happily, you and me, underneath the chestnut tree… ゾウさん、ゾウさん、誰が好きなの？/ Elephant, elephant, who do you love?
None of this is magic in the sense that it works every time or in a predictable way. Sometimes Aya won’t sleep no matter how I sing to her. Sometimes I write paragraph after paragraph that doesn’t feel right, in voice or meaning. The routines fall apart or hit an obstacle that forces them to change — like the heat of summer or Aya’s needs evolving with age. Rebuilding them almost always feels like an impossible puzzle at first, no matter how much practice I have. We wake up late and go to parenting class late day after day. I lose my habit of daily walks and feel depression trailing me.
This card may be calling you to examine the ways in which you give to the world. If you believe your resources are limited, then you will be anxious about giving fully from your heart, but if you know that you are one with all of creation and all of nature then you will be able to give fully and freely.
There is a tarot shop near where I live, and I like to go in sometimes to browse the open sampler decks. I had a fantasy that one day I would visit, systematically examine the whole shop and find the perfect deck for me, one that felt like magic. (Not future-predictive magic but resonance magic.) Instead, I found The Druid Animal Oracle one day with Aya, who counted down our time in the shop with an increasingly insistent “let’s go!” I liked the artwork. I drew a card and liked the text. Let’s go!
I feel compelled to give a disclaimer. I like oracle cards the way Yumi Sakugawa spoke about tarot in her webinar “Discipline is Pleasure”: as a way to “introduce a little randomness” and signal a shift of attention towards creative focus. You could do something similar by lighting a candle, ringing a bell, clapping, opening the window, turning on music, or reading a craft interview in The Creative Independent or The Paris Review. You could try a tool like Metaphor Dice or a creative process-oriented deck like Yumi’s Cosmic Comfort, Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, or Words + Music in 6 Seconds by Dan Wilson. (Here is a Words + Music card I just drew: Even to be a moderately successful musician takes a huge amount of repetition and a lot of luck. The repetition is good for practice, but it also provides fertile ground for luck.)
When I shuffle my cards, I feel both whimsical and serious. I like taking whimsy seriously, making it my job. I channel the Moomins packing lunch for a trip on their little boat. As caregiving fills my day with tasks, I think of being practical in the service of magic, magical in the service of practicality. How can I focus my mind enough to create on borrowed time?
But you can only give if you are also able to receive. How easy is it for you to receive the love and concern of others?
While my writing process often feels mysterious and delicate, my knitting process is straightforward and easy. Sometimes knitters will ask each other, “Are you a process knitter or a product knitter?” I think I am both. I wear my finished garments happily, and I make them pretty happily too, occasional frustration notwithstanding. Still, I consider knitting magical. Unlike writing, which has a mostly internal or indirect process, knitting has a tangible process that becomes more varied as you advance in the craft. Each stitch is a visual representation of time, making plain the fact that time is part of the medium of any art form.
This week I went to knit night at my local yarn shop for the first time in years. I used to go weekly, even worked part-time at the shop for a while. This part of my life had drifted away with time. At the table, on my right side, an old friend swatched for a mesh lace tank top. On the left, a new friend worked on a peach-colored raglan sweater with a folded collar. Across the table, a fuzzy green sweater, a pair of socks with little houses on them. With different yarns, different hands, we stitched the same time.
Journaling prompt:
What is magic to you? If you don’t call it magic, what words do you use instead?
One thing I loved this week:
“In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” by Andrea Gibson: “I could survive forever / on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me / to stop measuring my lifespan by length, / but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things / can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up / a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?”