It's Magical! But Who Is The Magician?

Life is magical. Literally! Real human tragedy starts when we lose sight, sound, taste, feel and smell of that life-giving truth. In the magic flows a stream of lightness and laughter; in the magic is a sense of belonging and believing; in the magic we create our playful miracles.

It doesn't matter which way you turn, you are bombarded by magic; it doesn't matter how logically, scientifically or rationally you analyse it, you will still reach the point where magic takes over; it doesn't matter how large or small your target, if you focus for long enough you will dissolve into magic.

Whether you head out for the stars to dance with supernovae and black-holes or head in to the 'quarking' world of protons, neutrons and electrons, your gob should be smacked often enough for a reverential silence to fall.

To view an atom with the naked eye in a drop of water, the drop would need to be 24 kilometres across.
To reach our nearest neighbour in the solar system- Proxima Centauri- you would need to fly for 24,000 years in a spaceship.

The world around us deals fluently with numbers so small and so large that they consist almost entirely of zeroes. This can feel empty and alienating but we must never forget that even zeroes are laced together with a beguiling intelligence. An intelligence that communicates. An intelligence that listens and responds.

There is a danger in being too familiar with the magic and numbed by it...finding it quite ordinary that you can play cards with people from Guatemala, Mongolia and Uzbekistan while sitting in a café in Amsterdam.

There is equally a danger in being too wowed by the magic and numbed by it...finding your imagination over-populated and bewildered by the zeroes. But there is a delicious in-between space where the magic sizzles around you, cradling you in a sense of wonder.

Disease stems from a dislocation with the magic. All the time you remain alert to the 'wonder-full' that unfolds and unravels unstoppably around you, a sense of joyful belonging will heal you. Demonstrations of magic are available without pause, but they rarely impose themselves on you. You have to take time out to notice. If you get seriously dislocated, you will need a prescription.

Try a tincture of the following magic to be taken three times a day with a satisfied sigh:
One fern frond unfurling,
several butterflies flying through falling leaves beneath an avenue of trees,
two ravens tumbling in a cliff breeze,
the smell of earth after a downpour,
one loud duck landing in water,
dozens of spider-webs encrusted with dew-drops,
the sound of 20,000 starling wings,
a horse rolling over and farting happily,
repeated waves thumping into a cliff, sending spray-rainbows cascading down the beach...

The list of cures is, and always will be, endless. If nothing on planet earth thrills you and fills you with gratitude, you should certainly question why you came and whether or not you want to stay. Magic just oozes from every pore.

You only have to look at the staggeringly perfect mechanism of your body with all its balancing systems of digestion, absorption, excretion, ventilation, reproduction, locomotion, investigation, interpretation and motivation to realise that you are not dealing with some cheap card trick here. That you ever get up at all is a throbbing miracle, let alone get up and interact like you know what you are doing. Every second your body is plugged into a mighty energetic force-field and requires nothing but your appreciative co-operation to replenish and revive. Yet how much of your time is spent wailing and gnashing about the few little blemishes.

That you are here is stunning; that you are here with millions of other weird and wonderful co-creators is staggering; that you are here because you helped create it and can actively and daily re-create it, should make you sweat and pimple and shudder with astonishment and excitement.

And here is the nub...that beguiling intelligence that interlaces all those zeroes and joins up the spaces in between...is interactive. You are not only significantly influential in the co-creation of this masterpiece, you are the absolute and only commander of which bits of the magic dance around you. You speak the abracadabra and the cave of treasure opens eagerly before you.

I chose the word magic, deliberately and precisely. We love to be entertained and there is no show to match the one called Planet Earth. Furthermore, there are no tricks and nothing at all hidden up the sleeves, just...

a deciduous woodland flushing slowly from yellow through orange to red;
a musician sitting alone on a beach composing on his lap-top with a full orchestra;
wildebeest thundering towards the river-crossing where fat cats and long crocs lie in wait;
a few million butterflies making a rainbow cloud as they migrate;
lobsters linking up in a chain kilometres long to march pointlessly across the sea-bed, ending up where they started;
a lover texting a lover 4000 miles away;
a giant leatherback turtle dragging itself up a beach to dig a hole and lay eggs;
a house martin negotiating its way across mountains, deserts, forests and seas to the same nest under the same eaves at the same address as last year;
a dandelion forcing its way up through tarmac to open like the sun.....

No apology for another list that is, and always will be, endless.

There is no problem for most people in identifying the magic. There IS a problem for most people in identifying the magician. Forget all the big names like God/dess and Buddha and Allah and Yahweh and The Force and The Universe. Yoo-hoo...Yoo-hoo it's YOU.

You are so good at it that you have tricked yourself into believing your magic is outside of you and outside of your control. You are like a spider that is trapped by its web, forgetting that the web was spun from its own body and that it is actually in command. You feel overpowered by events that seem to fly at you from all directions. The best you can hope for is to stem the tide and tread water, fearing that if you stop you will drown.

Life seems like the nightmare that beset the sorcerer's apprentice. Having set the broom to fetch water, he couldn't work out how to stop it. So he chopped it into pieces and watched in horror as each splinter turned into a fully-functioning broom and continued to fetch still more water. He would have drowned had the real sorcerer not returned in time to stop the army of brooms.

Maybe you no longer say the magic words; you appear to have lost your book of spells. And yet all those bizarre and outrageous aromas that rise up from your cauldron are the direct result of your incantations; as well as all the dull, flat and insipid ones! There's no point throwing stones at everyone elses' cauldron; they have no power over your concoctions.You make the magic that dances around you. How saucy a sorcerer you want to be is up to you. Be as psychedelic and explosive as you dare or even choose to weave a spell that gives away all your strength and makes you a slave. You have the power! You knew it when you first arrived.

If now you have chosen not to believe in your power, then you have made your world a scary place. It wasn't like that in the beginning when you planned your adventure. But if you do still believe, then the possibilities are only bounded by the energy of your imagination and your willingness to rejoice, rejoice and again I say rejoice.

There is no need to compete with others, no need to oppose others, no need to judge and criticise others. In fact there is no need to take any notice at all of others, except those that you choose to.

As you contemplate the astonishing displays of magic that unfurl every second around you, remember you are at a very, very supermarket. And one where you don't have to pay anything, apart from attention. Nothing will jump off the shelf into your basket without your invitation, so take your time and choose what you like.

Having chosen it, relish it and cherish it. The more you enjoy the possibilities of it, the stronger the magnetic attraction between you. Let the magic flow! Don't check all the ingredients for hidden additives or start worrying about the impact it has on global warming or ice ages. Just enjoy it. And when you've had enough, choose something else.

Unless of course you decide to stand over your cauldron chanting spells of scarcity and loss. What a magician you are! You can deny yourself plenty!

Many of us are vicarious magicians. We are so frightened of our power that we deny it and pretend to work through someone else. Usually that person has written a book or performed a miracle or died an operatic death and become an emblem of the greatness of us all. We find it easier if loads of other people also choose that magician. It somehow reassures us and we can all get together and feel chummy and swell up the power of our chosen one.

Then we choose a leader who seems through training or aptitude to have a clearer communication with the magician of our choice. By deferring to our leader's advice, we gradually remove from ourselves the responsibility for, and the opportunity of, our own blessed magic powers.

Inside all of us lives Merlin; a deep, primal sense of interactive connection. Many of us were brought up to use a different name, but the name is not important. This connection is vital to our health. It is available at all times, contactable by any incantation or silence. It is not necessary to point in any particular direction, go to any particular place, sit at the feet of any particular person, drug yourself with any particular incense. You can unfurl Merlin anywhere.

It doesn't matter what verbal trickery you use to explain or justify your Merlin-channel; it doesn't matter how orthodox or wacky the rituals you come up with. What matters is that you know what's underneath it. Your spirit will communicate with you any way you choose. You are not the subservient acolyte anticipating small favours for long service; you are the magician trying out the spells that work best for you.

And the way that works best for you is unique. Even those that appear to chant from the same spell-book as you, probably work in a different way. Forget the words. Listen to the feeling. Unless you are familiar with how the spirit flows through your original conduit, you will need to concentrate like a safe-breaker waiting for the tell-tale 'click'.

The world about you is malleable. From an inexhaustible potential your dream will rise up. Your only joy is to conjure it and revel in the swirling flavours and change it as often as you wish (you are not limited to three wishes.) Already you are doing this - probably a lot more than you realise - but the greatest fun comes from being a fully conscious and appreciative magician.

Often the spells unravel in unexpected and exciting ways, so the more familiar you are with your cauldron, the better.

As I said at the beginning: that you are here is stunning; that you are here with millions of other weird and wonderful co-creators is staggering; that you are here because you helped create it and can actively and daily re-create it, should make you sweat and pimple and shudder with astonishment and excitement; but most bewildering of all, you are here using just a tiny part of your mighty potential for joyful magic and hobbling along with a sense of smallness and unworthiness.

Hocus-pocus, abracadabra, knock and the door will open; izzy-whizzy, snap my fingers, ask and the goddess will send; alhamdulilahi, nothing up my sleeves, open sesame; hubble bubble, alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.