I’ve been off the blog attending to other matters, matters that seemed as though they had nothing to do with knitting. Now that the shift in attention is more or less complete, I’m finding that since everything is connected, I might as well come out.
I’ve been in pursuit of Magic since I first noticed that I looked at the world a little differently. I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room watching dust motes and wondering which of them were really fairies. In junior high, I would stop at the same place on the way to the bus stop and know that fairies lived there and wanted my attention. No, I was not expecting little flying things to show up. Even the dust mote leavings were not going to be little winged things.
Over time, atomic occurrences of another behavior collected themselves into proper molecule. Daydreaming. I remember my father snapping me out of daydreaming when we rode the subway together on our way to the playground where he worked. He didn’t like that one of my eyes wandered off. Apparently this is how I kept my attention on both worlds at the same time. Where was I? Still have no idea all these decades later. I’m getting closer to understanding, though. I still don’t have a name for it.
I remember an occasion when I was in Elementary school. What I remember about it is that I was walking down the front stairway and a girl went by going the other way. “Oh. That’s what it was”, or something like that was my thought. I had had a Daydream, reverie or whatever you call it, that showed me something. This was that something.
I’m not someone who is so fluid as to be always immersed in such seeing. I don’t know if that’s because I ‘m not wired for it or because the circumstances of my growing up put a resistor on it, keeping me from going there very often. It wasn’t until I was away at college that the amount of daydreaming I was doing seemed overwhelming. I had begun to feel that there was much more to what I was doing. Not just the occaisional, and up to then, passive and just before sleep, stuff. I began to feel that work could be done.
That was when I began considering myself as a shaman. No, not in this culture. I imagined that in another place or another time the attitude of daydreaming would have indicated some kind of spiritual intelligence that would be fostered and put to use for the benefit of a community. I would have some work tasks that allowed me to be both physically and spiritually productive. Then I got the Call.
It came in the form of a not very big breakdown. An anxiety state, is what the doctor called it. Its effect was to pry me loose from what was safe and familiar and allow me to leave on my first real Adventure. I’d been away to college, out of state, and as far from the life of the city as I could get. This was different. I got on a bus and moved to California with nothing planned. Ended up in San Francisco where I began to notice that there was, in print anyway, a Neo-shaman movement. At least the word shaman was mentioned and it wasn’t in the context of traditional practice. I was on the right track thinking that I would have to be a different kind of shaman, if indeed I was to be one.
After a few years of feeling my way around the new neighborhood, and taking the step of following my Shadow into a new career, I met Debora. She was the first person I’d met that I felt connected to. And she was an Adventurer. He is the one through whom I found the first description of Magic that made sense to me. I just read it a couple of days ago. It was from Max Freedom Long’s book — . I’d found my touchstone. Too bad, I thought, that it was such an old one and that I was quite unlikely to find something more modern.
Wrong. Thanks to Debora, I met Abraham Kawai’I, and had the dreaming experience of my life! When I finally agreed to go to hear him speak, I was both elated and disappointed. I was elated at the amount of information I was saying yes to. Don’t remember a word of it now, though. Oh, wait! I do. There was the idea that you could “tell fortunes” just looking at pages in a magazine. (Note to Self: A good thing to revisit). Just hold the question in mind and open at random. Not a new idea now, but at the time, over twenty years ago, it was. Generally, it was this idea, that things weren’t needed to do the work, that it was the person, who used the world as it was. The disappointment was that I was told, “You already know this,” and was back on my own.
For the following years, I tried to figure out what the heck that meant. Exactly what did I know and how do I apply it? How do I organize my life so that I am not in the way of what has to happen? Most importantly, whom do I serve? That last one is still kind of odd to me, that sense that I must serve someone.
Much of the questioning has been answered, finally, by the several years I spent training in Aikido. Through that practice with its emphasis on Ki and the community’s inclusion of the Pathwork system, I acquired experience and some skill with Being Me. I learned, for instance, just how sensitive I was to Ki, or The Force, if you will. Probably, of all that discovery, recognizing how much information was also being communicated to someone sensitive enough to notice it was the most important. I wasn’t daydreaming in class. You can’t in that kind of environment. In moments of meditation though, I could fill my field with roses, say, and Sensei might respond, “The scent of flowers”. Or, I might have a question, and forming it into a ball, “bounce pass” it to Sensei, who would answer. I learned that I could prepare myself for teaching a class by visiting with them in my head first. I would then be prepared for practical issues.
In fact, this being prepared is what I’ve come to believe being moderately psychic is good for. The attack on the Twin Towers was one of those visits, one of those, Oh, that’s what that was about” moments. Another purpose, I learned in the dojo, seems to be helpful in creating or soothing relationships. I’d spent some time imagining I was playing one of our games with someone I was having a hard time getting to know or feeling comfortable working with. Taking a clue from Sensei, I engaged him in the game with no other intent. Next day, he comes up to me and sits down and starts talking with me. We were so engaged that Sensei had to tell us to be quiet! When it was time to sit on the mat, my newly made friend plopped himself next to me. We had a great time working together that day. Absolutely a first for us and a totally different side of him, for me.
All of this is still casual, still not purposeful, not in service. Even my communication with people on the Huna forum is like this. Um, Huna is what Long called Hawai’ian Magic. In between Long and Huna Trainer, I’d found Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman. Exactly the thing I was looking for. At least the title was. And some of the stuff inside. Between King and Huna Trainer, came Aikido. I thought I had finally found my community of service. I was a first level black belt, had started working with the children’s class, and had even co-created a couple of workshops for a women’s class. Evidently, this was not the place, either. Oh, did I mention I’d met a Cherokee shaman while I was there? Yep. More interesting stuff happened. I learned more about reading the environment . This time it was cars on the road as messengers. (Note to Self: There’s a pattern here. Find it.)
Ok. Now I’m up to Huna Trainer. It started as a podcast and became an online forum that I became part of as quickly as I could by submitting pieces for the podcasts second incarnation. The forum is part of the reason I’m writing this. It’s a group of people who are in similar practice. But it’s more than that. It’s also a group of people with experiences similar to mine. And now that I feel settled in and more connected to the people rather than the group, some old questions are floating to the surface. What exactly do I know and what do I do with it? How does it work?
I’m back in pursuit of Magic. Reading the original words in this changed context is telling me that now’s the time to put things into perspective. When I started this journey, I was on my own. I didn’t know how to talk about my experiences or sometimes even form the questions. Since I’ve heard others’ stories framed in a common language I have a place to start.
Here. Now.
100Words
It’s challenging for me to take steps forward that land on areas I can’t see. Yes, there are people that are on the landscape I am heading to. And yes, they are willing to guide me. However, they can’t take the steps for me, they can’t see where my feet are heading. Could very well be that the very stones they stepped on are holes under my feet.
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