Processing…
I look at myself and notice that my shape is changing.
When I left high school at age 18years I was already starting to realise the map I had about how to “do life” was rubbish. It looked something like this:
I wanted something else. It was just that I was not aware exactly what that something else was. I just knew in my bones that I was not a brought to life by a linear staged plan.
At all.
I looked deep inside myself in my quiet moments and realised the river and trees listened to me better than humans, this was painful. How can a human learn to listen like a river and hold another like a tree? I noticed that as I was with my quiet moments, with out words there was something brewing within me, like a fast approaching storm. Far closer to my true shape than the tired map of a step ladder to the “head office”.
I wanted to learn to do magic. I always have and for that I need a far different map. Perhaps something more like this:
I want to show you how my magical education has been.
At first it was quiet, with the plants, river animals. Away from the culture of the world. Away from the judgmental voices, opinions and hurry up, mentality.
There I realised I was born with a deep impulse to run. It settled beneath my skin. It became impregnated in my blood tissue as a fetus. I was born with a huge doingness. It was a pressure to act and do, to never cease to be moving. Forward, grafting, tilling the soil, running, moving. Busy. Productive. A pressure to perform. To prove.
I also noticed that I had within me a 2 year time line.
A vague notion of freedom was always two years ahead of me. That my real life began two years in the future, I just had to get there.
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Then I realised that there was many layers for me to go through and many steps for me to take and that I did not have to do it all at once. Shifting your map of what is possible to something more alive, more breathable more in touch with connection and reality, is not something you have to do all at once. Moving through the layer that is right in front of you, is real. You really do only get access to the next, by going through the one that is right before you. Take that step. I continue to learn this.
The closest layer I had at 18 was my bike, a map and a drink bottle. I physically cycled away from my parents house and did not return until 2 months later. After having cycled, worked and run a mountain race which I was exhausted for and hardly finished because … I had been cycling for a week. I remember coming into the finish line, sobbing. I was aching to be witnessed in my process. However, the maps inside me that I used for navigating my feelings where still immature, left overs from school. I crossed the finish line, hunched my shoulders and walked away to the trees. To be alone. It was hard for me to be seen feeling. Big expression of feelings were always to be taken away from the eyes of people. My greif, ecstatic joy, shaking quaking fear and volcanic rage, where for me to handle alone, mostly in wild places.
I now see it is possible to leave school physically, the maps of navigating life, however, lay knitted to your sinew. Informing you, guiding you as to what is possible, what is right, what is acceptable, what is wrong. Until the time comes when you decide to take them apart for yourself, letting something that gives more space for life to happen to emerge, then consciously choose that.
What I was hunkering for at that tender age of 18 was initiation. I was hunkering to cross the threshold and to be witnessed in doing so. To come back into my village and tell my legends. The culture I grew up in does not holdspace for such initiation. My adults would look at me blankly and say things like “you just need to work harder” ‘yes dear that is nice” “I’m glad you had a nice time” “welcome back”.
I remember arriving back home after a 2 year trip over seas. I was stretched, edgy and tired as I was flying home a music was a rising up in me, calling me home to my land. Instead of unfolding into that arrival, I arrived and awkwardly tried to fit myself back into who I was 2 years before. An impossible, excruciating experience.
The world had rubbed up close to me changing me forever. I no longer fitted. The life I had I left, 2 years earlier was vague, pushing forward meant going in a direction that felt clunky and cardboard like.
I sift forward now through many shape changes. What I see, is that I was lacking in me a fundamental education in being a human. The physical experience of being a human , then deeper into the quest of “Who am I?” “What does reality mean?”
What does it really mean to be human? These questions led me through an education in Nursing, into practising for one year in the operating theatres, facinated by seeing the physical human body, laied out. How it worked purely as a physical structure. And there was still something missing for me. Something beyond the blood and bones was not mentioned. Only hinted at.
I sat for a few months in a university lecture hall absorbing lectures on Anthropology, Astronomy, and Culture. It fed me and still something was missing.
Outside of the mainstream offerings people were teaching me something else. Instead of feeding my never ending supply of questions from a purely intellectual level. I was encountering more and more people and situations that challenged me to answer my own questions. As painful, wobbly and pathetically as I could at first.
People, my teams held space for me to feel, into my own experience of right now, to extract an essence that was more potent to me, rather than the outside. Rather than an authority or schooling curriculum.
That sort of question and answer, the one that requires deep, internal harvesting and grafting . Is where I came closer to something that I would call my magic. What I discovered, surprisingly is that I became for more useful to reality than when I remained repeating behaviours, ideas and thought maps handed down to me from school or past generations. Meanign I could leave when it was time to leave, rather than “waiting for the bell to ring”. I could stay when it was wiser to stay and unfold my heart for another feel what needed feeling, rather than running away because “It can’t do this”. And it meant that I could choose to start experimenting and researching alternative living situations that gave more options for people and the earth rather than “rent, then buy and live with your partner and kids”.
Really what I have discovered so far about my magic is that, by intentional being in the process of life, I come in touch with my capacity to be an active collaborator with the archetypal forces of reality. There is a technology to this, it is grounding and real. Not esoteric magic. I am learning that if something can be achieved with my own inner and outer resources, I need not tap into magic. Meaning if I can use my voice, hands, feelings, the clarity of my words and the materials available to me the domain of magic can be largely left alone.
Life happens and so do I.
I am human.
