In praise of magic

The world is pretty crazy these days. In the past two weeks, we had Brexit, the siege of the US Capitol, and the announcement of a six-week lockdown here in Britain. Whoa. 

Thankfully our ‘childcare bubble’ is still intact and we still have support for looking after our nine month old baby. I feel grateful for this every single day. There was a moment when the lockdown was announced when I thought that our nanny would not be able to come at all until mid-February. At this moment, I saw myself in a future with no work. How would I go back to work without any childcare? This lockdown landing right at the moment that I was meant to be preparing for full-time work again really rocked my reality. Not in a good way. While we waited for clarity, I stayed up at night chattering to my husband about my worries. “We can find creative solutions,” he reassured me. The promise of creative solutions sounded to me like a guarantee of disappointment. 

(Parenthetic note: The gender dynamics behind his optimism, and my skepticism, are well established. The pandemic has been a disaster for women economically, as we have taken on the majority of unpaid household labour and our careers have suffered disproportionately as a result. Industries that skew female have also suffered more — think retail and food and beverage, versus, e.g., construction. Public policy has not, generally, been assertive enough to make up for the gaps, although there are isolated examples of gender-sensitive programs like subsidised childcare or similar.

Another bit of damage that I don’t see a lot of reflection on is the reversion to heteronormative binary thinking in our discussion of these issues. The story of, women care for children and men excel in careers and there is no other family arrangement imaginable, is likely to set back our thinking about gender pretty dramatically. /end digression)

I rant about this in my head a fair amount, the injustice of gendered divisions of labour at home. In addition to that, though, I am trying to do something more constructive and self-improve my way out of this anxiety. I have decided to ‘explore’ my relationship with control. Maybe I will get into the weeds on that relationship at another time. For now, though, I want to sing the praises of the way I have chosen to do that, which is by cultivating a belief in magic.

 Magic is a bit of a new theme for this space, but a familiar one for me. I am an unapologetic believer in magic, and it is a key element of my worldview. I take justification for this position from my own work learning astrology, Tarot, and other ways of working with energy, especially through yoga. I’ve been aided and enabled by anthropological approaches to magic, which offer skeptics an on-ramp to respecting theories of reality that take magic seriously.  Here’s what I mean by magic.

First, magic is different to a lot of the negative, dismissive perspectives that skeptics bring to it. 

Magic is not one of what Miranda of Sex and the City called ‘convenient theories for you monthly’. Dipping into magical thinking some of the time, for example to make wishes by throwing coins in a fountain, can be fun and cute. There’s nothing wrong with this and it might work for you. But this ‘sprinkle the ordinary with fairy dust to get what I want’ approach to magic is not what I find compelling.

Magic is also not the opposite of a normal lifestyle. That is, you do not have to have dreadlocks and do hallucinogenic drugs or go into the Amazonian rainforest to experience magic. You can experience magic while working nine to five at a desk job and having a stable, normal existence. 

What is magic, then?

Magic is what happens in the margins and between the lines of all things. It is the animating forces at work beyond the explicit and the linear and the causal. It is the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It is what happens that could not have been predicted or planned. And it is an area of life that we can all tune into with a little bit of practice.

My preferred ways of accessing magic are:

Following my own impulses. If I feel like suggesting something outrageous in a meeting, then I suggest something outrageous in a meeting. If I feel like resting, I rest. If I feel like launching a new project, I launch that new project. The magic that results from this is the kind that is very simple: people respond to the impulse. They reflect it back in a way that can be beautiful. The key, for me, to embracing this way of accessing magic is to accept that the magic is in unifying my actions with my inner state and to let go of any desire for the outcome to satisfy my wishes.

Listening to my body. In my experience, the keenest wisdom and intelligence that we can access is in our bodies. Bodies are constantly telling us what our needs are, and they are mercifully insulated from the ‘shoulds’ that cloud our thinking about our own wellness. They communicate honestly. So, in my search for magic, I begin by responding to my own pain, cravings, discomforts, and leanings. I do this most often through yoga. But there are myriad ways to do it.

Learning about symbolic systems. Symbolic systems have been around for thousands of years and they allow us to see interconnections in ways that are very difficult to discern when we are fixated on the literal and the linear. My preferred way of tuning into the subtle world is through astrology, but any so-called ‘traditional’ system of knowledge is likely to open up avenues for seeing new connections.