The World is Alive
on rabbit holes--and return trips
It’s the kind of pulsing epiphany you might have had on psychedelics. Maybe you managed to scribble it on the back of your hand, only to watch the revelation fade along with the green ink in the days that followed. Yet even after the descent back into daily life you still felt it was true. The world is alive. So people have known since time immemorial. So modern science has begun to glimpse.
We’ve all had moments. All felt that someone—god, the universe, your Great Uncle Bert—was speaking to us through some wildly improbable event. Like getting a phone call from someone you were just thinking about but haven’t heard from in months. Or seeing your grandma's favorite bird alight on her coffin at the funeral.
When synchronicity happens, it can feel like a profound wink from the universe. Receiving it, we know in our bones that reality stretches beyond the immediately perceptible. We sense that others (besides our friends, frenemies and family) are paying attention to our little lives. Rooting for us, even.
Many of us brought up in an essentially materialist, secular society feel these openings to magic but then quickly close up again, filing the anomalous incident away in some dusty mental cabinet marked ‘questionable,’ ‘dangerous.’ In this way we never really let the surpassing strangeness of things get under our skin. Never allow it to call into question our view of the world.
For others, and here I include myself, curiosity wins the day. We start to explore the cracks in the rational order of things, to probe and prod. If we’re persistent enough, we may find that the crack widens into a full-fledged rabbit hole.
We find, in short, that magic is real—not in some naïve way; often in a frightening way; sometimes the magic is all too real, as this boy from a too-good-to-be-forgotten Neil Gaiman comic discovers. You may decide you don’t like it after all, the whole magic business, but it’s not, in any case, deniable past a certain point.
Some of us rabbit hole tumblers go on to find our versions of the School on Roke (or Hogwarts if that’s more your thing) and, if we’re lucky, enroll. There we find our specialty and hone our craft.
Some are summoners, some conjurers, some masters of illusion. In my case, being a bit of a nerd, it’s about potion-making, elemental magic, divination, and scroll work. Otherwise known, respectively, as herbalism, acupuncture, astrology and writing (the wielding of language being among the oldest and most potent of magical arts).
If we survive the bumps and scrapes that come with the rabbit hole tumble and make it through the rigors of apprenticeship, we sooner or later make our way back to the familiar world as journeymen and women. Of course we find that the world has changed, or that we have, or both.
Returning from a strange journey can be the strangest part of all.
Who braces for this part, who prepares? If we’re expecting a rolled-out carpet, we’re apt to get a cold codfish slap instead. The world wasn’t waiting with baited breath. If anything, it’s tapping its watch with a look that says ‘about time you got to work.’
We may have stories to tell, and we may find that no one particularly is listening. Perhaps childishly, we may fall into pointing out the magic that we’ve learned to see—it’s everywhere, after all—to the unsuspecting. To give certain sleepy-looking folks a shake and say ‘hey, do you see that crack? That goes all the way through.’ But people seldom want to be awoken, or to have revelation thrust upon them. I suppose I’ve learned that we each ripen in our own good time and into different sorts of apples, besides.
It’s taken me embarrassingly long to realize there’s not much point in trying to convince the non-believers and outright naysayers, of whom (let us remember) I was once one. They don’t respond well to proselytizing, as a rule, and who can blame them? Besides, others have shouldered quite admirably the burden of convincing the modern world that it’s gotten some really basic things wrong. Thanks, Richard Tarnas, Robert Svoboda, Charles Eisenstein, Bayo Akomolafe, countless others. All your beautiful efforts may never move the Richard Dawkins of this world, but even the most tightly-knotted soul (and sphincter) will work itself loose in the long run.
With proselytizing out, that pretty much leaves preaching to the choir, or going quietly about one’s work. Perhaps it’s age creeping up on me, but I don’t have quite the wind power I once did, so (this current choir sermon notwithstanding) I mostly opt to stay in my lane and do my quiet, wizardly thing. Which can you find on my website, if you’re in the market.1
Meanwhile, the world remains as alive as ever, and magic as real; all of us are always already caught up in it, no matter how much we may protest—Even Dawkins, upon whom the gods and gandharvas no doubt smile as he rants his way across the world, unwittingly trailing magic.
Market, and marketing—these are words you don’t here much at Hogwarts. But marketing is a magical discipline in itself and one I’m trying to embrace, with a little help from good folks like Tad Hargrave. If one can wipe the smarmy, manipulative patina off of the term, it turns out it’s actually about communicating one’s value. Imagine that.
Thanks for posting!