Down the Rabbit Hole

I came down to Portland a little over a week ago for work, and found that I was unable to find a ride back up as soon as I intended to.  While I was a little upset about this at first, and about the cancellations I had to deal with, but with a little bit of work I was able to turn the situation around. I managed to use it as an opportunity to start marketing myself in a place I hadn't lived in for about two years. Portland really isn't that far from where I call home these days, and I managed to make some business connections that should hopefully lead to future work.

While in Portland I manged to spend some time around some friends I hadn't seen in a while, got some work in town, and eventually managed to make my schedule line up with my previous cancellations. I've noticed that when I have goals in mind, and the motivation to push myself forward, work almost always seems to find me. When I wasn't working with photographers and videographers, I was working on logo designs. Am I making a lot all at once? No, but still the work is coming in, I'm making business connections left and right, and I'm keeping myself busy to the point that it's almost overwhelming.

I'm lucky in that the majority of people I know and am close to, are also magic-users, or at very least familiar and open to the concepts involved. This has also allowed me to work on my magical healing skills on multiple people in the past month. I'm no miracle-worker, but I know enough about using elemental energies and my Will, that I can at least usually soothe pains, and potentially speed up the healing processes.

For years I lived with someone who while open to magic, was never open to having it used on them for whatever reason, even for healing purposes. I don't have this problem with the person I'm in a relationship with now thankfully, and this has allowed me to stretch my magical muscles a bit more than I'm used to these days. Not only that, but its helped reinforce the idea that "yes" I AM doing something when I lay my hands on someone and bind their wounds with energy, or help their headaches, or loosen sore muscles.

When you're practicing magic outside of a group, there's only so much that you can see to reinforce the fact that you're actually doing something other than waving your hands around and deluding yourself. Its when others notice, when others tell you sincerely that you helped make their foot stop hurting, or somehow (at least temporarily) helped their headache.  There's something powerful about that, about the idea that "this person experiences this too!" along with the idea that somehow I was able to help this person, this friend who trusted me.

Results in magic are often internal, and I think this is because on some level people are afraid to say that its more than just "in their head" because of the extra implications that holds. We try to put magic and our experiences with it in a little box that explains exactly how and why these things happen. Some of us try to explain it with science, some of us try to explain it with religion, but the fact of the matter is, regardless of reason, magic exists, and we all have the power to influence our realities on levels that many may even be afraid of acknowledging. 

I struggled for years with the idea that magic, that entities, were somehow both internal and external forces. It was easier to believe that it was just my own subjective reality, and that this reality somehow helped me. These days I feel it goes far beyond that, and that if my magic is somehow just existing within my own subjective reality, then there would be no reason for others who exist and have their own realities to experience the manifestation of my magic in their lives at all.

This means that if it purely existed within my subjective reality, that no one else would be affected by it, but this isn't the case. People are affected when I work magic on them, even the ones who originally may not have expected anything to happen at all. This means that magic is objective, that its viewable, and in some cases the results are even tangible. 

I don't consider myself fantastic at what I do when it comes to magic. Its been a lot of trial and error and guesswork with different techniques. I have gotten burned before, but you can only really learn sometimes by touching the hot stove and realizing "yes, that is hot, yes it does burn, I shouldn't do that." Magic isn't safe, but life inherently isn't safe either. Its a big scary world out there, and a lot of people want to just live out of their labeled boxes, without ever looking outside of them. They play in the sand, but never look up and realize that there's a sky. It's not for everyone, but its there for those who have the courage to look, and decide for themselves. 

Its your reality after all, isn't it?