"It"

In her comment to the Joy and Laughter and Fun post, dara suggested that I try "it" -- IT being a practice of consciously focusing on the things that you want, and so "bringing them to you" by what she called magnetic thought.  I am certain that her suggestion was made in the very best of good faith, with the sort of enthusiasm that is the trademark of someone wrapped up in the almost magical sense of having discovered some great truth. 

That is heady stuff.  I know.  At 55, I've been exploring in the spiritual and metaphysical realms for probably 35 years.  I have tried IT.  In fact, I've tried so many variants of IT that I'm not sure I could even put names or labels to all the great spiritual discoveries I've made in my lifetime. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, I have very early memories of being a child skeptic.  It wasn't very many years later that I found that I could induce in myself a sort of mystical rapture that kept me entertained through a great number of boring Sunday church services.  Like so many young adolescent girls of my era, I spent a lot of time "playing at" making contact with the spirit world.  Seances and Ouija boards were the stock in trade of that part of my journey.  As a young mother, I left my 'cradle' religion, and set out to explore what else might be out there.  I spent time with just about every mainline Protestant sect, but also wandered along the edges with Mormons and Mennonites.  I read deeply into the literature of Judaism and Buddhism.  I toyed with astral projection.  I flirted with EST -- didn't everyone?  Later, as I got older, I spent time with a couple different flavors of pagan folk.  I did deep body work.  I followed the Artist's Way.  I studied with a Lakota Sioux teacher, walking some distance along the Red Road.  I sat for some dozen years in the silent worship of the Society of Friends.  From Johnathan Livingston Seagull to Martin Buber to Clarissa Pinkola Estes, I've stretched out my heart and mind and spirit to touch the great unknown -- sometimes the great unknown has touched me back.  In my experience, the unknown mostly remains simply unknown. 

We humans are such interesting and curious creatures.  We want to know the secrets, and simultaneously, we insist that there is some magic that cannot be fathomed except through the practice of some sort of arcane and convoluted ritualized pagentry.  All the gourd rattles and chicken entrails and tea leaves and tarot cards entice and intrigue us -- but they are constructs of our own minds and imaginations.  It is all illusion -- the sort of David Copperfield conjuring that, when it is done well, can make us believe that something magical really has occured. 

There is no magic.  There is only life; night and day; rain and shine; feasting and sex and dancing and laughter and sweet refreshing sleep.  There is luck and fate and chance and pure serendipity.  There is coincidence, correlation, and causation.  There is science and there is superstition -- both have their place.

We are animals on a small blue speck of a planet.  We are electrons mingling in our orbits -- without a shred of solidity no matter what our skin bound lives might insist is the reality.  Call me old and call me jaded.  Shake your head at my disbelief and cynicism.  I understand.  For me, life is just simpler when I am living in the acknowledgement that I only know what I know; that there is a very great deal that I do not know, and even more that I do not understand.  It is and I am and that is enough.

swan