I am sitting in a sun beam listening to some podkin thinking about how this community is just so amazing and so welcoming and loving and how much I have been missing out on these long years I’ve been solitary. I kind of wanted to write about that a little bit today.
When I started on my path I was young and eager to learn about it. But my ADD took over and soon I just feel into a mostly spiritual and minimal ritual rut and got super excited about other things… music, history, and finally geology. I’ve never been part of a group, never wanted to be. I’ve never had a teacher and never felt ready for it. I’ve always been a very do it myself by myself kind of person. I’ve never been involved in the community online, I’ve always shopped at stores that are not “pagan” stores but places you can find things that work. I like herb shops, hardware stores, art stores… I take my tools from every day objects. Never been huge on spell crafting, but big on lighting a candle or placing some food out as an offering. I never thought to my self “WOW I can do magic to get what I want!” I have always thought you have to do it the hard way, there are no short cuts but asking for help will help me mentally and that goes a long way in helping.
I have always mixed my understanding of magic and metaphysics with the edges of science, the fuzzy areas, the places we don’t have answers. To me the edges of understanding will always be the realm of magic. There will always be edges to our understanding of the world, universe, physics…. even ourselves. And to me that is where magic lives and evolves. Yes I think magic by definition must evolve. When we can explain something with science it is no longer magic, the boundary has moved. The unknown is the place where legend and magic live, and where once the unknown was across the water, over there on the mountain… now it is the bottom of the sea and out into space. It has retreated to the corners again, its always been in the corners, the corners just move.
So back to talking about me, life and magic. I see magic in the earth I see magic in science when the models are completely wrong and the physics we thought was a work fails to predict what we can now measure. I think magic and creativity are closely related, and I think its magic when a scientist has the insight to say well lets look at this. Think of DNA! No one was looking for a double helix. Many other shapes were being looked at, but there wasn’t a test that would spit out a shape you could only test if it was a shape you thought of. Over beer the idea came up, lets look for a double helix and what do you know!? You can never explain why a double helix was thought it, it just floated up from the background and was there. An idea, a brilliant idea.
I have lived my life surrounding myself with magic of this kind. I have started to think maybe I should get my head out of the lab and come back to circle. That was have been what I was thinking when I downloaded my first pagan podcast, the wigglian way. I can’t remember why I thought to download it, I can’t even remember downloading it. Somehow it was on my ipod. And from there I downloaded Spirits Cast, and from there the number of pagan podcasts increased on my ipod. Where the spark that said “hey look for a pagan one” come from? I can’t explain.
Things happen for a reason though right? I am a pagan podcaster. A year ago I would have laughed yet here I am. Proud Pagan and about to get a masters. Maybe this next step into the unknown will land me face first into a group. Maybe it wont. But I’m along for the ride on this crazy thing we call life.
