189. ...sense in this shamanic wisdom...

(morning thinking)

Dec 19, 2024

Monday morning, I spotted a beatific friend as I walked home in the rain with a heavy backpack. Smiling, pushing her bike and carrying a moss covered twig - bright, alive with colour, like it had grown out of her hand. Her expression floated in the air around her face. She was more than her usual self. Her smile grew when she saw my wave and she crossed the road to say hello. The rain stopped and we walked the rest of the way to the beach together.

While I’d been supermarket shopping and queuing in the post office - a picture of modern mundanity - she’d been in secret woods performing magic.

My witchy friend had… “written a letter to [her] child’s father, accepted the pain which remains like an old friend, and sent a message to wherever he was through fire and earth.”

I've taken part in two ceremonies where fire has taken words to people who, for one reason or another, weren't present. Messages written or spoken into combustible vessels and carried away in the flames. There's sense in this shamanic wisdom - “How else do you reply to a dead man’s letter…?” she asks.

My friend looked new and I told her so. An ur version of herself. I felt I was seeing her pure, primordial, foundational form.

She pointed out that the yellow of the moss matched my hat. It felt right that we’d met and I thanked her for sharing her story with me. I felt honoured.

In recent years I’ve become more accepting of the word magic as describing something felt and held with a different facet of understanding to the way our experiences intersect with science and reason. An interpretation of something less tangible. Perfectly acceptable and quite necessary.

Magic as I understand it now isn’t about spells or tricks; it’s about presence, about holding a moment or object in a way that transcends its literal nature. Finding the more-than of a something.

It’s mid December and my journal is nearly full. With two weeks to go, tiny loops of cramped cursive fill 50 double page spreads. I’ve written fewer words this year. I created false boundaries to too long writing. The book is small. No rambling essays to self. My journal provides me with a little rectangle for each half of the day. 4.5cm x 3cm. The small space requires a fine nib pen.

I’ve been writing, each morning, my thoughts and gratitudes for the previous day and setting intentions for the one about to begin. Each box holds (I’ve just done the calculation) an average of 55 words. So about 100 words for each day of the year. 3650 words roughly outline my 2024.

For the three preceding years I used a copy of The Daily Stoic Journal. In year one I wrote directly into the journal with a pencil. In year two, I typed year one’s entry into a Google Doc and wrote a further reflection on the day's question then explored and expanded on the ways my response had changed in the intervening 365 days. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all. I did this again the following year. It grew arms and legs.

There is value in the process of journaling and a separate, valuable, introspection in revisiting past versions of one’s own thinking.

I get very attached to the journal that starts every day before me. The objects, the books and documents, become talismanic. Magic? There’s something really powerful about these bound or collected pages as they get toward the end of their allotted time. I feel very connected and close to them. They become totemic in a way I’d not have thought possible in a more cynical past. I feel protective, the Google Doc is backed up in two other places. Maybe I’ll print it. Hold it.

I bought a fresh copy of The Daily Stoic journal for a friend and weighed it. My copy was a gram or so heavier after a solid year of reflection. My ideas had weight. What had existed in my head, as electrical pulses swimming in a wet matter jelly, had taken a form outside of me. It’s as though my reflections give the journal substance. My ideas, just neurons firing in the dark, now have weight, something I can hold in my hands, something I could pass to you.

A large human sensory neuron weighs about 1E-06 grams. Whatever that is. Whatever is that? A single grain of sand weighs about 2.3E-02 grams (23 milligrams) which means a single grain of sand weighs roughly 23,000 times more than one neuron. So that.

Although intellectually I know that most of the weight was ink, sebaceous oil, sweat, tears and coffee drips, there’s still a part of me that thinks of this as the weight of my thoughts. Maybe just because that’s a happier idea than attributing a significant portion of this accumulated grammage to bodily fluids. Gross and beautiful, a happy dichotomy. That’s magic too, isn’t it? How something so ordinary, just paper, ink and sweat, can become extraordinary when it holds part of us. More than just the minerals left after sweat and tears evaporate.

Early modernity and science have sought to make ceremony and ritual obsolete, replacing unknowable, felt outcomes with hard data and measurable results. Have we lost something essentially human? A connection to wonder, to awe. To the possibility that some things can’t be explained but can still be felt.

Knowledge and wisdom aren’t the same. They’re like two intersecting loops, sometimes overlapping but rarely identical. Science, as it leans further into the quantum, shows us glimpses of the unknowable - particles that behave like waves, states that exist and don’t exist simultaneously. Boxed cats. This might be where the old ways and the new converge, where we can see that not everything pre-modern was backward or irrelevant. Some rituals, some magic, connect us to the parts of existence that defy reason and data but still matter deeply to our humanity.

There’s magic in my journal. At the end of the year when I write my last entry I’ll thank the paper and the empty gel pens before placing them on the shelf with all of my previous journals. There can be magic in the way we choose to close doors and put ghosts to rest. There’s magic in our personal rituals and I am very cool with that.

Thanks for reading. I figure out my thoughts and feelings through these posts and I’m grateful for your company and for the conversations that spark from your comments and messages. Thank you and thank you again.

Thank you to my wise and spiritual friend for sharing her story with me and for granting me permission to share a little moment of it here.

Do you journal? Do you have a particular practice? How do you feel about the book you put your meditations and reflections in?

I’d love to know.

The Variable Frequency Lambie

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