People write about magic a lot; but they don’t write about how it feels.
I guess that’s because they think it’s too hard. How do you describe colour to a person who’s always been blind? How do you describe the sensation of a muscle moving in your arm to a person who doesn’t have limbs? But the greatest thing about language is how we can share experiences which to others are impossible – how we can live lives which to us are unattainable.
So I’m going to try.
You know that feeling when you walk down the street at night, and you realise that someone is walking behind you? You’re listening to music on your headphones, completely insulated from the outside world, so you know you didn’t hear them. And you couldn’t have seen them, they’re behind you, definitely not in your peripheral vision. But somehow you were aware of them, you felt them in a place you couldn’t touch or name.
That’s where magic sits.
When you aren’t using it you can still feel it – you’re aware of it. Everyone who knows magic knows when it’s there, and when, rarely, it isn’t. I’ll call this awareness the whisper, though I hope I’ve described it accurately enough that you’ll understand it isn’t really an auditory experience.
If you’re one of those gifted people who can feel the whisper, the first step towards using the magic is the gathering. Magic is essentially energy, but think of it as energy that you can feel, that has a presence that is directly synonymous with physicality – but only the non-physical part of you can touch it. Imagine another skin layered on top of your own, just as sensitive, just as expansive; and this second skin is the one that can feel magic. They interact with each other in exactly the way your hand interacts with a cup of tea; but like pretty girls who know it, they only interact with each other.
This second skin can be manipulated, moved, the same way your arm can; you cause it to happen in the same way you might decide to lift your hand and scratch your nose, but you don’t feel each muscle tense and pull. You can isolate the movement if you try, break it down, learn it, but usually it’s a more instinctual response; cause and effect, action and reaction. This second skin reaches out for the magic and wraps it around you like vines in fast motion, crawling up the side of a wall. You can feel the connection points, the suckers holding it in place. You can feel it on you, connected to you, but not really a part of you. Magic is always external, a force greater than yourself, but it fits around you like a living glove. Vines. I like that. Vines of power, with a life and purpose of their own, which you can tame if you have the strength.
The next step is release. This is the harder part to describe, I think. Once the vines are wrapped around your second skin, you have to direct them; to decide what the magic will do. Are you using it to tame the winds, or call them up? To curse an enemy or bless a foe? Here I move to sight. Imagine, if you can, a world where you could isolate windows of possibility. Where every time you looked at someone the world split into boxes, and within each box you saw layered colours, and every colour was a possibility. Look at the wind. It could be stronger, it could be weaker, it could be wetter. Each option layers with the world around it, determining how those changes will ripple out. When magic wraps around your hands the world is a fractal. Beautiful, divisive. Deciding what you want to accomplish before you Gather is essential, because after you’ve begun the choices can be overwhelming. You don’t see them with your eyes, of course, but sight is the closest approximation, squares and colours and layers of sight.
Once you’ve chosen your target, the final moment is easy – you breathe. Breath is magic – magic is energy and energy is life, and breath is the fundamental connection to the circle. You breathe in or you breathe out, everyone does it differently, but you just – breathe. And magic flows like water or shifting vines, and tangles itself around your objective.
And maybe, now, when you hear about magic, you’ll feel a little less blind than you did a moment before.
Image courtesy of Julia Roncesvalles. Julia is an art enthusiast from Vancouver, BC. She primarily creates figure and portrait style pieces using pens and inks.