I’m sitting in stillness. Incense curls in the periphery, music,
noises from the street. A mug of potent green tea. My tarot cards,
bare on the table in their opaque stack. What kind of magic am I
looking for? Say I cut the deck, like so, and turn over the top
card: The Seven of Cups. Exactly what I was thinking. Because, what
of it? What if I could slip from this dimension into another, if I
could step into dream time, if I could construct immersive worlds
and be anywhere and everywhere else than here? Would having this
ability merely put me deeper to sleep? All the fanfare of the
sensory realms, following every pleasure, transforming every pain,
confronting fears, discourse with entities or godforms whose very
cliches blow my mind with sparkling fresh clarities.
And what of the spiritual bypassing this card may represent? Beyond all this mere gratification of the senses, accomplishments of ego, that I am merely identifying with the thought of transcendence to avoid the disappointment of my impotence in achieving material pleasures. Is that the middle cup, shrouded and spiritual and glowy? Or the shadow appraising them all.
Is magic this ability to experience something special or is it a work of alchemy, knowing how to transmute whatever is at hand into something amazing until the point that whatever is at hand is amazing by itself. If so, and I think it may be, then I have work to do. With this transmutation stuff…
“Maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall