...and the Art of Magic

...and the Art of Magic

by GinaMarie Byars, WWRL Chair
(written for Love Letters)


What is Magic?

One definition of Magic is:  “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”

What is your magic? What is your gift? What influence over the course of events are you wielding? Is it caring for small beings? Is it dancing? Or cooking? Or seeing what is needed at just the right time.

What is your talent? Maybe sitting with the dead? Or designing amazing websites? Or listening to others? Is it developing ceremony, full of beauty and complexity? Or teaching and helping others come to better understanding of what you’re teaching.

What is your connection to Magic? What is your passion? Is it crafting the most appropriate spell for this particular moment? Is it concocting the best potion and tincture to carry with you on any given journey? Is it storytelling? Or standing for those who are unable to, working to make the world a better place.

What is your magic?

Your talents, your interests, your passions…All these things are magical! All these things are imbued with the absolute essence of being.

For magic to truly be magical, it must be ours. We must connect to it on a subatomic and visceral level. We have to incorporate it into our very being.

Take any given ceremony. Each person comes to it in completely different ways. Every molecule we hold within our existence plays upon the elements of a ritual and affects it, shifts it, minutely changes it to be uniquely ours. Every person has a slightly different experience and walks away changed, adjusted, transformed—in their own way.

So what does that mean? It means we have the opportunity, and the obligation, to participate in beauty. And in a beauty-filled way. It is up to each individual to create and participate in magic—however we interpret it. It isn’t necessarily about doing something exactly how someone else says to. (Many of us have chosen to walk away from various dogmatic traditions for exactly that reason!)

It is up to each individual to give transformation meaning. It is up to each person to interpret what change means. When we do that, we become the architects of being, the creators of existence, the inventors of our descendants.

And that is Magic. That is Alchemy. That is Art.