🌕 Surrender (to Magic) Dorothy
it’s a full moon in aquarius 🌕
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
Thank you for the many messages (electronic and energetic) since the new moon. 💛🙏🏾💛 I can’t repsond to every email, but I do respond to comments— and I read everything. I feel immense gratitude for all your kindness and care. It truly means a lot to me.
I have wonderful news! Much to everyone’s surprise, my scans show decreases in cancerous activity. 😮 🥳 😅 Naturally, I’m thrilled. And I don’t know what may come… I am incredibly proud of myself for the ways I’ve met the ups and downs of the past few months & years. Not every moment was/is easy (for anyone!) — I am blessed with deep support for whatever challenges may appear in this life. We all know life eventually leads to death (for everyone!) — I hope, regardless the medical data, I would (and will) be faithful to my commitment to joy and an undefended heart.
Something I like about my current oncologist is her tendency to be both extremely rational and entirely unfazed when things contradict logic. Given the recent trajectory of my other tests, these results do not “make sense.” And this is not the first time my experience defies logic. My body has been through a ridiculous amount of crises & interventions in the past eighteen years. I don’t know exactly why I’m still in relatively good health (but I hesitated when my first instinct was to write magic).
Maybe by magic I simply mean this: continually surrendering to the giant ocean of love which I attempt to feel all around me, and, when I do feel it (even in the midst of ostensibly bad news or terrible pain or heartbreak) discovering grace and beauty. Every. Single. Time.
Yet, it’s often hard to surrender. Though I preach and reach for paradoxes and reenchantment, I find myself constantly seeking scientific explanations and validations for mystery, for magic. [Again, I hesitated writing magic.]
I can say this: I do believe in an ocean of love, which means this: there is something that I have in fact felt but that I find hard to name, so requires a metaphor, and the seemingly unending dark, watery depths from which all life on our planet emerged + love is the first one that came to me (which is definitely a lazy cliche, and I don’t care). As the late, wise art critic, Arthur C. Danto said: We have nothing better than metaphors to use for referring to what we do not need metaphors to recognize as unique. And as my wise friend, Greg, once said to me: There are only two things in life: concepts and mystery.
Concepts and mystery. Metaphors and magic.
Even if my own tendency to be extremely rational often occludes my direct knowing of it, I have sensed the presence of this oceanic-love/magic/mystery — through nature, relationships, meditation, ritual, contemplation, ceremony, art. Through presence. Through intuition. I recognize it everywhere and nowhere: the divine source named by indigenous cultures, wise mystics, and great artists; the unfathomable vastness I glimpse just beyond (or below?) my ordinary sensing; the interconnection I feel with other beings, ancestors, Earth, elements, cosmos.
Bruno Latour, the French philosopher said: A Modern is someone who believes that others believe. Anyone educated in contemporary school systems (which I’m assuming is anyone reading or hearing this) has been taught to believe in the supremacy of scientific materialism, the worldview that 1) physical matter is objective (extremely dubious 🙄) and 2) physical matter is the only true reality (girl, no 🖐🏾). Of course, I understand (and have written about) how the materialism–centric–cosmological–kool-aid has wreaked all sorts of individual and collective havoc, culminating in our current global crises. I firmly believe that this worldview is the foundation for the delusion of separation central to the dominance & destruction within systems of oppression.* The other night, a friend who lives in Miami and works in the book world was telling a few of us about the extent and nefariousness of the Florida book bans and how, along with race and gender and sexuality, they are targeting books about magic. Adherence to the dogma of scientific materialism is not only not going to get us out of this mess (whether the mess is our personal problems or our planetary breakdowns), but will actually lead to more delusion and destruction.
Last week, I began the first session of my current course, Soulful Cycles, by acknowledging how belief in the extremely rational is programmed deep into all of us. I know part of my purpose in writing & teaching is to be a translator between communities and cultures – a connector of concepts. I’m good at this. And I do enjoy it. And sometimes, I just want to do my completely woo mystery shit in a totally woo mystery way and moved to a cabin and speak to the plants & animals and dance under the moon and cast spells and befriend unseen beings and become a weirdo immigrant magical witch living metaphor (bows to those who paved the way for being the bridge to our own power).
I can dream. I can also know that all the magic is always right here (and everywhere). In my Brooklyn apartment. Caring for my plant-roommates and tending to my altars and pulling cards and tracking the sun every afternoon and being with breath, silence, sirens and taking in books, art, music and tapping this out on a magnificent machine which enables me to reach you and dancing, dancing, dancing, and marveling at every single element right here all the time (earth in the floors, water in the taps, fire in the candle, air in my voice reading these words) and thanking the ancestors within & around me.
Metaphors are spells. Writing & teaching are magic.
Also, I pulled the Magic card from an oracle deck right before that first session.
Image ID: An oracle card with a black illustration of a pentacle inside a circle on a purple background; the card has the label MAGIC at the bottom.
This is not a “science is bad” post. Hurrah for human ingenuity! Science has saved my life multiple times. This is a “science isn’t everything and also it’s REALLY fucking hard to undo the conditioning that leads me to constantly seek scientific explanations and validations for the mysterious and magical, because I can never truly surrender to the great mystery if I’m forever looking for concepts as justification, and I don’t want to suppress my inutition any longer, and why do I censure myself in even writing the word magic — like what the fuck kind of colonized-mind nonsense is that?” post.
MAGIC! MAGIC! MAGIC!
Image ID: A GIF excerpt from The Wizard of Oz depicting writing in the sky that says SURRENDER DOROTHY and a reaction shot of l to r, the Tina Man, Scarecrow, Dorothy, and the Lion reacting in shock and fear.
I long to know more intimately the great mystery. Not as a belief, but through an alive, emergent, generative relationship. I long to bravely practice magic. Not in the closet and with trepdation, but out, aloud and proud — filled with deep faith and hope and love. I long to know more intimately the great mystery and bravely practice magic.
May we all lessen our rational defenses as our way forward.
With love
Sebene
* If you’d like to read more on my ideas about this, I talk about it in the first two chapters of You Belong which I’ve linked here.
P.S. There is no paywall here. I appreciate everyone’s presence! And I send gratitude to paid subscribers for supporting different causes each month. July donations in honor of Disability Pride Month will be going out this week to Alice Wong’s GoFundMe and my sister’s community, Camphill Village. In honor of Black August, 10% of August’s paid subscriptions will go to Communities Not Cages to support their efforts to end mass incarceration and overhaul New York’s racist and unjust sentencing laws. Thank you!
I love this message, it so resonates. You always have such beautiful ways of expressing. And I really smiled when you said magic, magic, magic. Which means I listened to this and am grateful for the listen and for the no paywall. I will find ways to contribute. And what amazing health news.
You and your magic resonate with me. I admire your spiritual soulful attitude. Know that I am on your side.