The Magician and the Childe – Facing the Fears

I don’t consider myself a coward. At least, not all the time. While without doubt i’ve lived a life of magic and mythology and have accomplished many things, there has always been a splintering linger that sat within me, a question wrought into the somatic language of my body, flickering in and out of perception like wayward lightning. It is a thing of magic, one which holds both magic and majesty … a place where the longings of the soul meet with the hesitations of the flesh, where we discover and uncover the pieces of ourselves that both restrict and reveal who we really are, or at least, who we want to be. Such is a thing I have found to be true by my own reckoning, one that works within all the spaces and the letters that make up up the Mythica.

I had a card reading tonight, with Cassandra. One where I asked what I was doing with the Mythica, and which resounding spoke to my efforts with the tarot card, “The Magician” itself surrounded by a series of cards which suggested a kind of victory, a release from the Tower of my own quizzical imprisonment of inner tides.

The memory card had come up, and with it, a sense of healing, no doubt because the Mythica has always been about memory, about regaining access to one’s memory and to the questions of self that sit within the memory of the skin, speaking to both the frustrations and the possible release of such things within myself as well as to the true name of the Mythica and the breath of that creativity onto the skein.

A fear moves through me as I write this, and it is difficult to consider that perhaps some obscene cowardice has lain within me, festering within both the reality and imagination of a valorous charge, where the hidden depths of my own undiscovered country have worked to protect me from imagined villains and I have fought wars which existed within the shifting frontiers of my own mind.

It seems foolish. Yet there are tremors in my chest even as I write, secure in the sanctuary of my own makings, within the form and format of my own bard’s journey across the Mythica, and I divine my way forward with gasps and trembles, willing my fingers to move with the intent to not only publish my works but to actively and consistently continue to do so, to move beyond the seemingly endless reordering and tinkering of the Mythica into the publishing of my Quest that has always been my heart’s desire, realizing all the while that achieving that heart’s desire means facing the breaking of one’s heart, mending the places where we have become dim within ourselves and in question of our rightful birthright of passage upon the living earth.

The Mythica is, without doubt, a vehicle for healing myself; yet she is so much more beyond this as well, for she maps out not only my journey of healing and integration but that of others as well, her walls and wordings designed to communicate the principles and expressions of our all-too-real passage through the territories of our own resolving self. There is, I find, a humility in this, and moreso a humanity, one which speaks to the childe within me who dared to dream the life of a living story, to be an adventurer on Quest discovering the hidden landscapes of the subtle world, facing and continuing to face the challenges which lay beneath the skin, their true countenance hidden behind the flickering curtain of jailors offering draughts of amnesia and distraction from the true song that pushes to emerge within the darkened halls, that still shivers with trauma long-since buried and gone yet still repeating, strumming the nerves with shadows somehow still lingering within the skin.

I have, I realize, been afraid to present myself. To truly stand behind my own voice and virtue, despite knowing full-well the potency and strength of my own resolve and the virtuous action I have done in service to Story. A phoenix hammers within my chest and I feel myself as a caged thing, prying myself open with the tapping of fingers upon the keyboard in invocations of words made of true things in service to true things. It is a thing of healing, and healing requires facing the painful judgments we make on ourselves on our action or inaction, on the ways in which we orbit around what we want and to the draughts of forget that claim protection through a prison.

I don’t mean to dissemble, not to myself nor to others, for all things are things of magic, and so I write such that honesty sears myself into remembrance, that there is allowance of that childe within that dreamed and believed and somehow got caught in the tangles nonetheless. I had wrought the Mythica as a healing balm, a way of recovering and restoring my own memories, of bridging the splintered self back to wholeness through the power of Story, and so it is by story that I may find liberation from my own shadows. In this there is nobility, for it is the Magician freeing the child within, using the techniques and talents of a heart able to forgive itself for it’s own protections, for it’s own reserves and deflections and for the question of time gone by in dancing shadow. I do not like that it has taken me this long to present myself to myself, nor the feeling that I have battles yet to face to find my true face beneath the wrinkles of age and lost moments, yet I face as I can, picking the locks of my own mind with keys of shimmering verse.

The Quest continues, as it must, and so I publish, if for no other reason than simply to allow the ink to flow, to pump and pulse in heartbeats of recall across the skein in service to a new dawn.