The Magician and the Childe – Facing the Fears

So many things come to clarity with a reading – with the way the cards fall and the fingers that hold them to the sacred spaces that we hold for the transformation of our selves and their stories. A night ago I had Cassandra do a reading for me. For those who aren’t informed, Cassandra is my fellow alumni from the now-defunct Academy where we studied the mystic arts. She’s a fabulous reader and was the character who arrived for me when I was at the end of my rope in 2022, living in Carnia and needing of a place to land, to return from the twenty-year quest to the sanctuary of Lake Tahoe. Since then, it’s been a three-year journey of organizing my photos and moving through massive initiations to get to the point that i’m at now, realizing that the pattern that i’m negotiating in my own self is the one i’d been negotiating in my self the entire time.

The spread was for the masculine (cards on left side) and the feminine (cards on right side, and no this isn’t about the right/left thing within the body it’s just where we were sitting and the way she laid out the cards), and it really spoke to the idea that the Tower, the breaking of the manmade structures with the lightning and the dove within it was emblematic of my own isolations, my own constructs of limiting beliefs or avoidance of the world as well as questions of agency within time coming to the fore. It had come in relation to my asking “What am I doing with the Mythica?”, for I had felt so many shifts in the structure over so much time, and the Magician had come to the fore as well as the reference to Memory, reminding me (ha-ha) that I had constructed the Mythica to negotiate the challenge of memory, which is to say the limitations of karmic substance expressed as the bonds of our memory and amnesia of self, in a real way – not simply for myself but for others in a structural way, and the various cards around it formed a geometry of meaning, itself within the context of the unfolding Story that is my movement through the skein and the presentation of the Mythica herself. Overall, the reading spoke to my recognition of my own self and how the Mythica was designed, first and foremost, to use my story as a proof of the Quest itself, to be a healing balm for my own self-through-story and through that set the tone for others to explore their own tale, to see the seed within their story wishing to emerge. In this I speak only for myself (in this Now) and feel my own Tower crumbling, the isolation i’ve had and the trauma that sat within my form longing to molt free, the dove kissed by the lightning of Source consciousness breaking the Tower.

Flashback – 2001-9-11 – Fall of the Towers

It’s significant in so many ways. When I first started the Quest in 2002, it had been inspired by the fall of the Twin Towers during the 9/11 event of 2001. I had seen it as the fall of the old paradigm, one which spoke to the collective inspiration to forge our way to a brighter world, and I had subsequently left New York city to track my own way towards that thing. To encounter the card in this moment, in this sequence of revelation, felt a symmetry.

Writing about it is cathartic. Ironic as it may seem, while i’ve built own publishing platform to showcase the journey into the Mythica in real-time, it’s only through such world-rebuilding events as the Tower card that I feel the egress to use my own device in the way I designed her, a thing which speaks equally to the high ideal of creating a space to explore the mystic arts for the community as well as my own resolving trauma.

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.