Friday, April 9, 2010

Intimate Magic

No one has ever had to keep this stuff secret, not on the planet like it is. We call this kind of knowing esoteric. There is a big assumption in it. The idea that this knowledge should stay hidden assumes that people undeserving of the power want the power. There is a major discipline and a struggle that comes with it. It is no longer true if it ever was that people would chase this power. People mostly don’t really believe in magic anymore. We don’t even have a good language for it. so far is it from the kind of reality games we play now.

What has happened to me, I have been forced into power because my weaknesses demand its presence in my life or I do not survive. This is an exchange every recovering alcoholic makes in some way. We mostly devise a spiritual process that keeps the power firmly in the hands of God. That is because so many alcoholics are squanderers of power in any form. However, the disciplines are precisely the same if the consciousness permits. Magic is very near by. The power that permits sobriety is the power that opens the door to the deeper realms.

Now you can ask whether I am writing some kind of weird fiction or the truth as I know it. Is this a distinction that matters? To be honest, I have been interested in the realm far longer than I have been sober. There have been other driving forces.

Intimate Magic

It is not the words
that make the change but how you
can be found so near
or far, deep within
the flow of words, a perfume
released in the gaps
between the constraints
of form, perhaps gathered best
when speaking the words
as one would deeply,
so deeply in love with things.
That's where magic is.

May 2, 2009 9:47 AM

10 comments:

  1. You are always welcome here. There is an obliqueness required. Nothing is direct. It is all peripheral. Look in the corners out of the side of your eye.

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  2. Hmmmm. You know, or perhaps do not, that my mother is an alcoholic...and what I find in her is not a squanderer of power but a consumer. My power, her meal. But I reach down the throat of her and take it back, regergitated yes...but still mine.

    As always, I think here Christopher.

    ~ Annie

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  3. Annie, I did not know but am not surprised. That an alcoholic mother "feeds" on her children is so common a theme that it approaches a cliche. There was a way that my dry mother did too.

    She admitted at times that she was far too at risk for alcoholism and so deliberately avoided drinking. She kept an iron discipline that way and would throw rage-outs when she reached her limit. She managed to avoid actual damage in her hysterics but emotionally they were pretty good displays of drama.

    She protected her family fairly well from the holocaust of active alcoholism but it was present in her just the same, inheritances. Alcoholism was and is insidious. You are right, Annie, to point out that there are other issues with power besides its misuse, power on the exhale. There is of course the gluttony of the ingathering, issues of hoarding, and issues of bloat and leaking too.

    AA says selfishness and self centeredness is the root of the trouble, while lack of power is the dilemma of alcoholism. In itself this is not different from the human condition, but it is also the fact that alcoholics are extreme examples of self will run riot. That alcoholics prey on their children is a matter of condition, and not a matter of their intent, not usually, and most commonly this occurs in soul sickness more than it does physically in some way.

    The squandering of power occurs then as often on the intake as it does on the outflow, or it can manifest in the hoarding, or as well in the way it leaks or crushes from the bloated container. It remains focussed as a power dilemma, appears as a violation of boundaries, a kind of thievery, and it requires family structures of some kind as the feeding ground.

    That it continues year after year reveals the position of the alcoholic as a most often unconscious practitioner of "magic", holding the power structure together to the benefit of the disease process. This is why Bradshaw and others pioneered in the seventies and eighties the idea that alcoholism is a family disease.

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  4. To be fair. This is a condition that does not only flow from parents to children. It quite as easily shows itself from children to parents, and from sibling to sibling, and on and on, requiring only that "family" structure is established. It can occur friend to friend or among the employed too so long as the groupings have sufficient intimacy and sufficient lack of escape routes for periods of time.

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  5. Also, the lines of illness become blurred and do not always originate in the alcoholic. The alcoholic can quite genuinely be victimized along with everyone else.

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  6. with magic torch
    tomb's illumination
    does not re-instantiate life
    but rather
    reveals its darkest truth

    it is best not to speak of this
    but know it you will
    and feel the spark of life
    glowing for a mere instant
    when spent glows no more

    yet All is not as it appears
    and Reason does not answer
    what was The Question

    Y

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  7. Natural Order

    All's not as it seems,
    precisely that, infamous
    momentary bliss,
    the taste of lemon
    in chocolate gaberdine,
    a treat from heaven
    dropped into middle
    ground and I standing with you
    at this position,
    deep change in the light
    as you turn in your windings,
    turn in your burnt wings.

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  8. Here are those gaps again, Christopher. I am directly interested in those gaps. I look into the horizon and will my vision to spread to be able to recognize them. I see them in colour from time to time, and sometimes as a fuzzy emanation.

    Yesterday my daughter and I walked through the woods. She is almost ten and she fits against me often. She melted into me as I changed our language to magic. True, it got silly, looking for magical floating coyotes, but still, there opened between us a gap. It wasn't distance. It was closeness.

    Have a beautiful Sunday.

    xo
    erin

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  9. You are right to be so interested in the gaps and floating coyotes are the ones who can whisper the truth more directly than their smelly local cousins who must do it by disturbing chickens.

    When the world demands of you more attention to what is naturally in front of you, then the timing for chasing the gaps between worlds is no longer correct. It is all orchestrated by deeper structures that extend below the crust of the earth, the crust of your own soul.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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