When Childhood Magick Resurges
Grounding into the little, and not so little moments of wonder - even in times of objective fucked-up-ness
It’s been a hot minute.
Hello. How are you?
How’s your body feeling today?
What’s your spirit asking for right now?
I’d genuinely love to know. Do feel free to send me an email about it.
I’m re-committing to writing here more, particularly as Meta platforms are becoming more and more hostile towards our very humanity in general, and more and more openly fascist and dangerous.
So if you’re here, thank you! Yay! I’m excited to get to know you better, and for you to know me better too.
A general overview of the last couple of months would be that it’s been challenging… and educational.
I’m coming out the tail end of an incredibly stressful time - lots of conflict, housing instability stuff, and finally moving to a new home - and I’ve been FEELING IT.
For the bulk of the past few weeks, I’ve been experiencing a boiling, fiery, incredibly exhausting rage. It was a primal feeling, a hardcore FUCK NO from my body.
This wasn’t the kind of rage we celebrate, as we joyfully reclaim its expression from a stifling and repressive patriarchy. This was a petty, vindictive, and overwhelming fury at someone peeling a potato the wrong way.
It’s been… interesting.
I just let myself feel it, knowing it would pass, and recognising that fully acknowledging the intensity my body was experiencing was what it needed most.
It’s wild to think that just a few years ago I would have repressed the fuck out of that rage and shamed myself for it unrelentingly.
Even more wild to think that a few years before that, that intensity would have showed up as extreme rigidity and restriction around food and exercise, and obsessive calorie counting.
Wild that sometimes, recovery looks like celebrating feelings of intense vindictiveness and anger.
“I’m being a petty bitch, yay! Recovery is so thrilling!” - how bizarre.
I love it. I love all the weird and whacky ways recovery shows up.
And the way that magick and wonder always seem to weave their way into it.
I grew up in the Australian equivalent of a ranch town in northern NSW.
Bundjalung land.
The back gate of my house opened onto cattle pastures and paddocks that stretched on for miles and miles - well beyond the visible horizon.
When we were small, my brother and I would hop the fence and explore those paddocks for hours and hours at a time.
Climbing the ancient trees and making forts out of dead branches and old cow skulls.
Our home was volatile, so we’d escape out to the fields a lot.
For both of us, these are our happy childhood memories. For both of us, these are some of the only memories of our childhood we’ve retained.
Twice a year, the black cockatoos would migrate overhead. Hundreds of them, singing their haunting song, so many of them that it felt like the song would go on forever.
That birdsong, in that field, the sun setting, a chill of winter in the air, cattle skulls casting long shadows across a cold and dusty ground - it’s one of my earliest experiences of *visceral* magick.
That awed feeling you get when you look divinity in the face.
Since I moved into a little mountain village recently, I’ve been seeing black cockatoos again for the first time since that field.
Hearing their cries brought back everything.
Maybe two days after I moved, I got a message from my brother - telling me about a walk through the bush he’s recently taken. The smells of all the different wild flowers at sunset, and the husks of fallen trees, reminded him of the old fields we used to play in.
“I haven’t thought about it in years, but those times really were the best weren’t they?”
Yea Little Brother. They really were. I’ve been thinking of them too.
I love that the magick of those old fields pulled us both back there at the same time - after so many years where neither of us had thought about it.
Life is a wonder, sometimes. 🐦⬛🖤