Ordering Reality

I’ve always operated within what could be crudely described as a magical reality.

As a child the mundane world was uncomfortable for me and as I wasn’t equipped to deal with it, I retreated instead into what some people would call ‘the fantastic’, a place I found natural and very comfortable.

Long ago I decided that people fell into three categories (being as human as the next person I too find comfort in titles, definitions and labels although I naturally rail against them myself) of perceiving and ordering reality; political, spiritual and philosophical.Political dealing with relationships with power, philosophical with ideas, and spiritual with relationships with life. Of course there are blurring and cross over of boundaries, esp. as these are all centred around patterns of individual thinking and interpreting. I can relate to all these modes of understanding, however a spiritually constructed world view is what I most naturally and comfortably adopt.

Even the most unsociable amongst us crave identification from others and wanting to find like minded peers is natural.

I’d been incredibly lonely and alienated as a child and when I found people on what I considered to be my wavelength, it was exhilarating.The first group of peers I found,were part of a psychonatic group of drug users in the 1980’s. Intelligent,creative anarchists who were also dreamers, artists,musicians and outsiders.

The perhaps inevitable splintering and destruction of this group later led me to find pagans and magical practitioners of various persuasions who seemed to share my core beliefs.However although we spoke the same language, our different forms of articulating sometimes caused conflict. I carried on searching, eventually discovering that many artists had a similar reality scape to myself but by now I realised that my search would never really stop and I would always be looking for like minds and like perceptions.

When I was in treatment centres I was challenged to find a higher power, something greater than myself that I could hand over the control or lack therein, that I was trying and dramatically failing to exercise over my life.

This treatment centre was hidden in Kent and I would often walk alone in the countryside, in early spring where life is so obviously omnipresent.

It reminded me of being a child and playing quiet games building fairy houses in the very different fields of New Zealand, retreating to a life filled natural order when I was unable to cope with the complexities of the human behaviour around me.

My awareness of life inherent in everything and the belief that these life strands held energy that could be acknowledged and worked with, has always been with me although it faded somewhat during the time unhappiness and addiction were consuming me.

So I sobered up and awareness of life in everything was awareness of a life full of potentialities- full of magic- full of possible transformations, if I so chose them.

So my animist view has always been there in varying degrees. I followed its thread through drug use, through magical practice, through art, and through love.

The world changes, and sometimes it’s grim and sometimes wonderful but following and working with the magic that is in me and around me opens me up to an awareness of incredible force pulsing through everything.

Working with these currents is not a key to an easy life, but simply, an intrinsic part of MY life. Accepting that, is accepting who I am. Once that happened, I developed a strength I’d forgotten I’d had, and a sense of belief in myself as part of a natural sequence, that renders me beautiful.