My heart has known magick. My heart has also seen miracles and felt betrayal and known hope.
I have found it in the places I have been afraid to travel to and where I have arrived, with a plan or not. (With the right things packed, or not. Usually not. Last time, I forgot a hairbrush.)
My heart knows when something is calling and when something is asking for me to extend beyond the space of what I think is enough.
Beyond what the world tells me is enough or plenty.
Or too much.
Sometimes I need to get a little lost to find what I’ve been looking for.
Sometimes I am lucky to get so lost.
Finding the Heart and the Love Spell
I’ve recently returned from Australia, from a land I have visited and made magick on, from a community I love dearly (more so with each meeting), and from a camp theme of Aphrodite. How could I not fall in love with it all? How could I not fall in love a bit more with myself? With the world? With the gentle rise and fall of flirting and falling into the arms of those who know my heart, even if they don’t know anything else.
I don’t mean to have any answers right now. The first thing I do when I come home from teaching at witchcamps is unpack my luggage. Truly. The very first thing I do is take everything out of my bags, start laundry, put things where they live, and arrange the blessings I’ve brought home. But I don’t make any sense of it. I make room for what has come home with me, what has become a part of this home that feels strange and liminal and different now.
I remember the scurry of magick and the loudness of wounds begging to be healed and the ways that spontaneous dancing brings me home to myself. Brings me home to a self that I thought I had lost. That I had forgotten. That I had cast aside in service of vows and appearances and wanting so badly to be accepted for what someone else needed.
When I unpacked this time, the ocean of grief and gratitude burst from my face. A smile that remembered hands on my forehead as I tried one more time to resist being Love itself.
I fell in love again.
This Dance of Desire and Destruction
It started with a slow swell of relief for arriving safe and sound (as my flight had been canceled a few hours before I was meant to leave). The swell turned into a rocking wave of comfort from dear beloveds who collected my tired body from the airport. Fed and held, I looked out the window at rainbow lorikeets and listened to the bubbling of water, sinking into the edge of the couch where you could find me every morning. I find new rituals and sit spots wherever I go.
The waters rose in the meeting of faces and bodies, the ones who laughed and cried and planned and bonded across screens and timezones. The first embrace of flesh and finding out how tall everyone is when we’re not seated and trying to will Zoom to stay steady. I didn’t realize how much I’d been apart from people, from beloveds. I didn’t realize how much I had missed THIS. This coming together. This recognition and reconnection, even though we hadn’t met, I could feel these hearts.
And the altars and the string and the ribbons and the chanting of words made the proper length to encircle the hips of Aphrodite. And the spontaneous ritual, the way we could go to the liminal places together, carrying trust and trauma and gently allowing shared knowing to wrap through and around. We knew just enough and let the rest take the time it needed to open the door and settle in.
The movement of body to road through green upon green, ghost lakes, and the blue sky giving way to clouds that stretched out, making themselves home, calling themselves home again.
Just the Beginning, After All
I unpack when I first get home from trips like this, making space and making way for what I have carried and what did not come back with me. This is a dance, a slow dance where I am putting my hands gently on the shoulders of a nervous dance partner. Except they are me and they are not nervous, just finding the curve of softer shoulders. New.
Falling in love with it all, with me, with you, with the world that breaks my heart daily, with the grief of knowing I will lose all that I love…eventually.
This magick is the love spell. The spell that works for a while, for a time.
I have fallen in love with what is, with what REALLY is. With the roses that unfurl and unfold and drop their petals too.
With the roses that stained that dress. With the roses that came home smushed between journal pages, the pages that collected pieces of Aphrodite’s stories, the ones that travel the curve of pearls and the long stretch of ocean. The ones that still arrive as fragments, the ones that settle into the spaces I carved out in anticipation.
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