Sometimes I hate the world. Sometimes the bitterness and the hatred become too much, suffocating my breath, tightening my chest and throat. The shell I build around myself is meant to protect me, to keep away all the bad of the world so that I can find some desperate thread of peace among all the noise and chaos.
Quiet, just a little quiet…
The darkness within my shield doesn’t bother me; I’ll take it over the view outside. But sometimes, it gets lonely. No – not lonely. It’s not a loneliness I feel. It’s an overwhelming awareness that my vibration doesn’t match this place; that I’m not where I’m meant to be. It’s that inexplicable sense of detachment – the one that feels more like you’ve been severed from where you belong, with no idea how to get back, or even recognize which direction to run in.
Breathe, just breathe…
And always there, somewhere in the dark with me, a flicker catches my eye. As sharp as a candle’s flame, as fleeting as a faerie’s wing. Like a star, that may or may not be real.
It distracts me from the chaos outside myself. The white noise of screeching metal and unanswered screams seems to move away from me, until it drifts into a distant silence as my inner child lifts her head curiously.
It flickers again.
Now it has her attention, and the outside world vanishes. My awareness settles comfortably into her curiosity, watching patiently through her eyes as she seeks the light we know she saw.
Pretty little light, where did you go? she wonders.
It comes again – like glitter raining across a shadow.
It whispers to me – to her – “Come away…”
Her natural child’s instinct pulls her forward, as though the light reached out and gently grasped her heart. She allows herself to be led, reality forgotten; abandoned in favour of where the pretty little light may lead.
“Come away…”
This is the power of magick.
As I sit in silence, eyes closed, world shut out, my inner child remembers the simple, undefiled, always happy act of play. She’s unaware of all that lies ahead in her life, between the clumsy steps she takes following a butterfly to the clumsy steps I’ll take following my will to survive. She knows nothing of the pain she’ll endure, the screams she’ll release, the words that will tear her apart. She doesn’t know that instead of wishing the night would last forever, she’ll fear the morning may never come. She carries none of these shadows. None of these burdens.
She is free.
Because instead of trying to understand the light, she chooses to trust it. She doesn’t know what it is, but its presence feels good to her, and so she follows it. There’s no one to tell her to be careful, to hold back, to fear what she doesn’t understand. So she listens to the voice of Spirit, the whisper the Great Mother placed in her heart before she ever graced this earth, and steps deeper into the mystery as her curiosity evolves into adventure.
This is the power of magick.
The light becomes steady, a way becomes clear, and soon she’s wandering through the gracious golden light of another world, one where she is welcome and nothing can hurt her.
What I wouldn’t give to have her spirit now, to know that at any moment the power is in my hands to move into a better place, even a pretend place, just for a while, just long enough to remember that not all is lost, not all is harrowing.
Is it wrong to pretend now? To imagine something better? Something magical?
Is it acceptable if I call it meditation instead? Is that not what meditation is? Using my mind’s eye to envision something beautiful? To release the hold of the real world and let myself sink into a higher awareness, where anything is possible? Where the very definition of real is turned on its head?
Is it appropriate only if I label my imagination with a term understood by adults?
Or is it safe to awaken my inner child? To brush the sleep from her soft eyes and watch her come alive with anticipation of a new day? A new adventure? To allow her to trust her feelings to create a world she desires to witness? To play in?
Is it safe to be so free?
I wonder as I watch her run through fields of wildflowers, her laughter echoing from dancing trees. I long to follow her, to abandon all expectation in place of a truth that all is well. To rewrite reality to compliment my heart and spirit instead of suffocating them.
But is it safe, to be so very free?
I watch as starlight dances from her fingertips and she shrieks with delight.
Then, back with me where I watch in the distant dark, the light draws near again. It beckons, tugging gently at my heart.
Is it safe? I wonder, unsteadily unfolding from my place on the ground, to stand uneasily on my feet.
The light is warm, its grasp soothing, comforting, nurturing, as it weaves around me, always gentle, always whispering.
“Come away…”
I hesitate. I hold my breath.
The desire for peace is overwhelming.
The pull to freedom so intense it promises an impossible cocktail of deep rest and divine ecstasy.
“Come away, O human child.”
I run.
Forever running, with faeries and wildlings and wolves,