finding the magic again ✨
On this day of Epiphany, I charge you to reclaim the magic of your life.
My lovely ones,
There is a little doorway each year when beautiful things are imminent, a space of liminality where something is on the verge of becoming.
Traditionally, this first week of the year has been a time of noticing. Not rushing with the fire of a thousand passions, but slowing into the skin to find an openness, a softness, a sense of place as we stand between what was and what is still forming. These ineffable days of a new year are resplendent, glimmering with desire, and it has been pulsing within me to share with you.
Today marks Epiphany on the Christian calendar, but despite how it sounds, it is not about sudden answers or immediate clarity. Epiphany is about intuition, and what happens when you let it lead you. It’s about flesh forming around the baby-like hopes that you have as you move into a new world. Because a new world is being birthed, each day, each hour, each moment, and you are at the helm of creation. Not an actual world, you understand. It is a new world born through new eyes. Eyes of beauty, grandeur, and magic that creates a world in kind. A magic emerging from the wild imagination of one who is devoted to life.
Everyone wants to experience that hidden magic of life but no one knows what it feels like, tastes like, or sounds like anymore.
Perhaps it was the waiting that stripped devotion from our lips, ripping hope from our hands. I have waited; all of us have. Many of us have learned to prioritize efficiency over attention in these seasons of survival. We have numbed, rotted, blacked out. Wonder has been sidelined; meaning, deferred. But this week arrives to tell us that meaning is not generated by doing something over and over. You won’t find it in your new daily disciplines alone. It emerges through presence and the willingness to see through the eyes of your highest devoted self.
Let me tell you about the first time I tasted a tomato in Spain. I remembered something of how a tomato should taste. Ribbed, round, swollen, full of ripeness and covered in dust, I sliced it into oblong circles and laid it down onto a piece of salty buttered bread. My body remembered, though perhaps it had never really known what a tomato should be like. Modified into oblivion, all I had before was a dull, dry red thing lacking life and sensuality. All of its loveliness removed, all of its imperfections hidden, the tomato had lost its magic. But aha, here I hold this imperfect child and all life floods back to me.
I look around at the people who occupy this moment in history alongside me and wonder when the modification began. All their strangeness exchanged for conventional ideas of beauty. The same triangle scarves, the same outfits, the same eyebrows. Sameness is omnipresent. Sameness is our belonging. Sameness makes us presentable, desirable, delectable. We have become perfectly little tomatoes waiting for someone to select us. Sameness has destroyed our magic.
Oh, I am sure many things have robbed us of our magical sensibilities other than following trends or watching our words. Our taste buds diluted through the consumption of the same old things. Our eyes bludgeoned by a deluge of images reflecting the same desires. Our ears burning with the sounds of the status quo.
What shall we do to reclaim a life of magic?
Epiphany offers a modest but consequential proposition: enchantment is not lost, only a little neglected. Recovering it doesn’t require certainty or belief or clarity or the answers. It doesn’t mean you throw the scarf away (I myself have one). All you need is a little willingness to attend to your own intuition, and to follow where it leads you, even if it seems to go where you have not yet ventured.
Can we agree to do this together? I hope we all become the cauldrons where fear softens and sameness dissolve to create a potion of ecstasy. May this be the year you lift the veil of conformity to reveal a sense of self defined by what makes you roar with laughter and cry tears of joy. A self more true and honest than you’ve ever been. A bumpy, imperfect, delicious, ripe and abundant self.
Do you know something about magic? It’s gratuitous; excessive. Magic is rarely how we define a cloudy winter or water from the tap. Magic isn’t some ordinary baby in a manger — it’s the resplendent flesh of a long-awaited hope. It’s those sumptuous moments when the ordinary breaks open to reveal something glimmering within it. A nearly undetectable miracle. A sun shower sprinkling gold onto everything. A full moon across a sheep-filled verdant meadow. It’s that wonderful alchemy that happens when you look long enough for God to show you his hand, but only for a brief moment, before he shuts it again. It’s an abundance of wonder that emerges from within you when you perceive it.
If you want to make this a magical year, break open the ordinariness of your life. Forget homogeneity and move from your usual rhythmic inertia. Distrust the voices that want to modify you; water you down; rid you of the wilderness.
I am creating magic:
I am dancing in the mornings
I am wandering streets at twilight
I am writing poetry no one will see
I am wearing lipstick and not leaving the house
I am making tea in a silk robe
I am speaking without regret
I am making flower arrangements
I am smiling at strangers
I am seeing faeries in the flowers
I am bathing in milk and salt
I am reclaiming myself
I am creating a world anew
xx