Magick is Real and You Are IT.

Will You Let Yourself In?

Illustration by David McCall Johnston

You. Yes, you. Who is your muse? Where does she come from?

You, with those deep eyes and that fire burning in your belly and that longing. Oh, the longing, dark and mysterious and tantalizing. The longing. Illuminating, it consumes your being. Light and heavy. Unnamable everything. Sometimes the only thing that makes sense is to rip your heart, thick and beating and bloody, straight from your chest — to give as an offering. Where is the lover who will devour this, all that you are? This magick. You wonder silently, you scrawl into journals, you think and think and think. You drive yourself crazy. What does it mean? Where is the one who will love me?

You want to be eaten. You want to give, and give, and give again. Inside of you, there is a river coursing. A love so powerful, so rich, so full, it pains you not to pour it. But where? What to do with this abundance? The fruit of your soulbody. Ripe with passion and a nectar so sweet even the bees would stray from their queen for it.

You want dark jazz, poetry dripping, love like honey from your devil’s tongue. You want to be seen — to open wildly, to be felt for miles, through eternity. You want something mythic. Transcendent and joyful and grounded and buoyant. You need this like oxygen. This tension. It is the pulsing beneath everything. This eros. This life inside you. This longing. This void of fullness. This, wanting, yearning to come alive through your being.

You have access. Where is the key? There is no lock, no key. Breathe. You have your body. Soul, power, wisdom. Aliveness. You have your erotic mystic. Your love hymn. Your epic poem. Your divine comedy. Your myth. All here. All in your body. This is the burning. This is the heart’s yearning. This is IT. You are IT.

You are it. Where is it hiding? Is it a game? Seek and you shall find it?

I’ll tell you a story.

•••••••••

When I met Luke, I already missed him. To the very core of me, I knew him. My whole soul sang, this is the man. My soulmate. This is the man I’ve been with beyond time. I went through phases of believing. Are there soulmates? Does anything matter? Is magick real? Is god dead? I went through all this questioning as I came to know him, came to know myself through him, stripped naked, coming closer, coming to the edge, jumping into darkness. 

I went through all of this as I questioned relentlessly who I wanted to embody. How many facets? Was there a right answer? Was there a limit?

I tried, at first, to be safe. To be mechanical. To strip it all away, the poetry, the music, the flowers, the jewelry. I tried to break it down into bits and pieces and tell myself, “This is it, this is enough. This is all I need to give.” But you know what? It wasn’t enough. Not even remotely. I wanted to be decorated. I wanted to be cherished. Oracle. Creatrix. Mage. Sorceress.  I wanted to be lush and rich and I wanted to give form to the formless. I wanted to become what I sensed. I wanted the process. 

Soulbody. The term expanded through my willingness to let myself in. Visions. Clearings. The limit does not exist?

Devotion. It wrecks me in the sweetest way. Devotion not to one thing. To becoming. More loving, more magick, more soul, more depth, more connection, more facets. The whole damn disco ball. A universe inside me. 

I noticed. I let it happen. All of me wanting all of me and all of him allowed to see.

At every turn of more of me I questioned — will he still love me? What if I am too much? What if I get rejected? What if he thinks I’m fucking insane? What if he doesn’t meet me? What if he doesn’t see? Soft folds in consciousness. Layers revealing no limits.

My shadow selves roared and screamed and wanted to be witnessed. I held them. I wept. I threw tantrums (I still do). It gets messier the deeper we go. I take a stand for who is coming through me, making magick through my body, my instrument. Turning darkness into light. Pain into love. Breath into form.

•••••••••

Ten years ago, my only move in the face of doubt was to collapse on myself in an impenetrable heap. Retreat from my yearning. Bury myself, become a black hole of desperation. I’d die before I’d stand firm in my knowing, so afraid of light shed on my devotion. A hidden world was all I had.

What I did was put all my power in a man, a relationship. What I did was let my worthiness rest in others’ judgements and expectations. Then I learned, through many trials, this was not the way to the water. Then I learned to make wine.

•••••••••

When I was five or six, I watched myself in home videos, stories playing on repeat, vivid images of me, hurt. To a child’s imagination this is a strange thing. As a woman of 33 I contemplated this, my first memory, watching myself with an arm broken, wailing, laughter in the background, being recorded. Then naked in a sink after some surgery I don’t remember; my spine needed fixing. And at the kitchen counter, about to bite into fluffy fresh bread, my hand slapped away from my hungry mouth. To a child’s imagination, what does this mean? My pain is the only thing about me? My pain is what makes me, me? My pain is funny? Important? My hunger is wrong? My body is broken? 

They are watching.
Something is wrong with me.

Imagine the shadow cast over a life. Imagine the scenes recreated. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe you lived a similar thing. I wrote the horror story several times over. Dated insufferable men. Evil men who hurt me, one with a snarling grin that still makes me want to stick a stiletto through his throat. Men who thought I was their property, their plaything, their little doll to toss around. Men who punished me for smiling. For being me. Of course. I was the one really doing the punishing. I didn’t know any better. 

I starved myself because it hurt too much. I wanted to not think. You know, the brain consumes 30% of the body’s calories. If you don’t eat, you can’t think straight. But you can still think. Mostly into dark holes with no exit. Mostly you can’t let anything out. Mostly you just keep hurting yourself to try to remember you’re alive, you’re here somewhere in this skin. You must be. There must be something else. There must be more. You sense something. So subtle. So small. So fierce. Piercing. A small echo that brings you to your knees.

One day I started eating again. I put on makeup. I put on new clothes. I let myself be radiant. I wore four inch stilettos. I was taller. My toes hurt, but I liked it. A couple months later I left the rage filled ex fiance. This isn’t a coincidence. I lacked nourishment. I gave it all to him, naively thinking he might change if I caved to his every whim. I thought that’s what devotion was. Well it was devotion, but to the wrong thing. To his power over mine. I took it back. Packed it up in a suitcase and off I went, beginning a new story.

•••••••••

Lost in the wiggly abyss. There were many trials here, too, in this space of freedom. In my mind freshly opened to the fact of choice. My body now mine. My life now possibility. It took a few more years to realize I was still trying to get a man to tell me who to be. I tried on different personalities but all of them remained on the bottom step, looking up to a man on a pedestal. Everyone was bigger than me, knew better. I was still a child in a woman’s body knowing nothing of my power except that men wanted it and that when I gave it it hurt and that was familiar. Until it became something different.

When did the shift happen? I met a man who said he loved me. He didn’t know what that meant, to love a woman like me. Here I was now pouring my heart out, actually. Writing novels. Writing poems. Coming alive. Wanting to show myself. Into the light, all this darkness. All these cast away parts. At first it was wonderful. Then he dropped me and ever so fragile I shattered into a million pieces.

I did a lot of LSD I did a lot of mushrooms I smoked a lot of weed I drank a lot of wine but there were too many calories and I didn’t like being dizzy I tried starving again I tried to make believe I tried to keep writing stories I tried poetry I tried music I tried. I kept trying. I tried everything to keep feeling what I had been feeling when he was there and I was there and I thought a connection was there. But it was gone. It was never there.

I left. I stopped putting substances into my body. I stopped putting a veil over reality. I felt my pain. I felt years of pain pouring out of my body. And then I felt space. Slowly I felt myself emerging from another hiding place.

In his absence I realized the power dynamic. It was the same. I was naive to believe words over actions. He was taking my power, taking advantage of my willingness, my loving, my sensitivity, my depth. Not loving back. Just taking.

He tried to contact me. I felt nothing. Not nothing as in nothing, nothing as in nothing. Full of hurt nothing. Vapor. A mirage. The trick revealed. Poof. My power back to me.

•••••••••

There was only one choice. Devotion to my body.

Years of that. I thought nothing was happening. I kept practicing. I was yearning, on my knees, writing my dreams, crying, creating, loving myself, wanting myself. Where was my pleasure? How many layers of pain above it? Where was my lover? Where was the man I knew? Where was he? I pleaded to god to the earth to the water to the fire. I burned incense I wrote poems I wrote Spells I burned paper I picked flowers and pressed them in pages.. I danced. How I danced. I felt my magick. I believed my magick. I believed it when I couldn’t see it. I kept feeling. I kept yearning. I never stopped yearning for the magick love I knew was real.

One day Luke showed up to love me. Me. The one I’d been becoming. The one I was still becoming. Still am becoming. Was I ready for this? At first I didn’t believe it — my mind didn’t anyway. My mind protested. The parts that still believed I am pain protested. My mind tried to spin me into a sticky black web. I breathed. My spine grew taller. My feet sunk into the earth. 

He wasn’t hurting me. What did that mean?

My body was stronger than ever. More alive. More feeling. I didn’t know it then, but I could barely feel a thing.

My body knew something was happening. I felt it creeping through my awareness, at first subtle. Then roaring. Love growing. My power returning tenfold. My power overflowing. My body, my emotions overflowing. I was singing. I was singing? Out loud, my voice returning. Is this what love is? Is this what I was on my knees for, praying for years, waiting patiently, loving myself, my body, believing in magick, becoming magick?

The first time he touched me was electric. I can still feel him dragging my skirt up my legs, his hands not even touching my skin and I was dying with wanting. I loosened. I breathed. I opened my longing. Unleashed. For the first time, with him inside me, I breathed into my belly. I had never done that, pressed my belly my breasts my lips into a man. Breathed him in. Received all of him. How could I when I hadn’t received all of me? How could I when I couldn’t feel my body?

He filled me. I let him in. My heart broke open. This was five minutes after walking in the door. This was my shoes still on. This was the lover I needed to become.

My heart breaks open every day, making space. Letting go of pain. Letting more love in. Letting myself in. Letting him in. Smiling. Playing. You know, I’d never done that either. Maybe not even when I was a child. I don’t remember playing. It was all so serious till love filled my body. Now I am changed irrevocably.

Let me tell you something.

You are the poetry you write. You are the lover of mythic proportions. You are all of it. It doesn’t have to stay on the page. You don’t have to stay on the surface. You don’t have to stay hiding in stories. Go deeper. Pray with your whole body, whole being. Give yourself to the process. Trust your devotion. Become the love you seek.

x Faye

P.S. Listen to these songs

Hi, I’m Faye! Here, we get weird and wonderful and a little naughty on the path to personal empowerment. And we do it through the language of the body. We move from prescriptive to expressive. From obedient to deviant. From copied to embodied. 

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