Big magic, little magic

The sky is brilliant with the stuff of big magic, dark and filled with lights. If it weren't for the red storm coat that covers me head to ankle the magic would be just cold. For a woman born to tropical temperatures, cold is "not my jam" as writer Elizabeth Gilbert writes. I'm reading Gilbert's book Big Magic, so what naturally happens with me can only be called spillover. Writing this in the very early morning hour the big red coat and my red rubber boots keep me warm enough to keep ahead of the spill. The spill of inspiration is edging out the heavy sour feeling of miserliness that is going around. I woke up to that Scrooge Itch because it had rubbed off on me ...

There are big pohaku, rocks, boiling in a copper bottom pot outside on the hotplate. Those rocks will go into an old wool sock bound at one end with a thick rubber band so the hot rocks don't slip out. Where I'm sitting and writing with my big red coat on is inside the almost-cozy kitchen. Outside is where the rocks boil, I can hear them, and know. It's time to go out there and spoon them out of the water and ladle them into the sock and get them up the hill to a sleeping White Knight who has a need to be rescued a little. That's the big magic.

Many years ago I was in a big bad way, wounded and broken and not at all ready to just keep feeling miserable. I was reading Clarissa Pinkola Estees' Women Who Run With the Wolves and one night I dreamed up a solution and he came floating in my window in a Carhartt coat. Little did I know what that book and that dream would do to the broken pieces of me. I think it good I knew very little about what might happen. There are more than one way to tell the story of being put back together and I have written those stories because as a friend told me while we exchanged good cheer at the meat counter, "We're all myth makers." And that's the big magic.

Who would have known that down the road a piece after a left turn here and another left turn and only an occasional right, that white knight in the Carhartt coat would help build me a wagon to face the trials and adventures of life unpredictable? That's a long sentence but not so long a sentence that it ain't the honest truth, da honest true fac. That's the way my Dad would of said it. In all the days and nights since Pete and I have been together, our relationship has grown in many respects because we take turns being the knight. The idea for this shared role of white-knight-ship came from Elsa who was responding to a man's question. The man signed himself "Left holding the bag". Elsa begins:

"So you heal your partner and you wind up wounded, huh? Well, I hate to tell you, but this “White Knight” thing is one of your jobs out there, so I think you’re going to have real trouble getting out of it..." Elsa continues, "Instead, embrace the idea that sacrificing yourself and “White Knighting” is in your nature. If you can do this, I bet you will find yourself feeling empowered and simply more aligned with everything around you. At that point – Stage Two..." Elsa's parting sentence to "Left holding the bag" is:  "Try a personal ad: “White Knight seeks same…”- to read the whole post link here.

Back to the big dark sky filled with lights. The sky and the stars and planets are so much a part of the big magic that inspires me: that's astrology. There's long been astrology for me to configure the pattern beyond the confusion; but not so much that it leaves no room for the Mystery. I need to swallow life with at least a little bit of magic.

The sky and the moon conspired during the myth making of the life I live with Pete. We learned, together, the value of being homeless while living on the island of my birth. From the car we set up our home for the night and watched the moon, Mahina, rise from the horizon. We had the gift of beginner's mind -- something that happens when you are homeless, or broken, or otherwise bereft of all former sureties, and with those first moon risings we because to count time differently.

To count time differently translates differently for everybody for who can know how the other was taught to count in the first place?  Since I began writing, trying to stay ahead of that spillover of inspiration now three hours in its flow, I hear the sound of traffic outside. The beginning of ferry traffic means time has passed and people in vehicles head off island. When you live on an island and dwell near the only main road connecting the mainland with a large boat that hauls people and wheeled vehicles, you count time by the flow or no-flow of commuter traffic. If you use a Gregorian Calendar (most people do) you mark time according to the tracking of the sun and the numbering of seven days in a week.

If you use a Gregorian Calendar and a Hawaiian Moon Calendar and study astrology and write, the big and little magic of trading off being the knight (black or white or brown or some shade in between) makes for the interesting and creative versions of  life where definitions cross borders and the spill of inspiration ... keeps you vibrant in all seasons. To end this ramble I turn to "Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World" where Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about lichen,

"The forest the lichens inhabit is a richly textured plantscape, but they are not plants. They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga. These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a whole new organism."

"I once heard a Navajo herbalist explain how she understands certain kinds of plants to be "married," due to their enduring partnership and unquestioning reliance on one another. Lichens are a couple in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

That's big magic.