Wayward Witch Part 5
A short essay, in parts, about rediscovering magic.
As you might guess from the previous batch of comics, the last month has been a bit of a rollercoaster. It felt like a good time to break from our typical format and work on something slightly more introspective. The views I describe are just my own, I have no opinion on the validity of others’ beliefs, because who knows? I certainly don’t!
And don’t worry if you’re missing the strip format: we’ll be returning to that this month. A prominent local paper requested that we make a run of strips that touch on life around our city, which is something we’ve been excited to do even before this point, so I’m stoked! I hope you all enjoy them, and thank you for all of your support and well-wishes over these hectic times.
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That pretty much describes how I got into it in the first place. 😉
Don’t forget the realest of all magic:
Human Society.
We have turned fiction corporeal, in so many ways.
Money is human trust so powerful its manifest in numerical form.
Cash is mana-bearing paper charms that can be used to cast spells of summon pizza.
Just as with enough mana a spell can be cast that does anything, so too with enough money it can spent to achieve anything.
Wizards never put a man on the moon, but the US wielded enough money to do just that.
And what is the US but a fictional entity existing only in our collective consciousness. Sure, it was created when a gathering of the most powerful folk in the land waved their inked feathers over an glorified inscription known as the US constitution, but that scrap of paper only works because we can translate dead trees into sound of human calls.
Flowers might not let me understand birds, but even though I’ve never heard your voice, the power of reading let’s me experience your words and I think that’s pretty magical.
Yes 🙂
Our paths are similar. But recently I had another breakthrough: hinduism.
I’ll try to leave it at that as much as possible, because explaining it would take massive amounts of text. Maybe I’ll just mention that at it’s core, hiduism is about living out your own personal destiny and calling, and celebrating your uniqueness and the fact that you’re a manifestation of the divine, a facet of life, like everything that exists. It’s both spiritual and scientific at it’s core, very intuitive, can be viewed as ploytheism, monotheism, atheism, agnosticism, a philosophy or simply a way of living, all of those without contradicting itself. It is non-dogmatic and encourages debate. It is what is talks about: both the infinite complexity and the simple oneness of life. It is the oldest belief system on earth, and has infinite regional and individual variations. The multiple deities protrayed are there solely as metaphors to understand the many facets of the sacred aspects of life, and although some hidus believe in them per se, some reject them altogether, and both are valid ponts of view.
I might also add that it’s the only major “religion” that accepts any and every form of gender/sexual expression/orientation as part of your unique being and the way you are created.
At first I had many misconceptions about hiduism, because like every large belief system, there were some people to turn it around for their profit, which gave rise to cast systems and the like. Also, the homophobia that some hindus carry is merely the result of British colonization in India. But underneath all those distortions is something very wide and beautiful.
I beg to differ. Animism and totemism are waaay older belief systems.
I know how you feel. I’m still looking just because you never know, and maybe because my dad is so Christian that I never got the chance before. However, quantum physics is certainly a fascinating magic as well.
I study object oriented ontology, one of the newest and weirdest philosophies in current time when it comes to interpretation of reality. It basically works off the premise that everything, all things we can perceive, are all we know and that all of it is equal in remarkableness and worthy of attention and reverence. To quote Ian Bogost “All things are welcome equally in the palace of being.” I find magic everyday in just EXISTING. There is nothing not magic about it. I still read tarot, I still ring my singing bowl. But I know that the magic comes from simply BEING. And that is the greatest magic anything can ever have. Existence is MAGIC.
I’ve been reading your strip for years and I feel so close to you guys without ever having met you. But this one speaks so firmly to my heart. I’ve studied wicca for most of my life and it’s something I frequently find comfort in. Yet time has made it much harder to believe in things unseen. Science and astronomy has become a bit of a second wind for my love of the mystical. It’s been an amazing cross over between the seen and the unseen. I adore what you write and I am truly sorry for all the hardships that you both have had to deal with.
I wish you all the best in life and every happiness that it comes with it.
…Why am I crying?