A young person of my acquaintance has been ranting and raving lately about someone who is Pagan, which apparently goes against everything said young person believes in and is the cause of much distress for them in a FAUX News kind of way.
Fortunately, they have not seemed to notice the Broom hanging in my entryway, or the numerous pointy hats sitting around on shelves, or the Moon and Star theme in much of the artwork around here, or the Green Man or the Guardian Spirits or the other “decorative” items scattered about the house. Or, apparently, me being, well, me.
It’s fear, it’s all just fear of something unknown, so I know I have to talk to this kid, explain to them what the objectional person is really doing and how all this stuff really works, which is always like, dude, don’t make me sprain my eyes by rolling them too hard again, please. Deep breath, here we go.
Fortunately, I have spent the latest Covid Avoidance Season reading stuff, and have learned some things. Let me see if I can break it down.
I’ve been reading books on neuroplasticity, forest ecology, mycelium networks, Ayurveda, mushrooms (auto and diesel, if ya know what I mean), entheogens, brain chatter, the microbiome, and how spending time in Nature (the Finns recommend a minimum of five hours per month) can heal stress-related disease. Seriously, what do you think I do, sit around reading romance novels all day?
What do all these things have to do with each other? Well, everything. Or to be more specific, Everything, which is different. I could try to draw all the connections here for you, but it would take five years and a substantial team of researchers and fact checkers, and probably about 489 pages not including notes, glossary, acknowledgements and index. So we’re gonna fly at 25,000 feet here, and get a high-level, big-picture picture, otherwise y’all will TL;DR this thing starting in about two paragraphs.
Here’s the short version for those who have limited time and patience (my fam, truly): As Above, So Below; As Below, So Above. Everything is Connected. We are One. There is no Other. Everything is part of Everything Else. In the Beginning was the Chord.
Got it? Good. Weight off my mind.
For those who want to dig deeper, or haven’t yet internalized all this stuff, or are simply enchanted with the sound my voice makes in your heads when you read my scribblings, I’ll see if I can shed a little more light on the subject.
Forests cannot survive without their mycelium companions, the fungal networks that allow them to share resources like water and sugar and even natural pesticides. If you clear cut an area of healthy forest and burn the ground to “sterilize” it, you kill the mycelium network, and the trees can’t tree without it. Additionally, many species of tree can’t tree without certain other species of tree in the neighborhood, who share resources in a complementary way, and the mycelium network is the medium through which those resources get to where they’re needed.
Think of your brain, and the neurons that fire and signal and communicate with each other constantly. The mycelium is like the neural network of the forest, often called the Wood Wide Web. The forest can’t forest without its brain, just like humans can’t human without their brains, nor can any other living thing. Our gardens need mycelium partners, too, and don’t do well without them. It’s like mycelium is, actually, the planet’s actual brain, in communication with all the plants, and through the plants, the animals.
Because what do you think we eat? Plants! And plants grown in healthy gardens with friendly mycelium are tastier and more nutritious than plants grown on massive corporate farms with artificial nutrients and pesticides sprayed on them. And through the plants we eat (and yes, to a lesser extent through the animals we eat that ate plants before we killed them to eat them) the Earth communicates with us. Through the air we breathe. Through the water we drink. Through the smell of the flowers and the taste of honey.
Through the wind on our skin and the mud between our toes and the sound of the ocean and the green against the blue and the velvety dark sky with a billion pieces of home shining to keep us company.
Let’s pull in a bit now. The human nervous system is a fucking beast that could not possibly have been designed but had to have become, grown, changed, shifted, learned, expanded, over millions of years, from single cell all the way to major multi-cell cooperation and community. It’s dynamic, responsive, and a genius on its own. Are you aware, and I just recently learned this so don’t feel bad if you weren’t, that the “gut brain” is a system of neurons and nerve cells woven through our entire food-tube, from tongue to patootie, that has as at least as many neurons as the brains in our heads? Scientists recently decided that the nervous system of the gut brain is in fact its very own independent thing, now called the enteric nervous system.
When you have a “gut feeling” about something, it’s not just a turn of phrase, it’s an actual communication, a piece of information, originating in your enteric nervous system and being sent up to through the vagus nerve to the head-brain. I think it has to do with eating food from our local area, or drinking local water, or better yet, local honey (bees are such gossips!) which turns on the antennae in your gut brain to receive messages. The gut is incredibly essential, and incredibly smart. We aren’t necessarily what we eat, but we are what we digest. The cleaner we eat the more information we can take in from our gut brain, which is just as smart as our brain brain, and the more we allow it to inform us, the smarter we will get.
The bottoms of your feet are also riddled with nerve endings. This is why and how reflexology is such a powerful healing modality. The amount of information we get about the world through our skin generally, but largely through the bottoms of our feet, should be monumental. Way too many of us spend far too much time wearing stupid shoes or walking around on carpeted floors. Tootsies need to go on the ground more, stretch out those toes, let your feet be feet! I have replaced all my shoes with barefoot shoes and I seriously have never felt more connected.
And do not forget, you have an biofield, too, a system of energy receptors and channels that link in to your nervous system (this connection has been proven through scientific experiments recently done with acupuncture treatments; the subtle energy channels have been verified, and when mapped, matched the ones that our acupuncturist friends have been using for … what, 3000 years now? At least? Gooooo figger!), and provide data to your brain. Our biofields interact with everyone and everything around us unconsciously, but with intention and focus we can cause them to interact with anyone anywhere. They are instantaneous and omnipresent and, if we allow ourselves to open to it (and practice our asses off) they can be nearly omniscient. Our biofields gather data, regulate our moods, respond to the emotions of people around us, and sometimes they can get the lay of the land in order to help us determine what the likely outcome of some situations might be.
The instruments we use to access this information are things like Tarot cards, crystal balls, tea leaves, Runes, pendulums, even the lowly Ouija board. Sometimes we make our own tools, for example I have a set of ogham sticks I made by gathering native sticks and wood-burning ogham letters on them which correspond to trees. Sometimes we feel like tools we make ourselves are more deeply powerful, more attuned to … us and to where we are, our moods, our … ness. And sometimes, people make tools from things like bones, in the belief that the spirit of whatever animal the bones used to be will somehow give them an edge, a better connection. I have mixed feelings about that. Dead stuff is dead stuff, let it decay in peace. But you do you.
So, finally, here’s the secret part, the magic behind the magic: All of it is Us. We’re doing it. And it’s magic anyway.
We are doing it by accessing our ability in interact on a cellular and energetic level with Everything. So literally every single human should be able to do this, in some form. Not all of us can read tea leaves or crystal balls (I suck at that stuff), but there are so many ways to get information, to allow the Earth to communicate through you/to you. The way we shuffle the cards, or the shapes in the fire last night, or the way we’re craving a Honeycrisp apple right now – these things are messages, and ways for the virtual mycelium network of Everything to signal us that there are messages or downloads or upgrades available. When we know that it’s us, it might make it a little less … eldritchly magical, but I think it makes it all so much cooler! I mean, shit humans, we evolved together on this planet with a bunch of other critters, growing these crazy elaborate nervous systems that allow us to access so much information … the minds boggle!
How is it done? Through brainwaves, I suspect. When we close our eyes and slow our breathing, we start running on Alpha brainwaves, leaving us relaxed but alert. This is the stage where we are open to inspiration, to sudden bursts of knowing, to clairvoyance/audience/sentience, to gut feelings and goosebumps. We can keep ourselves primed for these downloads:
- Eat locally grown organic food as much as possible, and drink plenty of water;
- Stay away from things that depress our systems like alcohol, and things that weigh down our energy and feed our bad Karma like meat (red meat is the worst, just the worst, so heavy and so fraught, just leave it be, it’s terrible stuff);
- Spend time working on listening to our bodies, from our heads to our feets.
Following these fairly simple steps, we can greatly improve our reception, as well as the ability to understand what’s being received. I’m like a big damn radio these days, I know stuff all the time. I recently told one of my favorite humans ever (who maybe has stopped reading by now), “If I ever tell you not to get on a flight, don’t get on the flight!” And he said, “I KNOW!” Cuz I’m so radiophonic.
It’s what I do, I make sounds and I know things. So what am I going to tell the adolescent human to get them to chill? Probably all of that. And hope for the best.
We all need to be reminded that we are magic sometimes. I feel you. You’re magic.