Do
you like to shop? I know I do. What’s not to like, when
we get up every day to a world so rich and exotic in color,
texture and design! The creative genius of the human spirit
is boundless, and our inventive genius and craftsmanship bring
new worlds of possibility to our fingertips every day of our
lives. It is an exciting and beautiful world in which to live
… Until we find ourselves saying, “Oops, I really
shouldn’t have spent that money.” “This is
exquisite, but what on earth am I going to do with it? I have
nowhere to put it, nothing to wear with it. I really didn’t
need it, it was just so pretty.” Then we are off to a
new round of shopping, trying to find something that will make
the last thing we purchased fit into our lives. We are at the
movies, watching other people shop or looking for new things
to interest us. We spend enormous energy watching other people
play sports, and then we spend even more effort buying video
games which we think will somehow, in some small way, put us
in the game.
There is wonder in all of these things, to be sure. When people
like athletes, actors, anyone really, are performing at the
top of their game, they inspire us to test our limits and expand
our experience of the world in sometimes spectacular ways. We
all need art and beauty in our lives and in our homes, just
for the sake of being there. And even the earliest pictoglyphs
show humans adorning our bodies, our gods, even our animal friends
in impressive style.
But is there balance in the modern world? There is a difference
between what we are doing today, in all of our acquisitiveness
and the fantastic pace at which we pursue it, and the way people
adorned their bodies and their world long ago, when we lived
in hunting and gathering societies and drew symbols on our tools
and on our skin to invoke the benevolent intervention of mighty
spirits. When I look at today’s modern world through my
shaman eyes, through eyes that have spent the past 35 years
studying and working with 44 indigenous shaman women from native
cultures in many different parts of the world – cultures
that continue to adorn themselves yet today to honor and call
in the spirit world – I see in our modern cultures a world
that has lost its connection to values and is desperately trying
to find ways to bring magic back into its life.
We who live in this “modern” world are living under
greater stress and chaos today than at any other time in human
history, and that’s a simple fact. My teachers often tell
me that human beings were never intended to live with the kind
of pressure and confusion that we face in today’s world,
and yet here we are. Yet so often our response to all the chaos
and confusion is to go out and create more stress for ourselves,
instead of learning to destress through things like exercise,
meditation, learning something new.
Our beautiful Mother Earth continues to shower us every day
of our lives with a never-ending supply of nurturance and abundance.
Yet still we want more. Only now we are discovering that many
of the resources we have drawn from her to feed our growing
appetites are finite, and we are beginning to discover that
it’s not so easy to put some of these things back. Much
of what we have taken from our first Mother wasn’t put
here to serve the imagination and whimsy of human beings. It
is part of a balance of nature, part of an ebb and flow of power,
energy and life force in the universe and here on earth that
is billions of years old, that we aren’t even close to
understanding.
We see disruption on a spirit level, but there is a disconnect
between that and what is happening in the physical realm. If
only we would pause to see through the eyes of the shamans and
medicine people who have been observing and studying the way
that energy courses throughout the universe for eons, building
on that knowledge to help their communities live in harmony
and balance with natural life force and then passing that knowledge
down from shaman to apprentice, parent to child for tens of
thousands of years.
We are at a crossroads in our world today. A crossroads is a
place of power, a place where important decisions are made.
At this crossroads, we must be careful to make very wise choices.
This is a crossroads that is filled with immeasurable promise
and abundance precisely because of the creative ingenuity of
the human mind. It is a crossroads that is also laced with very
real peril, precisely because of the remarkable ability of the
human being to forge ahead blindly, even when we know we may
well be on a collision course with danger.
I believe it is a crossroads that is inextricably intertwined
with magic. We are at this crossroads in part because our world
has lost its connection to magic and the balance that comes
from simply understanding and accepting the great power of that
which we cannot describe, but which we know exists because it
makes our lives extraordinary. We have lost this sense of magic
in our lives, and we are desperately trying to find it. I think
that our insatiable appetites for “things” is in
large measure a reflection of this loss of magic in our lives.
You can’t buy magic. Magic comes from the soul, it comes
from within the human spirit in that place where we are one
with the Great Spirit and all of life.
What we have done in our frantic dash into the modern world,
with all that entails, is that we have separated ourselves from
the world around us. We have separated ourselves from one another.
We have separated ourselves even from ourselves. And tragically,
we have separated ourselves from magic, from the magic of our
souls. We’ve let literature, art, architecture and music
go from our schools, the very things that teach us about beauty
and the magic of boundless possibility. These are the disciplines
that bring our souls to life and inspire us to greatness, and
we’ve let them go. Beauty is the language of truth, yet
we’ve limited it, sacrificed it on the altar of “perfection”
as defined by a very acquisitive, superficial world that is
bereft of poetic vision. True perfection is so often found in
the flaws, as the flaws within the crystal that give it such
a beautiful, magical prismatic light.
The next time you go looking for magic, please remember that
you cannot buy magic. Magic is what you find in your own original
nature. If you do not believe in magic, your life will not be
magical.
Magic, like the power of Stonehenge, is part of the unknowable
– that which you cannot describe, but which exists and
makes your life extraordinary. It is part of the goodness of
your spirit. It is that mysterious and intriguing part of your
spiritual life. Magic is what we are all looking for, but if
you try to hold it and name it and describe it, you will lose
it. You must journey around magic, describe what led you there
and give thanks for that part of the universe that is unknowable
and full of color, strength and magic. Out of relationship comes
magic. Out of the friction of forgetting and remembering comes
magic. Out of the mists of dawn and the mysteries of creation
comes the magic that we call life. Out of your passion for existence
comes magic.
(“Magic,” from The Power Deck, Cards of Wisdom,
by Lynn Andrews.)
Author
of the Internationally acclaimed Medicine Woman
Series, Lynn Andrews who has spent the last 25 years studying
with shamanic women on three continents. Lynn V. Andrews is
the best selling author who shares her ancient teachings of
shamanic training. Lynn V. Andrews brings spiritual tools and
compelling techniques for healing from the spiritual realm to
the modern everyday physical world. Her techniques use the power
of thought to take you beyond self limitation to other realities.
Lynn
Andrews: 21st Century Shaman and mystic life coach. www.lynnandrews.com
© 2007 by Lynn Andrews
