Resilience Magic 3. In The Down Below

Resilience magic is capability building. It is giving of care, relationships, and health. It is problem solving and developing skills. It is motivating and self-efficacy. It is the belief that life has more meaning. It is an adaptive system. It can be taught. It is the extension of human will. It is a light in the covid-darkness. It is functioning better, it is resourcefulness. It is emergence. It is the grit to make the new normal, extraordinary in our favour. Resilience Magic is power and capital. It is vision, understanding, courage and adaptability. It gives us utility, purpose, and usefulness. It allows us to choose a new path and move forward. It is self help over self-harm. It is self-reliance over self-injury. It is self-compassion and determinism. It is strength not victimhood. It is glass half full. It is a weapon of love. It re-builds and overcomes. It is the direction of attention to the good. It is the focus of small things. It is reseeding. It is safety. It is ecological, psychological, and social care. It is peace after trauma. It is new routine and habit. It is hope, forgiveness, gratitude, and faith.

Resilience Magic brings choice, new stories to tell yourself, better outcomes to intend for, helpful tools, steps to move forward, tracks ahead in the dark, perspective-building, evidence challenges, nourishing pauses of renewal, hills to climb, can-do-this attitudes, possibility, preferred futures, maps, ripples extending, influence to help others, strategies for success, powerful thinking, steerage and navigation skills, bounce-back-ability (and bounce-with and bounce-forward too) – and it is your yoga to practice. As a resilience magician, addressing challenges you find yourself in this 2020, you need to shift and affect change. You must engage and believe in transformation. Think flexibly and hope actively. Wizard your way beyond grief to a new response to the destruction and collapse of old world order all around us. Believe that you are a change-agent, a change-magician. Have a courageous voice with magic words to see you through dark times. Widen your understanding of people, things and systems. Find options. Be helpful and stick with it. You are survival. You will choose the right fork in the road. Police your own mind, awake to your brain-magic within.

As you begin to get intouch with your higher self, your soul within, you can begin to surrender ambition and striving. You can cook up a new storm when you throw down a pot. There is a seed of new order growing within. Putrefy what no longer serves that germination and growth. Shatter demons within. Deconstruct then reconstruct again anew. Be titanium. Turn sorrow and pity into purpose, like rope to haul yourself up and out of the pit of doom. Be a gatekeeper to a new future. Like Jung’s own journey, “know thyself”. Examine your life. Be your own biographer and coach. For the afternoon knows what the morning never imagined.

Find the sacred in all tiny acts of care: in tying your shoelaces, in brushing your teeth, in making a cup of tea, in watering the plants, in making a bed, in cooking a meal, in fixing the bathroom tap. Your resilient magic soul is here in the living room and kitchen and garage. Come down from there to here below. Come down to come home. This is life in all its experiences. In the classrooms and in the hospital wards, in the everyday shops and laundrettes. Here we lie down here in the ordinary world. After a lifetime of adventuring on your hero’s journey, your monomythic trials, and tribulations, here at midlife we stand about to cross the threshold back again – into the humdrum real. Ironically, at a time in the world when real is anything but normal. We are at a rift in time, a gateway, a crossroads, and a liminal place in the shadows of human time and a species’ fate. In the woods and the church pews, daily life is being sacrificed. Saturn’s heart is empty.

And yet you, you are a living flame. You are a wildfire in a forest, a force that can spread. You can be unstoppable if you just tried. You would not flicker nor waver, you would be inextinguishable. The heat of your magic on fire within. You are a phenomenal old soul. You are cosmic yet domestic. Both the fool and the wise woman, becoming and unbecome. Resiliently you will go on living. You will revision and re-signify what is to be significant. You will not collapse. You are cure to your own inner plague of dis-ease. You rust but never die. You are born and bornless. You are time itself caught on a line, snagging a thread in the fabric of life. You are as unique and idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. But never confuse ordinary with mediocre – because you have magic within. A pirate of the seas, you travel not through soulless monochrome shopping mall after shopping mall or Disney resort. You are the ship itself and the cutlass. You are twinkling treasure on a map marked with an X. You are heart.

You have no bad seeds. You are shaman with purpose and an iPhone. We need you to help others to flourish which is why you must cultivate your magical garden of resilience this year for the troublesome decade to come. Plant your roots in heaven and grow down to earth upside-down. Consider not growing up, nor growing out. But instead, grow down. James Hillman urges us, grow down. Drop down. Into the depth. Into the depth magic below. Fathoms under seas. Choose to fall into a new fairytale. Downsize, downscale, de-growth, come down. Fall into the interior. Regeneration is an inside job. Here you are little acorn, tiny seed, buried in the dark earth below. From this emptiness and nothingness, life will begin again.

It is the mud and the worms, not the horizon nor birds that belong to you. Your footing needs to anchor you in the now. Root here, fertilise a while. Stand on strong legs down here in the below. Not human, but as Hillman and Moore call it, a daimon. A daimon in the dark. Ordinary magic, everyday magic, resilient – with genius inside. A little earthbound angel full of pluck and heart. Bound up in a tiny shell of life, you begin to unfold. The nucleus choosing to follow its calling, its innate nature. You are plot and character waiting in the wings for your role call on stage. Curtains up, house lights on.

Fortune, fate, luck, future, design – all these markers in time attend you now. Destiny. Will you make it a dream or a nightmare? You wrote this script, so make it a glorious ride. Not a ride up and out. But a ride down, a journey of descent. You are the rock and the grass and flowers under foot. Your soul sways to symphonies inside of you, but you cannot always hear the music or song. You are alive. You are living poetry. Like the seafoam on the tide, you ebb and flow. Draw down now, dip your head under. In this underwater world you can see all the shoals of life swimming, deep down. Float. Fill your lungs like gills. Breathe here below.

Your resilience magic is like sailor in a storm, keeping the ship seaworthy and upright. Take Raphael’s hand, Apollo’s, Poseidon’s – grab onto the healing gods inside. Let their natural magic restore your soul. Here you are bobbing along waves of chaos heading for the beach. Surf them. Ride. Hold your breathe under water as your seed sister holds hers underground and in soils below in deep earth. Grab the life buoy that is thrown to you. Grow out of the ground. But never to high. Heed Icarus’ myth not to fly to close to the sun. Stay down here a while, terra bound. 

In the below. In the down lands, awash with candlelight and goodness.