Soul and the City

Photo by Shannon Tremaine via Unsplash

"Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing."

-          James Hillman, City and Soul

I have of late become under the spell on London again, from far away Singapore. The city has re-enchanted me virtually. I find myself pulled into its vortex. From its gorgeous tourist board Instagram to its fabulous tour guides, from my piles of English magic and history books to newly (second-hand) acquired London tomes – current reading-mood: Albion vibes.
My London lore and magic tomes as I #workfromhome in Singapore 

From Fleet Street to Dick Whittington, John Dee to Churchill, Crowley to Kipling, Leylines, Palaces, Blake, Dickens, Samuel Pepys, Shakespeare, Pubs, Big Ben, the Tower, Bond, Piccadilly, Pudding Lane, V&A, Sherlock Holmes, Shard, Blackfriars, Greenwich, British Museum, Walbrook, Isis-Thames, Paddington, Tate, Crystal Palace, Sunday Markets, East End, St. Pauls, red buses, Kew, Paddington, Mary Poppins, Canals, Wimbledon, Westminster and Claridge’s all the way to Gin Tonics.
Photo by Jurica Koletic via Unsplash

I am bewitched, decades after leaving the city I once called home. Beefeaters, scones, and sponge-cake, oh take me home again one day. To the greatest city on earth, the greatest country in the world: home of magic, myth, and story. Your architecture is compelling, your geography divine, London you are alive – through all space and time, full of ghosts, pulsating with history and character. London, you are like a living poem, an urban design of the soul, a map of infrastructure and meaning. You are a realm of amazing things nestled under stars and streetlight. 
Photo by Fas Khan via Unsplash

London, your paths weave, your mysteries unveil. Your roots are ancient and deep, you are full of gods, goddesses, and sorcerers. From Cernuous the horned god in Richmond Park and great Mother Goddess Diane-Isis of the river – the spirit of both Apollonian intellect (ego) and Dionysian zest (soul) live in your city side by side. London - you can be full of shadows and yet have so much potential for regeneration. You are a forest in a city, fecund, mythic and perfumed. Neolithic, Roman, Saxon, Renaissance, Medieval, Romantic, Gothic, Victorian - all are here under foot. A place charged and transformative. You are preternatural and a keeper of stories. Full of rebellion, power, love, fire, angels, and beauty. London – you are a language, for all tongues to speak. You both slay and heal and cross dimension. Once brimming with cunning folk and wizards, sages, and scholars, you wait for a revival in mind, like a lost Atlantis. Celtic, Norse, Briton – all buried here. Surely, you are the birthplace of wisdom, the library of humanity and museum of magical arts. You are a city I want to live in again - to raise my kid in, love my husband in, drink wine in and raise magic in. 
Photo by Fas Khan via Unsplash

Under sun and moon, sky, and stars – one day again I’ll walk your streets. You are all that has been and all that shall be, Queen of Cities. I invoke you London, take my theurgy to heart. My ritual, my words, my dreaming, visioning, blessing, and prayer. London, you are divine in your nature and signature. You are an ecstasy and a devil. I see you, you and your old gods; I’ll dance with you under scared trees. I celebrate your festivals, believe in your elementals, smell your rich soil, and inhale your reverence for life. Hecate, Artemis – I see you. Cerridwen and Brigit/Brigid, one day I’ll come home. Rule Britannia dear Queen Juno. 
Photo by King S Church International via Unsplash

Until then, take my grateful blessing. In these times of chaos, protect all in your city, stay resilient, stay enchanting, keep your roads open and sprinkle your fairy dust across the rooftops. London, I’ll light a candle for you. I’ll warm a brew, smoke an incense, anoint an oil. Just like the herbs and roots that I love, the resins and the greenery, the flower, seeds, and plant remedies - all that I love to dabble with, I’ll dabble within your garden too. Your garden is a classic design, palatial, a maze, a botanic heaven on earth. Just like a Victorian glasshouse collecting all manner of world botanicals, I pray that you colonise my soul once more. Beneath your skyscrapers, one day I’ll come again. 
Photo by Maria Teneva via Unsplash

Keep collecting your stories Albion. Keep nourishing us with your myths Old Britain. You just go on renewing, like ripples extending through time. You are place, you are protected. You are revival, enlivenment, and high spirits. You banish blues and fulfill dreams. One day, we’ll meet in flesh again old Mithraic magic London town.

And until then, during this pandemic, I choose to travel virtually, to create virtual worlds in my head and go. I travel to you through my imagination, thought, through books, sounds and music, through touch, evocative scent, taste, writing, films, TV, people, images, symbols, prayer, online communities, blogs and story.

The equivalent would be that if the world were a huge book, right now we can only journey and explore a small area, not the whole prose say but just a little of the punctuation on the page. Imagine a mammoth sweeping epic, this is not a green travel zone right-to-roam option in 2020. Instead, we’ll have to settle for exploring say just within the parenthesis, the tiny space in-between the start and end of an aside comment in a bracket tucked into a bigger sentence. A parenthesis, it isn’t fundamental to the main topic event, just an afterthought, joke, clue or additional bit of information from the thoughtful writer to the reader.

Here is our plague-free travel zone now: ( )

But that is enough for me to travel in my mind. Like Paulo Coelho said:

“Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”

So, in between these curvy brackets, I wander, I get lost, I am in the wilderness. Virtually, I journey in these ontological spaces. My senses and imagination help augment that trip, they make it “real”. London and beyond lives in these parenthesis for me now. 

But I can go to London, to England, to Sussex by the sea – without ever leaving where I am. I can smell the seasalt. I can breathe in the herby fresh Highdown Hill grass. I can plunge toes in sandy shore and swim in marine depth. I can feed my soul, feel blanketed in love, come ablaze with ideas, energise with zesty vigour and feel alive – right from here right now. Thousands of miles away I can explore, my nose pressed up against the imaginal wardrobe door of Narnian delights. I hear Covent Garden. I taste Borough Market. I marvel at The Shard. I’m in awe at the Natural History Music. I sing along with the West End. I eat those toffee apples and candy floss at the funfairs and sup on mulled wine at snowy fictional Winter Markets. I feel history come alive in the City and the wall. I am captive to their spell.

I walk from (to). It takes, forever. Just how I like my slow travel, my new A to Z. No masks required. The ground covered is less than the Square Mile, it’s just the equivalent of a small piece of punctuation lost in an epic the size of the King James Bible or Complete Works of Shakespeare. But in it, I am free.

Aren’t we all just a little parenthesis in eternity in the end?

(Home)

Photo by Benjamin Davies via Unsplash

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