HAPPY DAYS

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HAPPY DAYS

This blog has been about (since its inception in March 2020 during lockdown in Singapore) Magic – of all kinds. Psychology and Magic. Herbalism and Magic. Astrology and Magic. Religion and Magic. Gardening and Magic. Folklore and Magic. Books (lots of books!) and Magic. Healing and Magic. It began as writing therapy, a safe space to create and exercise (exorcise) demons and angels – from head to prose. But it is not an imaginary fiction, for me it is real. It is my astrological time for hope and courage. As Paulo Coelho says, my ‘little parenthesis in eternity’. So, I have taken the liberty of ruminating back through some of my writings and mashing up bits that speak to me now, on this full moon in Pisces, Sept 20^th, 2021. It is my best Woolworths-inspired “Pick n’ Mix” selection, represented anew. This makes me happy. Happiness is my focus. To be happy. Grab a cuppa and I’ll begin.

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Duck Deficiency

Permaculture movement founder Bill Mollison said, the problem is the solution. He said: “you don't have a snail problem; you have a duck deficiency”. He reframed the problem into an opportunity. He was a badass food gardening warrior, a resilience magician.

I believe it’s thinking like this that will enable us to thrive (and not just survive) the ‘New Normal’.

We can steal our future back, rescue it, salvage it – convex thinking and an unconventional approach to problem-solving (or opportunity-hunting) is our spell for hope at these times. It is what our story of resilience might look like. As Terry Pratchett said, “change the story, change the world.” And as Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

I’m a Downlander, growing up in Sussex by the Downs, near rugged sea, mysterious megaliths, and ancient hillforts. There is deep history here (probably which drove my desire to study History at York), the peoples are rife with folklores whilst old twittens and droveways carve the landscape. There is a magical geography here. A song in a landscape of magic, carried by the wind. Archaeology as portal to it’s past, yet timeless living myth. Rings of Oak trees containing magic within their circle.

When I’m back home I relate to Joseph Campbell’s idea of “the feeling of the rapture of being alive”.

I am regenerated. What we need in the world is what the alchemy writer Paul Cowlan calls “the seed of regeneration”. Regeneration for all.

The world is ensouled – we live in an animist universe, everything is alive. All here is vibrating, living, amplified and broadcasting. The fairiy folk dance under moonlight by Elder and Yew. It is what environmental essayist Charles Eisenstein calls 'interbeing', what ecologist Satish Kumar calls ‘elegant simplicity’ – what I call, miracle. Inspirited, enchanted. Deeply alive.

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Elves In The Machine

We might just get to see, as chaos/Baphomet magician Julian Vayne suggests (in his excellent online course Deep Magic), “the wiring under the board” that Terence McKenna had vision of, the machine elves in the system.

Magic awakens our primitive minds. Carl Jung was a prober of these depths, rediscovering the old gods within (or “the old ones” as Wicca writer Doreen Valiente calls them). Archetypes of the collective unconscious, ‘soul of the world’.

As Chris Johnstone the Resilience teacher tells us, “Find a can-do remedy”. I choose healing, writing, learning to read astro star charts, practicing with magical oils and prayer and coaching folk who ask.

Margot Adler said that “Magic is the art of causing changes in consciousness.” I am at cause. I cause.

Vayne says that “meditation is the key to magic.” All major religions had figureheads who went out into the wilderness and meditated. Mindfulness then is a technology to help us. To allow us to go within and connect, to be truly human. For Vayne also tells us that “without empathy we become automata.”

We can see further, in the occult, on the fringes, at the fertile edge – we can see Jung’s “aeons deep sea.”

In his book ‘Magick Works’, Vayne reminds us of James Hillman’s great warning: that “the literal is the enemy.” He also imparts Doreen Valiente’s urge, that “effort and visualisation make the magic circle, not material things.”

Astrologer Austin Coppick has called this place in time a very visceral ‘woodchipper time’. We are in 'the Fall' here, at the macro level. But from the fall we find emerging possibilities. To navigate we can fire-up what Henry Corbin called the ‘Mundas Imaginalis’ - imagination which has the power to create being into form.

We can build our happiness by practising Positive Psychology (advocated by experts at Pennsylvania University, Dr. Martin Seligman and KarenReivich). Simple practices in our everyday life will help us adapt to an uncertain world.

Happiness is about the importance of gratitude - noticing the small things that make a difference. To choose where we focus our attention. This strength-based approach helps us and gives us a perspective check. We can then see a new array of possibilities emerging. We can see what is more likely, what would be the worst outcome and what would be the best result – then go chase it down.

The old magicians tell us that we can make fire from ice, that we can transform something into something else. We are both Order and Chaos. We are our own crisis and own seed of opportunity.

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Know Thyself

Happiness helps us with our inner capability building. Happiness improves our self-care, our wider relationships, and health. Being happy helps us with problem solving and developing social skills. Happiness feels life-affirming, motivating and creates more meaning.

Being happy helps us to function better and be more resourceful. Happiness gives us utility, purpose, and usefulness. To be happy, like Jung’s mantra of “know thyself”, we must each examine our life, then keep examining it with the curiosity of Gemini, all through our life. They say that the afternoon knows what the morning never imagined. What your afternoon self can now see will astound you!

Find the sacred in all tiny acts because you are a phenomenal old soul. You are cosmic yet domestic, born and bornless. You are time itself caught on a line, snagging a thread in the fabric of life.

Consider not growing up, nor growing out. But instead, grow down. Hillman urged us, grow down. We are not just human, but as Hillman and Thomas Moore call it, we are/have a daimon. A daimon genius inside, a little earthbound angel, your innate nature. You’re plot and character waiting to live your role. Fortune, fate, luck, design, and destiny. Your soul is like the acorn within the giant Oak.

What is magic? A wise magician once said, “magic is the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.” What is your will?

Will you spur on revolution from your sitting room in domestic resistance, finger up “to the man”? As Toni Spencer’s poem Galvanize rallies us, we can “get off our arses, realise our vastness!” And what a world we could all make if we just galvanized. You don’t have to be a healer, magician, counsellor, or astrologer to help rebuild the tree of life. Just every day, ordinary you.

Malkuth has fallen, but perhaps for a purpose at this time in the Kali Yuga. "Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, as the alchemists call it, the negredo, and this encounter causes suffering" – says Jung. But from the suffering comes the healing, the resolution – there is higher purpose. Timothy Leary said, "What disorientates us is good". In Moore’s ‘Dark Nights of the Soul’, we face and overcome our shadow self, catalysing birth pangs of a new beginning in the cosmic serpent of time.

Don't take the wrong path down the tree of life. Choose miracles and meaning. See membranes in the fabric of the cosmos that shimmer and ripple, tessellate, vibrate, and oscillate. Own your defiant human will. Between the pillars of Severity and Mercy, chart a new middle third path. Magic, astrology, gardening, yoga, positive psychology, herbalism – all our paths to journey. By embracing the esoteric and deeper systems we alter our awareness, our ‘reality’. How do we get out of the labyrinth, out of the bread and circuses and rediscover instead as Eisenstein says, “a better world our hearts know are possible”? We identify and commit to our tiny hills to die on.

At every moment of our lives, we all have ‘one foot in a fairy-tale and the other in the abyss’, said Coelho. I reclaim both the savage and the subline, profane and mundane. It is all precious and mossy and true. The 2020s seem a twisted fairy-tale, a garland of thorns, but it is also an opportunity to experience life more fully, throw out the map and rediscover the actual territory. Time to revivify.

Inhabiting a growth mindset, believing we can recover, believing we can transform and believing we can adapt – this is how to navigate the decade of destiny. Exhausted yes but not extinct.

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From Fear To Flow

Being intentionally happy is a coping strategy that can help nourish us and keep us warm in dark times of disenchantment. The fairies are trapped in the operating system, but you can set their tiny wings free. For soul is a wild beauty, untamed. Being happy – choosing this a revolutionary act. We may not always have a choice in situations we find ourselves in, but we do have a choice in response.

Personal power is not a simulacrum, we must find it within. We can bring ourselves back to life and move from a narrative of fear to flow. We can occupy possible. Chaos Magician, Animist and Starlore writer, podcaster and Permaculturist Gordon White says, “Optimism is a spell”. Abracadabra, amen!

Jung said: “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” It’s time to hero’s journey out of the underworld and begin the return, time to achieve a healing outcome. Hillman asked: "What door is opened into soul through our wounds?" Open a door. This fragile perishable impermanent kingdom of life invites us to step forth. In these challenging years of pandemic, we need not grow a garden of fear and isolation. We can choose to lead invincible lives. On the other side of a long winter, there’s hope in a new spring.

Happiness empowers us to flourish despite uncertain times. From that dirt in the soil under foot, where our ancestors are buried and the ashes of fate scatter, we can plough fertile fields – fecund with bounce-back-ability. As the outside world rages and decolonises history, inside we can elect to colonise our own mind and will. The present defines us. Let not a virus stop us from choosing joy.

Resilience coach and climate writer Chris Johnstone reminds us: there's what happens, then there's what happens next.

As I begin some astrology study with the wonderful Steve Judd and pick up writing again – with new writing to come, I’m excited for what happens next. Writing the story of what happens next makes me HAPPY.

Can't wait to read this tome by Nick Campion

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