Guts

Bride with Gift

Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012203929.html?hpid=topnews

The military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility, where the rights of habeas corpus and due process had been denied detainees, will close, and the CIA is now prohibited from maintaining its own overseas prisons. And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001.

And about time. I wish Bush had had the guts to do this. But he felt secrecy and torture and performing occult illegal acts were perfectly fine, that they “saved” us, when really, all they did was taint us. That taint permeated society and we hated it. It wasn’t American, that taint that Bush tarred us with. It was composed of pain and fear and things hiding in the dark, only partly glimpsed and partly heard, and the power of suggestion made it worse than it would be under the glaring light of knowledge. He kept us ignorant and tried to keep us shackled at home so the “experts” could handle it. And the “experts” handled it by shooting pets, breaking into the wrong houses, terrorizing innocent citizens, and spreading a culture of suspicion and dread.

Americans are busybodies by nature. We like poking and prying into the lives of our neighbors and co-workers and friends. In good times, this prying helps us out, it’s talanoa. We learn about one another’s needs and desires and in learning reach out to fulfill those needs and dreams and desires. In dark times, we poke and pry and seek out anything that could be used against our neighbors and co-workers and friends and we report it to the authorities so they don’t look too closely at us. Even the most innocent among us can be proven guilty of some crime under that type of scrutiny. This is gossip at its most evil. That was the direction Bush was leading us towards by modeling behavior that said “secrecy is good”, “torture is necessary”, and “privacy is bad.”

At this time, this is mostly a symbolic act. It will take time to replace suspicious sneakiness leading to secretive incarcerations ad torture with our more usual good-natured inquisitiveness leading to generous outpourings of help and well-intentioned advice. Yes, we were naïve, but our national strength lay in that naiveté. We have never been a people who could condone torture, hounding innocents, killing children and women, secretly imprisoning anyone. That’s just not American.

You can’t have a “war” on terror because terrorists aren’t so easy to identify, and when you give in to terrorists, you become perceived a weak and thus a better target for even more terrorism. It wasn’t Bush and his policies that kept the terrorists away from American soil after 9/11 – it was the American spirit, the rebels among us who would willingly sacrifice themselves to keep a terrorist from achieving his goal, and who would go all vigilante on any real terrorists we found. The way to prevent terrorism is to arm everyone with knowledge and provide them with the skills to carry through when they needed to act – and then let the world know we haven’t disarmed ourselves and made of ourselves weak, ignorant, and frightened targets.

What we need is transparency in government, openness in information, and a media that isn’t afraid to spend the few extra minutes to get the facts instead of acting as if rumors were real. We don’t mind waiting a bit longer to get the real information, and the media won’t have egg on its face when they have to correct their earlier errors caused by haste. Investigative reporters should take pride in truly investigating all the facts before they release their stories. We’ll wait.

What we need are people willing to act when time is urgent. Responding to disasters can’t wait 2 or 3 days, we need people who are living in the middle of the disaster to be prepared, and we need our government to acknowledge that we just might know what we’re doing so we don’t sit passively waiting for promised help that doesn’t arrive in a timely way while locals are being held outside the disaster area with supplies, food, and help. That Citizens Corp idea needs to be ramped up and presented in the high schools and colleges. No, I’m wrong. It should start in kindergarten, with the simple concepts and acts and work its way up. We’ve seen how capable children can be if we just let them – the 4 year old who called 911, the 6 year old who rescued a drowning sibling. We should let our children be as capable as they can be. Protect them, teach them, sure, but give them the skills and the ability to think and act on their own, stepping in only when they are in over their level.

It will take time for us to regain that confidence and to rebuild the skills we were told not to use by our government, but we’ll get there so long as our government doesn’t start telling us to “let the experts handle it” and to “go shopping” as the response to disasters and wars.

A citizenry that isn’t afraid to act, that communicates with one another, is a citizenry that is as safe from terrorism as it’s possible to ever be.

Blogging for Choice

Last year, when I wrote this, things had gotten worse since the previous year. This past year has been even worse for women and children. In the news, we still read stories of women “being raped”, not of “men raping women”, and watched court cases of rape victims being further victimized. We’ve seen the Department of Health and Human Services pass a regulation that allows any employee in the health care industry decline to services based on the employee’s morals, and screw the patient. This has resulted in a nurse-practitioner “accidentally” removing IUDs from patients. We’ve seen more women and children becoming homeless because they weren’t allowed a choice that could have prevented the whole problem. We have people actively and vociferously advocating having babies – in spite of the fact that we are breeding ourselves out of resources.

More and more, we need to take control of our reproduction, to stem the constant increase in our population. We need to consider the welfare of those who are already born and living in this world. We need to care for those who are alive now, and in need now.

I believe life, and the life of the soul, begins at conception. I do not believe sentience begins at conception. That is something that develops when the vessel it is meant to inhabit matures enough to nourish the seed of sentience and nurture it to fruition. Life is sacred. All life is sacred. I am morally opposed to the malicious taking of any life, but I believe life that already exists independently takes precedence over a potential life. Choice must be moral, ethical, and legal. Let me explain.

I choose life for myself and the children I bore, because I am inherently selfish and fluffy. I choose for no other woman because I am an American. It is the precise separation of religion and law that allows disparate faiths to thrive alongside one another, including disparities within religions, such as Catholics and Methodists. The American attitude of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state has ensured our safety in the practice of our beliefs, and our rights are not dependent upon the morality of the privileged few, but rather on higher ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.

I am pro-choice because it is the only moral choice to make when it involves other people.

Without choice, there can be no morality at all. There can only be slavery.

Consider. A woman who becomes pregnant has not just her unborn child to consider, but also any other children she may currently have, her own body, and other people dependent upon her. She is the custodian for all of them. She must be allowed the freedom to choose to add this unborn child to the family or to abort it for the greater good of those already born. If we take away that choice, then the unborn baby may be saved but at the cost of a far greater evil to the woman and to those already born.

Is it better to allow a woman her choice, knowing she may choose to abort in some cases, or do we remove that choice and most assuredly commit evil in every single case?

Life must be protected. There is no doubt about that. As a woman, it is my duty to protect the life of my unborn child, not the government’s, not some preacher’s, certainly not yours. It is also my duty to protect the lives of other children I may already have, and those living children take precedence over an unformed and unborn potentiality. It is my duty as a woman to protect the people already living in my care, and I must consider so very many things.

The welfare of the developing embryo is, like the embryo’s own tissues, too caught up in the mother’s own existence to be considered separately. The distinction between mother and child occurs gradually. In the beginning, when there is no distinction, when the embryo is incapable of independent viability, it is and must be entirely and completely the mother’s decision on how to safeguard all the lives within her care, from her own and the already-born to the unborn within her. The mother can, should, indeed, must, protect herself first, because she must be healthy and able to care for those dependent upon her. Then she must protect the already born who are in her care – whether those are older children of hers, her elderly parents or grandparents, cousins, kin, mates, mates’ kin, co-workers, neighbors. She has a large group of people to consider, not just the one unborn potential of a child.

Life must be protected, and the question becomes, whose life?

The pro-life argument is not one of law or physical technicalities, but of the spirit. It is not life with which they are concerned, but the soul. Let me address this from my own Numenist perspective.

To have any integrity of the human soul at all, we must be allowed to know, and knowing, to choose our path. To remove a person’s right to choose is tantamount to gainsaying the spiritual concept of free will. Free will is an important part of Numenism. Those who would prevent a woman from making a choice to bear or abort the unborn embryo may think they are stopping a terrible crime, but what they are actually doing is harming everyone – everyone connected with the woman, everyone in that woman’s neighborhood, society, culture, and religion, and they are harming themselves more than all of these others. They are stifling spiritual growth, playing god in an unhealthy way, and abusing the intelligence granted us.

It is fine to be pro-life. If you can change someone’s mind with love, compassionate words, and physical support, so much the better. Offer the mother all the help she needs, during her pregnancy, during the childbirth, and most importantly – after the child is born.

It is not acceptable on a spiritual level to force someone to make choices they would not make because you feel it is the right thing for them to do. Removing choice from someone removes their humanity, their adulthood, their hard-won maturity. It makes of them slaves. Slaves have no choice in what they do – it is all controlled by someone else. Spiritual slavery is as terrible as physical slavery. I, personally, think spiritual slavery is more terrible than physical slavery, for physical slavery has avenues of escape, even if that escape is death. Spiritual slavery offers no escape, for even death doesn’t guarantee freedom.

This isn’t about “killing babies”, it is about the freedom of the human soul. It is about being allowed to choose our destinies. It is about being allowed to have respect for our own reproductive lives, and it is about having no shame when we protect ourselves by doing what we must.

I could never ask a woman to risk her life for a pregnancy she did not want. I could never ask a woman to shoulder a lifetime responsibility she does not feel she can bear with grace. I could never force a woman to abort who desperately wanted the baby she carries. I could never presume to make a life-altering decision for anyone not myself. I didn’t even have my son circumcised so he could make that decision for himself when he was old enough. How could I have the utter arrogance to decide if a woman would bear child or not?

I believe that abortion is the taking of a life, but it is not murder. There is no negative stigma on a woman choosing to preserve the emotional, physical, and mental well being of her life and the lives of those already dependent upon her. Abortion is a method of self-defense and protection for her and her world. To label a woman who has had to choose an abortion with the same name as the people who deliberately drown their children or shoot them or starve them is a disservice to the soul of society. And when we burden society’s soul with too many negatives, it responds in harmful ways. Those already born become less valuable, more disposable. People who know their lives are not valued in turn place little value on other people, and violence, greed, and callousness become common.

The reality of abortion is not black or white. It is not good or evil. It is human struggle, filled with blood and grief and fear and pain and humiliation. Nobody plans to get pregnant just so they can have an abortion. Abortion is not used as a primary method of birth control, not by any sane, valued being. Birth control methods fail, and abortion is a back-up for that. Men take advantage of women via rape, and abortion is there to help protect the woman from one major consequence of the man’s violent act. A pregnancy can go horribly wrong and the body needs help to be purged of the unviable flesh. A health emergency arises and the health and well being of the mother supercede those of the embryo. Only the woman can determine if she is capable of caring for the child that will come from a pregnancy, to accept the risks, and to bear the consequences afterwards.

And that brings us to what our society would consider the dark side of abortion and what I consider the bright side of it. Relief. Abortion is a safety valve for families. The choice to abort or not allows the woman and her family freedom and safety. It is a considered action that dignifies the value of human life and the human soul by considering all parts of the equation and not just the one unknown cipher. Like any act of great human consequence, there are times when abortion is the right and only thing to do, and times when it is a terrible mistake. The pregnant woman is the only one who can make that decision, and once made, we, as a society, cannot ethically and morally judge her choice, not and remain a moral and ethical society.

Who are we to second-guess her choice, a choice that is never as simple or easy as it sounds?

We have the wealth, the technology, and the ability to make every child born a wanted child, to prevent unwanted pregnancies, to safely abort dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, to provide support while any children are entirely dependent upon the mother, to make families stronger and safer.

But we don’t.

As a society, we Americans devalue the mother, we force women into untenable positions to assuage the vocal demands of a small group of control freaks, we force children into untenable lives of poverty and violence, we make all of society colder, meaner, and more selfish, and we do this by preventing women from being honored; block them from making the hard choices they must make. Abortion is not easy. It is as life-altering a decision as giving birth, and there’s not a woman who has had an abortion who doesn’t regret the need for that decision. They may not regret the decision itself, they may rejoice that they could have that choice, but they will always regret the need that forced the decision upon them.

This isn’t even addressing the primary reason for allowing women to make the choice to carry or abort the pregnancy – the spiritual growth that such decisions will bring. By abrogating the woman’s right to choose, we stunt her spiritual growth. We enslave her soul and the souls of all her children and dependents. Through that, we demean society’s soul.

Perhaps there are those who want women to remain spiritually small and weak; they are themselves small-spirited.

There are those who will cry out, “But what about the father’s right to choose?”

And to them I answer: The father’s right to choose takes place before the act of coition. There are pregnancy preventions he can take – spermicidals, condoms, even reversible vasectomies. If he chooses not to take them, and squirts his sperm into a woman anyway, then he hands over the decision for what happens next to the woman. It is her body, her life, her family, her community, her spiritual well-being that informs her decision. She may choose to allow him a part in her decision, but it is ultimately and completely her decision, and it will remain hers until we develop something along the lines of the Bujoldian uterine replicators. When we have artificial wombs that put no woman’s life at risk to carry a baby to term, that involve no woman’s emotions, bodies, or families; then men can decide to take custody of the embryo, grow it in the artificial womb, and raise it.

When women can walk away from the pregnancy as easily as men can, then men can decide.

So, if men want to make that decision, to take the lifetime responsibility of growing and rearing a child, they should hustle and develop working artificial wombs as soon as they can. Until then, they need to take responsibility for their fertility, either through using condoms and a spermicide, through abstinence, through vasectomy, through the male birth control pill, through self-control. And they must always, always be aware that birth control does indeed fail, that surgical sterilization isn’t always 100%, and that, like most humans, women make mistakes, are forgetful, may have an idiosyncratic reaction to birth control, and sometimes, sometimes, in spite of all the effort to the contrary, pregnancy occurs.

Abortion is a safety valve for those instances. For men as well as women.

Abortion is never an easy choice. No matter what the media tries to make us believe, abortion is a dreadful burden, a life-altering choice that haunts the women who must choose it for the rest of their lives. If a woman is impregnated by a man – through failed birth control, through lies, through rape, through changed circumstances – she has very few options. Every one of those options has a strong potential to be detrimental to her health, her spirit, her mental well-being, her finances – and the health, well-being, and futures of those already alive and in her care.

If a woman lives where she can still choose abortion, she has to undergo a risky surgical procedure to free herself of the unwanted pregnancy – a man walks away without having to undergo any kind of surgical procedure or alteration to his body.

If, for religious or ethical reasons or, increasingly often, for lack of adequate medical care in her community, she has to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, she risks a host of ailments, up to and including death. A man gets to walk away without any kind of damage to his body and certainly without any fear of dying for the pregnancy.

If a woman chooses to place the child for adoption, she can’t do so without the father’s permission – permission he can deny just to punish her – and it is a punishment to both the mother and the poor unwanted child, to have to work and spend money to feed, house, clothe, and educate that unwanted child, frequently without any support whatsoever from the father – who gets to walk away without losing a penny or a moment’s sleep over the lives he’s just destroyed. Even if a court of law determines he should pay child support, all he has to do is walk away.

A woman who walks away from her baby is prosecuted for child abandonment at best, and child abuse at worst.

If the couple are married when the child is conceived and born, if the man decides he no longer wants to be responsible for the child he helped bring into the world, all he has to do is nothing. He can leave all the care and work of raising the child to the woman. No one condemns him for it. No one demands he pay for the life he helped create. No one blames him if he denies the child is his. After all, short of DNA testing, there’s no proof, not like there is when a woman gives birth. Maternity is rarely in doubt.

So many men have taken the option to just walk away, it’s a wonder women haven’t risen up and reacted with far greater anger and made far stronger demands. It’s a wonder women even consider giving men any choice at all. That women do give most men a say in the decision says a lot about the women’s ethics, morals, and concerns.

Men make their decision to impregnate women the moment they allow their unprotected sperm to come into contact with a fertile egg. If men failed to use birth control themselves, then they are as liable for the unwanted child as the women they impregnate.

The burden of birth control is not and should not be entirely upon the woman.

Me, I’d like to see every child born be a wanted child – planned and anticipated and hoped for. That means everyone has to own up to their part in the procreation process – from erection to living child, and take responsibility for the results of their choices.

That means we need a wide variety of choices, from better birth control for both genders to better behavior from men and women to better health care. We need health care professionals who care about the health, welfare, and spiritual needs of the patient; not ones who can refuse care whenever they choose. We need artificial wombs so women can walk away from a pregnancy as easily as men do. We need better methods of adoption and fosterage. We need more humane peer pressure.

We need to allow women the freedom to choose and the access to knowledgeable and skilled physicians to help them in their choice.

And men? If you want to have a choice in the continuance of a pregnancy – get busy developing artificial wombs. When you build those wombs, then you can choose.

Magic

Keegan Talking

Originally uploaded by nodigio

John Michael Greer A Magical Education http://www.necronomi.com/projects/manifesto/

I read Mr. Greer’s Manifesto on magical education, and while I find much of merit in it, after all, we Numenists have been teaching and requiring a grounding in philosophy, logic, mythology, science, and other languages for decades; I find that he skirts the most important questions of all – why study or practice magic, and what can you really do with magic. He tucks partial answers about “why” here and there; that we study and learn magic so we can “bend the universe of human experience to your will more effectively than others” but he never describes why we would want to do that or what it means to be able to do that. The closest he comes to that is when he says “magic can be used for many things other than acting out a social role” and when he says magic is used to “make any circumstances the right circumstances for the lightning to strike.” Perhaps he’s being deliberately vague.

That’s not the Numenous Way. We don’t drop teasers – poetic or otherwise – and then move on to other matters. We expect those who seek to be more than a Celebrant to ponder their reasons for learning magic and we will spend what time is necessary working with a priest or minister in training to reach those answers. We don’t go any further until the student understands why they are doing this.

There’s more to “why” than “bend the universe to your will” and I think far too many teachers of magic – good ones and bad ones – rarely go beyond this. Much more time needs to be dedicated to the “why” than many traditions offer. Knowing “why” before you start to learn magic can help you learn and use magic easier and better than if you go into it with just vague notions of controlling the universe.

As for what you can do with magic – this question needs to be answered forthrightly and up front so students can find within themselves the answers to “why”. Before we learn to drive a car, we know “why” we want to do that – so we can get to work, earn money, visit friends, travel, or shop – when we want or need to and not at the whim and availability of others. We learn to play a guitar for many reasons – we like music, we like how the guitar sounds, we like the admiration we will get from friends who listen to us, or we can earn money from playing the guitar if we’re really good. We know before we learn to drive or play a guitar what the final outcome is, and we know (sometimes vaguely) how to get there. Magic is no different. To learn magic, we have to know what we can expect from it, what the final outcomes are, and (at least vaguely) what to do to get there. When we know that, we can reason through to why we want to do this.

What can magic do?

To reach the answer to this we must first answer “What is magic?”

Magic, in its broadest definition, is the ability to “bend the universe”. Even people who don’t actively learn magic use magic randomly and without control, creating static and patterns that are unpredictable, changing the world around them. We are all constantly bending the universe. A mage or magic user is someone who knows this, has a few reliable techniques to purposely bend the universe, can predict to some degree what those changes will do, and has a reason for doing so other than ego. Therefore, a good working definition of magic (for Numenists, anyway), is “A collection of reliable techniques that allow a trained mage to make informed changes to the universe.”

A recent example of magic in use is the 2008 Presidential campaign. Both sides wielded magic, one more effectively than the other because they had a greater understanding of patterns and the zeitgeist and began working much earlier towards the goal of becoming president. Any time a person or group of people attempt to make societal changes, they are working magic. The better magic users are the ones who apply solid magical techniques to the process and achieve the results for which they aimed.

Under the Numenist definition of magic, the magic isn’t spectacular, speedy, or special. It’s actually quite ordinary. Look at the recent Presidential campaign and you can’t point to a single “oogity-boogity” act, yet, magic still happened. A collection of people started the presidential race, and through the use of self-control, knowledge, practice, and well-placed words and actions either dropped out of the race or progressed forward until we had a clear winner. But it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t spectacular. It took a lot of research, study, and hard work to make it happen. It took years of dedicated training to reach the point of even being able to run for President. Some people stumble through achieving their goals, and even stumble and bumble along and become President through what appear to be a series of happenstances. This is what we consider uncontrolled magic – the person becomes President but can’t clearly mark how it happened. Successful people who shrug and say they just had good luck are using uncontrolled magic. Most successful people can tell you precisely how they became successful – the things they studied, the techniques they learned or created, the knowledge they acquired to help them achieve their goals, the constant awareness of ksana – the right moment and the ability to bring their training and knowledge to bear in the ksana to make the change. The Obama/McCain Presidential race is going to become one of our better training tools for teaching magic because the techniques and trigger points are very clear.

Real magic works. It works very, very well. Using magic takes a lot of study, practice, and hard work and it never stops. Real magic is available to all of us if we are willing to do the work. Magic is an inherent attribute of Dea Nutrix (God, the gods, the Creator, the generative force, whatever you care to call it or personify it as). Since we believe we are all part of Dea Nutrix (individuated, corporeal beings, but nonetheless part), magic is therefore an inherent part of us and we all use it in the same way we breathe or our heart beats. All we need to do is learn how to use it effectively to become mages.

Now that we’ve defined magic and discussed some of the reasons why we would want to use magic (I’m sure you can find many more reasons than the few we explored here), we can speak of what magic does.

If you followed the Obama/McCain Presidential campaign, you saw a lot of magic in action – and the end result was that one of the candidates became president. Not all of us want to become President of the United States of America, but that’s definitely one use of magic. Other uses are to buy a house, get a job, get healthy, help friends, become successful (whatever your definition of success is), live an abundant life, develop your connections with divinity, create new things, learn new things, meet interesting people, and be happy. Magic is ordinary. Magic is common. Magic is about the small, trivial things and the big awesome things. Magic is everything.

Now. Learning magic is a whole other ballgame. We can muddle through life and occasionally have flashes of awareness of using magic (some call it being “in the zone”), or we can learn some solid techniques that allow us to actually experience and control magic, to set seeds that will grow and ripen into the results we want, to bend that universe to our will to greater or lesser degree, according to our desires, training, and strength.

There is no oogity-boogity stuff about it. I will second Mr. Greer by saying fictional magic systems are just that – fictional. They don’t work in this world, no matter how much we want them to. We aren’t Deryni, or Terukkan, or Gandalf, or Elven, or Fae. We’re humans. And we have our own magic, human magic, that works when we wield it as humans. Personally, I see no reason why we should seek magic from fiction when what we have works so well for us.

I agree with Mr. Greer that mastering the human system of magic is time consuming and sometimes tedious. It involves real, dedicated work. And yes, it does indeed take 8 – 10 years of regular and thoughtful practice to get a good grounding in magic working. It’s not mastery, at 10 years, but it’s certainly a good start. I’ve consciously been working magic for more than 40 years. I’m decent enough at it, but the more I learn, the more there is to learn. It’s a lifetime study and you can always improve.

Numenism requires our co-religionists who wish to become priests or ministers to have a well-rounded education. It doesn’t have to be a formal education, but it does have to be solid. Students must be literate in at least 2 languages (my own students must be literate in at least 2 verbal and one non-verbal language), intimately familiar with the scientific method, deeply and widely read on a variety of topics outside of fiction, familiar with folklore, myths, and fairytales of at least 3 different cultures, knowledgeable about the history of their country and at least 2 other countries, familiar with current affairs, capable of critical thinking, familiar with chemistry, botany, astronomy, mathematics, comparative religion, psychology and symbology, first aid and human biology, occult history, memory enhancement, and applied philosophy (ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic). More is better. All knowledge is worth having and we encourage our co-religionists to learn as much as possible and to think about it and apply what they learn.

Like Mr. Greer (and most other teachers of magical systems) we require our members to keep a journal. The journal is an important tool and anyone who wants to shirk this isn’t really willing to learn magic. We don’t require that it be handwritten, although that is by far the simplest and most reliable method. It can be a spoken record, typed, kept in a word processor, or even tallied in knotted ropes. As long as you are capable of accessing it reliably and studying past entries, what works for you works for us. Me, I still keep a magical journal. I seem to go through 2 or even 3 journals a year. I don’t have any particular type of journal I consistently use. I’ve used Blue Books (those who have attended college know what I mean), spiral bound notebooks, pages stapled together, blank bound books (not my favorite), loose leaf binders, composition books, and even 3×5 index cards, napkins, and paper menus. Recent ones have been transcribed into Word files and saved in several locations online, on disk, and in hard copy. Whatever method works for you is what works.

What isn’t acceptable is trying to keep all of this in your memory. We encourage and teach memory enhancement skills as part of our magical training, and we know from experience that human memory can be faulty until it is well-trained – and even then, it can experience lapses. Injuries can deprive you of your memory, as can illnesses, medications, and misuse of controlled substances. Keep a record, and you’ll have a tool you can use to regain damaged memories and restore your reduced abilities.

Therefore, a magical journal is essential to becoming a trained magic user.

Mr. Greer’s article has a sample one day journal entry. That’s really about as skimpy an entry as you can have and still have an entry that is useful to you. You aren’t going to be graded on the journal; it’s your tool for improving your magical abilities.

Now, you’re probably wondering what those magical abilities are. Forget shooting flames out of your fingertips (unless you develop a micro flameshooter you can strap on – a distinct possibility and really awesome to think about), twitching your nose and having the room right itself, saying a spell and watching the broom sweep your floor, setting Deryni style wards, or walking through Witch World style gates. Those aren’t part of human magic.

What is human magic is the ability to collect information, spot trends and patterns, and then formulate and execute plans for enhancing or disrupting those patterns, thus affecting things and changing the universe. What is human magic is the ability to imagine and extrapolate into the future what will happen – and you don’t need yarrow stalks, Tarot cards, or dice. What is human magic is the ability to shape sounds – through music or words – that can have a profound effect on other humans, animals, plants, and objects. What is human magic is the ability to discern trigger points in patterns of activity – and the complementary ability to use that knowledge to tweak it through words or deeds to make it change, to tilt it in a manner you choose. What is human magic is the ability to create something new that never existed before. What is human is the ability to imagine a 4th or 10th way to accomplish something – and then to do it. What is human magic is the ability to transcend limits, overcome obstacles, and forge new paths to reach desired goals. What is human magic is the ability to adapt, learn, and grow. What is human magic is the ability to record the past and to build on it, taking it further than our ancestors ever thought possible. What is human magic is the ability to empathize with others, to match resonances, and to experience life as another experiences it – whether that other is another human being, an animal, a plant a piece of metal, or a rock. Human magic is awesome.

We have so much magic in us that the flashy fantasy magic is best relegated to the minds of scientists, who will, using human magic, create tools and devices that will give us the flashy stuff.

We who are striving to be mages are beyond mere fictional magic; we are the path makers, the keepers, the creators, the dreamers, the workers. We are humans, wielding human magic skillfully, reliably, and effectively. It takes years of study, of practice, and of hard work to be competent in human magic, but that magic is accessible to all of us.