The Rhythm of Our Souls

 This past Imbolc weekend was illuminating for me in many ways. It was appropriate, of course, since Imbolc is about illumination and the increasing light of the solar fire. What I gleaned most was how drastically my pace differs from the pace of the human world and just how much that pace has shifted in the years of my search for the mysteries that surround us.

In the dark, hidden secret of each moment, there is a silence. It exists between breaths; between beats of the heart. There in that liminal space, we can soar soulward. Only in that stillness; that soundless choir, have I found true communion with the land. It is this stillness and silence, found even in the midst of all activity, that can open us to a kind of magic.

We, in the modernist world rush to our doom. In the frantic pace of goal oriented experience, and our attachment to reason, we omit ourselves from life. This pace, advocated by commercial doings and the surrendering of our will to those that exploit, removes us from the voices of our ancestors, from the song of the earth. It cuts off the wordless singing that surrounds us and calls longingly for our reunion.

Rather than relate the experiences that led me to a particular realization, I thought it would be best to simply relate the insight I had. To do else would be to cast a shadow upon some that are caught in that pace, and hold them accountable for what they did not create. Most of us participate unwittingly, captured by the world we were born into, unaware that there is another pace we can find.
This then, is the magic that flows out from me. I have learned, by methods certainly far older than I, to sink into a different rhythm; to deepen my experience into the moment and in so doing, pull back a shroud heaped upon the senses by civilization. It is this magic, that we so desperately need, that has found me, enchanted my senses and taken me deep into the underworld of our shared earthly experience.

This isn't just some fancy wording for feeling, or seeing more clearly, though it is certainly that. This is an honest sinking into a world of being that interpenetrates us and all that we can see, hear, feel, taste or smell. This is a magic older than any, and it surrounds us, waiting to be rebirthed into the consciousness of humankind.

So often people look for magic in some nebulous “out there,” when in fact it's “in here,” in this moment that we are experiencing. But, our pace won't let us see it. Our pace is a predatory looking, a hungry ghost seeking, to fill the emptiness that commercial interests have enchanted us to believe is our lot. And we have danced to that glamor for too long; so long that most who remember something different have either passed from us or have walked away into that real world, leaving us to our folly and illusion. This pace, so hard in winning, is the pace of the earth, the trees, the wind and the river. This, then, is the magic we must reclaim; the magic of a new rhythm, an old rhythm, the rhythm of our souls.