Magik - Enchanting the World One Word at a Time Podcast

Would We Also Say Light Holds No Sway?

You have to allow yourself to be an artist … you have to allow yourself to open to experience reality. We spend so much time resisting reality that, if we’re going to create art, we have to gently open the door to ourselves,in the spirit of appreciation and acceptance.It’s astonishing what can come from just loving, listening, and allowing.~David Price [https://davidprice-26453.medium.com/the-attention-we-bring-84024a47d20f] This is an in-between time. A marriage of culture (i.e., the capricious time we choose to end the calendar year) and cosmos (the darkness has had its say; now time for the light to grow). Perhaps the year’s end is not random or impetuous. Maybe, in the closing of accounts, collecting of tax documents, and glancing over our shoulder at the year that was, we’re trying to tell ourselves that darkness holds no sway. Would We Also Say Light Holds No Sway? When I was younger, I brooded about the darkness, starving for spring to shed a beam of light, a scent of warmth. I feared and shunned darkness like I reacted to my brother Blayne’s adoration of the Doors. All that doom and gloom of the Lizard King … but the music and lyrics were SO. FUCKING. GOOD! Now that I’m older, I crave the darker, colder, wrapped-in-secrets tilt of the planet away from the sun. Just like I can’t help but love everything and anything the Doors did. When I was a child, it felt like a humiliation, a giving-into what I thought were my brother’s perverse musical proclivities. Now, it feels like “Look what I was missing! I’m damn glad I gave in at seven years of age, baby!” I Haven’t “Given Into” Darkness Rather, I’ve adjusted my eyes and heart. Unlike the light, needing—nay, demanding—to show everything, darkness helps me unwrap little parcels randomly dropped in nooks of my heart. When the light shines, it’s time to make hay, people! And I once did my own share of that in spades. I still do lots of hay-making. But in my own time. And I find that the tiniest parcels in my dark, cozy heart-rooms blossom into acres of grain waving in the night breeze under the moon. In bleak mid-winter’s frost-bitten stubble lie seeds.Spring will come in its own time, and offer emergence from burrows of dark and seep, light and aroma, moths and snowflakes. This Year’s Darkness This year, in the Solstice time of encroaching darkness, I furiously feared in my heart for our world. I seriously looked into ex-patting it to some other place that wasn’t wooing fascism. I adore England and Wales. Yet, they have the same problems/different names. Where to run but deeper into who I am? I’m trans. That’s one part of who I am. I’m a writer. Another part. A baker, a patient access representative, a wife, a parent, a grandparent. Oh, and a hatchet thrower. I let those fears gallop over my December, without tamping them down or numbing them. Fear opens doors in my heart and parcels I never guessed were there. Every night can be Yule. The fear has galloped away. I am who I am right here in Colorado. I don’t need mountains to climb on another shore. Dang, the ones here are beyond majestic. Beyond fear. Beyond delight. Everyday, they stand there and woo me. Thus, my ex-pat aspirations found purchase in planning for the trip to Wales my son will take me on this spring. (Good son, that man!) There, in May, I’ll have the chance to bring a few parcels into the light, to see what the Welsh sun does to ‘em. At the close of this work week, I took Persephone-path first steps away from fear. (Mind you, all first steps are in darkness.) I’d asked my supervisor if I could observe one of our providers in surgery. I talk everyday with patients. I’m not qualified to give clinical answers to their questions. But their fears and uncertainties? I can bring a human voice to share with them. Uncertainties are lived in flesh and bone. It was time I took a literal journey into the darkness of blood vessels, fascia, and muscle, to see what parcels O.R. lighting might reveal, that I could take back with me. And it revealed a delightfully unexpected parcel of peace. It’s All About the Art I stood four hours, by our surgeon, watching the dance of surgical lights, forceps, gloved fingers, and vocal exchange between nurses, NPs, doctors, and beeping, trilling machines. It was mesmerizing and fascinating, eliciting “Wow!” after “WOW!” I said to the surgeon, a person for whom I schedule clinic appointments by the hundreds, “Doctor, you’re an artist!” The surgical NP quipped, while grasping a retractor in one hand and adjusting a shunt with the other, “Now, now, we don’t need to inflate his ego.” My surgeon said, “Ah, it’s all art on the inside, that never gets seen,” as if apologizing for what he does. I smiled under my surgical-grade facemask, “All art is on the inside, doctor. Words, paint, dance-steps, and more are the telepathy for communicating it.” “Hmm,” my doctor said (probably wondering how this stupid bitch got into his operating room!) and continued with his artistry. The next time I see him though, I’ll tell him this: “You have a telepathy, too, doctor. It’s called ‘health,’ and, though it’s hidden in the dark places where your expertise and instruments take you on a daily basis,you reveal it in the doing.We all reveal it in the doing.” Happy Solstice and New Year, one and all. Love, Bethany Get full access to Magik at www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe [https://www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

How We Happen—Like Yeast

There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure.To grow into the person that your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go.The gift of life is given to us for ourselvesand also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others.~John O’Donohue [https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Echoes-Celtic-Reflections-Yearning/dp/0060955589/ref=sr_1_1?crid=354E1D0SW1GAX&keywords=eternal+echoes+john+o%27donohue&qid=1701092248&sprefix=eternal+echoe%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1]. Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong [https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Echoes-Celtic-Reflections-Yearning/dp/0060955589/ref=sr_1_1?crid=354E1D0SW1GAX&keywords=eternal+echoes+john+o%27donohue&qid=1701092248&sprefix=eternal+echoe%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1]. I’ve talked at length in my writings about who I presented as before transitioning, about what I was like, about how far I’ve come, and even about the mercy I’ve learned to grant to my previous years. What I haven’t talked about is transition itself. What it was (and is) like. Part of that is because while I was transitioning, I had to, um, transition. Analyzing it would have halted it, while I analyzed the fuck out of it instead of getting on with it. The rose doesn’t pause its blossoming to note how far it’s come from the bud. And the yeast in a sourdough starter don’t measure their progress from once floating on air to landing in a jar of water and flour, to eating, fucking, and spawning thousands of new generations. They just do it. While I was transitioning, I had to, um, transition. Analyzing it would have halted it, while I analyzed the fuck out of it instead of getting on with it. A Fool’s Errand Nonetheless, I can fool myself into believing that I can, at the same time, grow and analyze that growth. Ah! A fool’s errand if there ever was one. I can’t go back to my transition period. Hell, I can’t go back to a moment ago. I live my moments now. What I go back to is a memory of it. And memory can be deceptive, much in the same way a photograph can deceive. Oh, yes, because a photo captures things at a precise moment, granting a seemingly “realistic” image of the subject. Yet, it’s still an image and not the thing, the moment, itself. Far from being an objective glimpse, frozen in time, a photo records the subjective, as in “subject” to everything that was happening in that precise moment—the way the light hit, the flow of air, the interaction of shadows with shades, tones, and hues and the aperture of the photographic device, not to mention the medium of record, whether digitization or chemicals on film. The subject of a photo doesn’t even capture the subjectivity of the photographer. Rather, it’s an image of that person’s subjectivity, much like writing, music, dance, painting, sculpture—and any art, really. Where it goes beyond subjectivity, where subject and object cease to be an illusive binary, is where the viewer/reader receive the image. This isn’t an exchange in which the artist hands over their work for consumption. It’s an event that shows we’re all shared events. Perhaps that’s why, in the West, we’re so wound up about sexuality. Obsessed with binaries like “before and after,” “subject and object,” and “matter and spirit,” we have trouble analyzing the event in which two seeming opposites are one—ourselves and all that we fear as “other.” Uniting sexually with other human beings is something that can’t be had by analyzing it. For that breaches the event horizon. The uniting is the being done, the event. Analyze it later if you want, but don’t stop happening with each kiss and caress. That’s what transition is. This isn’t an exchange in which the artist hands over their work for consumption. It’s an event that shows we’re all shared events. We Are Uncatchable Moments Yes, the photo makes its mark because it’s so similar to what was there when it was taken. But that thing, that moment, isn’t there anymore. It’s different. Infinitesimally different from what the photographed thing is now and what it will be the next moment. Just like me and you. Being subjective isn’t bad or worthless for all that. It’s us living in the narrative of time. So, in transition, my memory in every moment played a glimpsing role in what I was becoming even as it plays a role now as I look back on my transition. Reflecting on it helps shape what my reflections on it in a moment’s or a year’s time will be. None of us is given an instruction manual because nothing like you and me has ever before been previously built. We aren’t even “built.” We’re us, happening. Unique. And we’re not us, as in we’re not what we were a second before, and in the next second won’t be what we are right now. But we constantly happen. So, we can painstakingly try to mark how we go about that. But that is a taking and a pain. Yes, we can think about what we want to be, but when we get there, we won’t necessarily be what we expected or intended. And that’s quite fine. An adventure, even. None of us is given an instruction manual because nothing like you and me has ever before been previously built. I Know What I Like The focus should be on what we like, love, and feel most at home with right now. We don’t do that in a vacuum. Yeast don’t grow in outer space. They need air, food, and moisture. They’re algorithmically programmed to gravitate to what they like. Indeed, they’re like those things because yeast are an ever-happening relationship with them. Yeast float on air and consume water and food to make more of themselves by making air, water, and flour more themselves. We and all things in the cosmos transition by transformation—transforming the needful things that in turn transform ourselves. We and all things in the cosmos transition by transformation—transforming the needful things that in turn transform ourselves. I’m learning, recipe by recipe, that such is my ever-happening life. Damn, I’m grateful for it! Love, Bethany Get full access to Magik at www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe [https://www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Aura Lea & Why I Write

No recipe for this week’s newsletter. It’s not because I’m out of them. In fact, this weekend, I made bread pudding, focaccia, and a hideously sunken banana walnut bread (still goes good down the hatch). This blog really isn’t a way to make money, though that would be welcomed. I write about what I witch, and I don’t always get the choice to witch what I choose. The mood hits me, and I’m painting, baking, writing, or throwing hatchets (that last one will be material for an upcoming post). Lately, I’ve been writing where I didn’t think I would—on a book I want to market to a publisher instead of self-publishing. I thought I’d finished the bugger, but it keeps growing, changing, needing refinement that I didn’t expect. Every book I write is a means of self-discovery. Yes, of course, I write because I enjoy and want other people to love it like I adore my favorite stories and writers. Outside of that, though, I can’t think of a practical reason to write stories, memoir, or philosophy, all of which I do like it’s the one and only vocation I live for. And it is. So what if I write something that lots of people read? What was the point? To communicate something? Why shouldn’t I just go out with friends or chat up the patients I check in at my medical receptionist day job? I communicate with them, don’t I? So, there’s something special about communicating through a book, something I have to do, or I wouldn’t be me. Yet, even if I do that to the tune of international fame, what’s the point? Yeah, I’ll have communicated something. To what end, though? I honestly don’t know. Nor do I have to know. It’s a spell I do, like baking and painting, or cracking a joke. It doesn’t accomplish anything. My meals, stories, rhetoric, and art make a connection with bellies, hearts, and minds, but why the effort? I apparently just need to do it, and that’s very selfish on the face of it, not to mention narcissistic. The utterance of the spell implies the hubristic assumption that I have something to give. The hard-and-fast utilitarian can easily say that I do it to be heard, even by a tiny audience of appreciators. Still, I don’t know why I do it anymore than I know why I’m here in the first place. Presumably, the universe would still be here if I didn’t go to the trouble. Yet, I’m here anyway. And that says something. Something about the fact I’m here when I might as well not be says that I’m here for something more than vanity or coincidence. And, as I’ve been fond of saying frequently since I transitioned, “There are no coincidences.” So, I’m going to tell you a story about my day job that made me blush every color in the spectrum. This really happened, though it’s both mundane and odd enough that I find it needful to tell. On Halloween day, a patient who’d been particularly chatty at check-in called out to me from his exam room and in his boxers, while taking off his socks to reveal his swollen, purple feet (which he was there to see our surgeon about), serenaded me (his son also in the exam room, harmonizing) with the “Aura Lea [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_Lea]” version of “Love Me Tender” that they said their ancestor [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._W._Fosdick] wrote back in 1861. THEN, they sang “Love Me Tender” as the head surgeon of our clinic was entering the room. I whispered to the doctor, “THEY called me in. I’ve nuthin’ to do with this, I swear!” I then told the father-and-son duet act, “That was lovely, gentlemen—those songs perfectly express how I feel about my wife,” and got the hell outta Dodge. So, yeah, CREEPY, but not in the usual Halloween way. The doctor later smiled at me about the incident, so no harm done, I suppose. Still, I was flush with 17 different kinds of embarrassment, discomfort, and … gratitude(?) Yes, I was grateful. They didn’t have to sing it, but they did, making my morning at the clinic something I’ll never forget. Other than me, the doctor, and three MAs in the clinic, those two men had no other audience. Yet they sang like it was what they were called to do. I wonder how many of us do that? Then I remembered that I write. Get full access to Magik at www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe [https://www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

You Could Have Done A Million Things …

Pam says I get a tone. And she’s right. It’s when I get preachy. A long time ago, in a lifetime far away, I used to preach for a living. There were a million things I could have done with my life, and I set my sights on becoming a Methodist minister. I don’t regret any of the thousand choices I’ve made, at least in the sense of damning myself for them. Knowing what I know now, being who I am now, I realize I wouldn’t have made those choices. I don’t get a rewind button. I have right-now life. I can look at life like I’m holding a remote, a passive viewer clicking through streaming services to decide on which of a million entertainments I can watch. Yet, taking life as an observer may have been the reason I decided out of a million things that I needed to be a pastor in a Christian denomination. We don’t decide Netflix’ menu. They decide it for us. It’s like the radio playlists of the ‘80s: yeah, we had the freedom to flip the dial to another station, but the industry was deciding what got heaviest rotation on any station. So, the industry of living in the capitalist West decided which circles I’d live in. Maybe it’s just a process of growing older and hopefully wiser that I write this. I’m not damning myself for rotating myself into a frenzy and making life decisions that I clung to with a death grip even long after they revealed themselves as not the best in a million (or even dozen) things I could do. Maybe I’m doing it again. I don’t think so, though. You see, we don’t decide. We live. And how we live, what we open ourselves to, where we put our flower pots so they can catch rain and sun, does the deciding. So when I see legislatures deciding that of a million things they can do, they should harass trans people; when I see Hamas slaughter people like it’s what they have to do out of a million things they could’ve done; when a preacher decides that of all the things they could preach this Sunday it should be about who’s going to hell because of what they do with their genitals with another consenting adult—well, I no longer judge the preachers. I don’t agree with them. I grieve the decisions made and wonder about the human choice-maker that’s inside me every bit as it’s inside them. And I feel in my heart that I’m frail and that this life is precious. And that I have f*cked up, am probably right now f*cking up, and will f*ck up. Some of that decision making process is out of my control because I’m shaped by culture and inner fears and desires I haven’t admitted to myself. I start again. With myself. With this magik called life. I give it another go. The dead are right now burying their own dead. I might help them and do more than preach or worry or bemoan our existence. I might even decide that, out of a million things I could do, it’s right now time to stop writing a post and instead not decide to do anything. But to instead be still and see. Feel. Listen. And love. Myself. And all us decision-makers. The million things I could do are all really one thing. Before I do anything else, I’m gonna let life happen to me. To see what happens when I don’t feel called to do anything but be me to the next soul I meet. Get full access to Magik at www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe [https://www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sinead and Me

There’s a soul-sickening here that steals dreams. We live amid wonders. And hideous peril that makes us wonder what we’ve done. Future ages will call this a wartime, like we called the Civil War. World Wars I and II. Now We Dangle In those wars and others, we knew all hung in the balance. Now we dangle, for we don’t even know we’re at war. We feel it but haven’t the words. We’ve stolen meaning—and worse, we handed over, without a qualm, our magik. Magik never leaves us. It stands with us. In us. Is us. Disinformation. Flirtation and outright adultery with fascism and nihilism. “Why not?” we say, fey with the sheer acceleration of it. Every moment feels a cliffhanger, no chance to rest, heal, pause, and present ourselves … to ourselves. Though we don’t reckon the partner who walks with us, she’s still here, calling us, as Lincoln said in a more seemingly perilous moment, to the better angels of our nature. What we miss is not just our razor’s-edge peril, but who we are. What do we desire? What do we see as the ultimate prize? Look at the clothing we wear. The cars we drive. The persons we keep relation with. The places we live. Breaking with the Broken “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has long been a tagline of homo sapiens. What do we do when it is broken? When we are broken and just don’t see it but instead go on like we’re getting better? At some point, we’ll see that we’ve been settling for something—anything—other than that which really answers our thirst. Dressed in chrome, brushed nickel, and ever smaller microchips, our costume is as superstitious and fatuous as paintings on cave walls. “Yes, but look at our technology, ever outstripping itself and us!” we might say. What then? We bank on ever-improving, ever-evering … to what goal? What’s the endgame? A Never-Ending Cornucopia Aristotle, then the Renaissance, set on course the technological revolution that was all along our choice and not destiny, not evolution. We at first went with what we knew, to build civilization. Stepping beyond that, we crafted an alternate reality where we might live free of weather, catastrophe, disease, poverty, hunger, war, and one day, even death. From being subjects of a harsh universe, we turned the cosmos into our subject. Still, We Hunger for Something. For the last 600 years, we’ve bewitched ourselves with scientific method. We continually poke the bear we call the unknown. In the meantime, we consume, consume, consume. Techne is our religion. Its priests assure us that the bear won’t maul us and that we’ll continue to enjoy an endless supply of bear meat and fur. Magik was an option for our ancestors, and to call that mere superstition misses that they were behaving no differently than we are now: going with what’s working for us. Until it doesn’t. Chanting what we know. Until we’re not sure we know anything. Unknowing the Question The scientific/technological revolution, by its nature, can proceed in no other direction than to eventually undo itself. Witches feel our world’s right now undone. The pandemic was a tipping point that made it apparent to a critical mass of humanity. For the last 250 years, only witches, artists, poets, and prophets had felt and proclaimed that something’s bubbling under the surface, against which technological prowess won’t avail. We’ve so bifurcated our perception that we think we face a precipitous choice: * Should we use our world as a means to something, whatever that is …OR … * Should we hallow it? We haven’t tried unknowing. We might then see that the two questions are pointless. We’ve needlessly dissected the one thing in front of us—the thing that is us—till we fail to recognize ourselves. We are the answer that never needed a question. We are the reality that was never a choice. We are magik. Sinead and Me The death of Sinead O’Connor hit me powerfully. Of course I loved her magik voice. But she challenged me. She was a pop singer, for crying out loud. Until she wasn’t. She tore up a photo of the Pope on national TV. Hear what she said: “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil. Fight the real enemy!” Patriarchal “princes” like Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesce took turns bragging about the violence they’d’ve done to her had they been there. But they weren’t. Like so many of us right now aren’t here for ourselves. I was 29. Pam and I awaited the birth of our third child two months later. I was a practicing Catholic who even then asked questions about the church’s soul-sickening monster of abuse. I didn’t know what to make of O’Connor’s lone voice in the wilderness crying out against the depravity that garbed itself in white robes. For that’s where we were living and still are—in a wilderness of our own making. It doesn’t have to be that way. We never left the garden, only built around ourselves a desert so that we could then righteously take water from those not powerful enough to keep us from doing it. Water Under the Bridge of Sighs Think of everything that’s happened since that October night. We no longer have “national TV.” The twin towers melted into the ground. The planet is taking arms against the virus called us who have sickened its soul. We’ve waged wars like a theater-goer missing the picture for trip after trip to the popcorn stand. Our democracy and liberal progress have been stolen by a contagion of misinformation in the grip of our appetites—the same misinformation machine that raped and vilified Sinead the rest of her life. We congratulated ourselves at our righteousness at having burned the witch. Ah, But She Was Right And she was a pop singer who heroically burned down her career to wake us up. “There was no doubt about who this bitch is,” she said to us. “There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star … People say, ‘Oh you fucked up your career,’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant that I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.” We All Make Our Living Playing Live So why, in the wake of her death, are we all still playing a lie? Her words didn’t shake me then like they should have. I went on playing my life as righteous father, faithful head of household, slaving to build for Papa Culture the beach house he convinced me I could have, if I just worked hard enough, kept faith enough. When I woke up to myself, I found that the sand all around me was my own private Sahara, no sound of waves in earshot. But her voice rang across the dunes and echoed in my heart. I kept listening to her music, finding prophetic the art she made after “the incident.” Clear. Ringing. True. Best of all—beautiful. Like this, her song [https://youtu.be/MXyGEw8lHG8]: Thank you for hearing me …Thank you for loving me …Thank you for seeing me …And for not leaving me.… Thank you for staying with meThanks for not hurting me …You are gentle with me …Thanks for silence with me ……Thank you for holding meAnd saying I could beThank you for saying "Baby"Thank you for holding me … Thank you for breaking my heartThank you for tearing me apartNow I'm a strong, strong heartThank you for breaking my heart Thank you, Sinead. By the cosmos, thank you. You haven’t died. For I live. Beautifully torn by you. Get full access to Magik at www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe [https://www.bethanybeeler.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]