I’ve always been a wild child. I was orphaned by my parents while still living with them (yes, this is possible).
Summer days meant riding my bike through the wild fields that surrounded our small subdivision, leading the charge with the other children in my neighborhood. There were tadpoles and frogs, leeches and dragonflies in the little canal.
I was an instigator. I did mighty research about everything I could POSSIBLY turn into vastly exciting edge play pursuing FUN.
I went barefoot at all times, except when hauled off to church.
I was astonishingly physical. I could approach a six foot wooden fence at full speed, going up and over it without slowing down. This and other demanding forms of play resulted in constant scrapes and bruises to my arms and legs, and frequent stubbing and crunching of toes. There were bee stings to lament mightily. These injuries were merely collateral damage in my perfect tomboy life.
I climbed onto houses and stood at the edge of roofs panting with exertion, pushing through my fear of jumping. The neighborhood children bore breathless witness to my rituals of courage as I finally leapt onto the bone-saving carpet of suburban grass below.
I grew up. No. I tried to grow up.
I was terrified of becoming an adult. But I wasn’t going to end up sitting at some kitchen table sucking down vodka and O.J.s like my mother.
I tried lots of things. Even the long process of attaining a Master’s degree, which devolved into the inevitable realization that I had educated myself for a profession inhabited by the class of workers called professionals, something I was not adult enough to successfully pursue.
THEN.
Here is the key. The clue to my current stalemate with magical development. Only when I was in a relationship, with a boyfriend or a husband, could I engage with the world of others. They provided the link between myself and the doing of adult things as I lived in their worlds, became friends with their friends, pursued activities that were astonishingly easy for them.
NOW.
Now I am pursuing the life and purpose of a black magician. I knew right away that this is my destiny. This is the passion that filled the empty hole that could not be filled by the dark days and painful burdens of emulating an adult life.
But I am still that wild child. In between relationships, I retreat into myself. Any sustained engagement with the adult world is for me akin to trying to survive a toxic waste spill. I much prefer to lay in bed for hours, watching educational television series and documentaries, enjoying the intense curiosity of someone who has had to parent themselves. I have had to teach myself what the world is made of, how it holds together, how it works. But I do not live in that world. I live in the world of ideas, of understanding. This world is utterly fascinating to me.
So here I am. Over a year now in developing myself as a black magician, and waking up every day feeling stuck. I am waiting. Waiting for the comrade who will reach for my hand, bidding me to take up my bed and walk. The one who will generate the connection and momentum of a life that is underway, that is happening to them. But… black magicians are by nature solitary in most, if not all ways.
Without this connection with another, I am mired in fear and smallness of effort. It takes tremendous energy to go at things, and to generate any of the sustained momentum necessary to keep this energy flowing. Soon I am mired again. I go from being a lump to a self-prosecuting deadbeat, then back to the consolations of a small life of managed fear and relief from that fear.
I have this mighty clue: When I read a book about magic, when I watch a video, I feel my “stuckness” intensely. I cannot tolerate the mighty feelings these activities bring up in me. I feel I must be “doing something,” but I don’t know what that is.
And so. I have progressed magically. I have made huge advances. I have done extensive shadow work. I have been prepared by the entities I work with. But lift off hasn’t happened.
There was the breakthrough of realizing that yes, as a girl who was raised Mormon, I am very earnest about everything. Mormons know how to get the hay in the barn. But another word for being earnest is to be controlling. I have an agenda in everything I do. And agendas are about control.
There was the breakthrough of realizing that I am constantly pushing on my inner experience. Trying to control my experience of anything worth focusing on, shaping and contorting and amplifying, trying to fill an immense emptiness, an awkward stabbing at the world, trying to connect in a meaningful way. I want to grab hold of something that will not fizzle in my hands. That which will somehow allow me to corral and consume it as I try so very hard to incorporate second-hand the vast wildness of the world into the child size wildness of my own.
I have struggled. And I have made some amazing progress as a magician.
There was that moment. When I saw clearly that my immense agenda for this life has remained unfulfilled. That I cannot trade this agenda for anything. And as I have brought this agenda to magic, I have begun to think that they do not go together. What if one has to go? To transform, you need to be willing to change agendas. I was really angry about this realization for a few days. Really really angry.
I have to let go of all this, the things that have been most precious to me all my life? In order to accept the full force of transformation?
WHAT ABOUT THIS HUNGER? THE HUNGER I THOUGHT WOULD BE FILLED BY MAGICAL TRANSFORMATION.
I haven’t wanted anything but this transformation all my life. But I didn’t realize I would have to give up everything in me that was desperately seeking it at all times, in all ways, for almost all my life.
Yes, I have a mighty agenda. I find that I am not ready to abandon it. It has to be fulfilled, or I will lose part of myself.
So, until I make some progress on this dilemma, I am stuck.
Stuck.
Lord help me. Help me Lord. I am struggling. Like walking through cement.
I need help.
I have made an appointment for a spiritual consultation with an immensely talented and experienced black magician that I know, with whom I have had a couple of consultations in the past.
We shall see.
The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse (1888) ~ I live in the world of dreams, constantly searching over the closely flowing dark waters that are going somewhere, but forever passing me by, searching for a glimpse of the real life that will somehow take shape as the ever closer port to a new land and a new life, one that actually happens to me.
Twilight in the Underworld 
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