My dear readers,
It is August 23rd, and we are nearly a third into 75 Grow. How is it going for you?: Have you forgotten about it? Have you deepened into it? Have you surprised yourself? The terrain external and internal to us is a great mystery. Regardless of where you are after the past 22 days, can you go back out to the garden and practice again today?
I want to write to you today about a cult and now internet-aesthetic classic that I circle back to in late August: Practical Magic. I want us to go deeper than aesthetics, though I do believe aesthetics can be a sort of open window into parts of ourselves with which we struggle to connect. Habits, hobbies, and activities for this will be at the end of this post, but first let us enter more into the theme.
How do you define practical magic?
I’ve written in other posts about my relationship with both Catholic theology, the contemplative mystics, transcendental poets, and the romantics. All for me wander around similar idea: there is something unseen within the every day. Hell, my account here and across socials gets at this in a way: to practice creativity, even badly, is to connect to a mundane current of flow. Practical magic and reading more from historians of folklore, magick, and witchery is an autumnal theme that lets me understand this way of being anew.
One component of Catholicism that I value and was emphasized in my theology major was the importance of memory and repetition. If you go to a Catholic mass anywhere in the world, even if the language is different, the words, sounds, movements, and scents are the same, and have been much the same over the millennia. The reason for repetition and ritual within the belief system is tied to an understanding of being human, and that the eternal entered through embodiment to dwell within the human body. Though you often hear in modern American Catholicism about the flesh and sin and badness, there is a long history within the religion of understanding that divinity coming into the human body re-ordains it as transcendent, and therefore the embodied life as such. Catholic churches are beautiful and there is so much Catholic art because beauty is viewed as a way to God. Routine and active remembering is viewed as a way in which God is known through the senses, the body, and time.
This returns me to the poets and the practitioners of magic, who also understand that something done once is usually not done well. When I wrote about Mary Oliver in the spring, a part of her daily life was walking the same area near the sea daily with a notebook and a pencil. As romantic as this sounds, she also did it on days she did not want to, presumably on days when it was hot and humid and smelled all too alive out there on the Cape. In Practical Magic, both in the books and the movie, there is also a story of routine and duty in Sally vs wildness and spontaneity in Gillian. For the Aunts, magical practice shapes their whimsical and at times dark business in love spells and healing. Magic requires a sort of dedication and clear attention for any spell or charm to work, and that clarity and repetition of mind is what achieves the spectacular.
Practical magic then is sustained, ordinary, and attuned to what is present. In our habits over these 75 days of 75 Grow, I continually remind myself and you, Reader, to stay with the questions and habits daily. Each day, I try to ask myself:
How would I like to move today?
What do I need to stop avoiding today?
How can I find playfulness today?
How can I simplify all the directions I feel pulled in?
This practice is a sort of prayer, a sort of poem, and a sort of spell. In holding the same questions actively and repetitively, we find ourselves deepening into the novelty of the mundane. The trick is that this deeper knowledge of the interior terrain can only be known by sticking through the boring, the unremarkable, the disgusting—the human. Magic knows this. The poets know this. We know it, Reader.