Image by author: loose watercolour of two profiles at an angle, face to face
A life of magic. I want that.
It’s an obsession. I make no apologies.
Most nights I go to sleep bathed in magic, with the sound of Harry Potter being read to me by the glorious Stephen Fry.
I live for the notion that life can be magical. That miracles are at our disposal. It may sound ridiculous and it’s made life most painful for many a-year as I struggled to live with what is… I still dip back into disbelief, of course, but now I know where to go with it… This morning a new perspective emerged from one such dip.
I was having a wee cry as I was chatting with Michael and with all of the heavenly crew. “Help me find more confidence that I can allow abundance in” was the gist of the request I made through my tears. ‘“I know it’s about letting go and allowing the magic. But I’m finding it tricky to trust.”
And here I am, I added to myself, talking to the spirit of my dead husband, with all his imagined entourage… how desperate am I? OMG…
Michael was always so good at magic. I mean. He found me, for a start. That was magic beyond belief…
We came from opposite backgrounds, born hundreds of miles and lightyears in lifestyles apart.
He’d not a qualification to his name. Though his thinking was pure genius and his curiosity unending…
I’d not long graduated from Cambridge University when we met.
Michael, my angel, had grown up in a street dubbed, ‘The Worst Street in Britain’, according to popular press. Violence. Drugs. Extreme poverty. Abuse. Daily life for him then…
I’d grown up in Earls Court. Treading on Lady Diana’s toes in local sweet shops, before she became a princess…
We should never have met.
But Michael dreamed me. Vividly. Down to the last detail.
He dreamed me repeatedly when he was 13. I was just 8 years old then… but he dreamed of me as the young woman he would meet some 14 years later.
In his dream he knew I was from a different place, a different world. In his dream I was his wife.
In the year that we met, I’d found happiness for the first time. I remember stopping and noticing it and thinking to myself, So this is what happiness feels like! Wow!
For the first time in my life I was doing what I wanted. Living day to day, following whatever impulse appealed. No thoughts of future or past. For the first time, for a brief time, life was mine to mould.
I remember clearly how I’d come to the conclusion that year, after a relationship had crashed unexpectedly, that I really didn’t need or want a man in my life. I was happy in my own space, my own world. Complete. Content. I felt whole.
There was no resistance in the mix. I was living in the most childlike of ways. Making bread with local kids. Working with an adult literacy centre. No calculations or capacity to think about the future; I’d no space for worry. I was in fleeting, sweet recovery from the responsibilities of my past.
I’d followed a friend to the poorest part of town. I shared a house with her there as she lived out her passion for a life spent working with the poor and disadvantaged.
I had no such ideals. I simply followed my friend and loved the life we lived. Freedom. Simplicity. Enjoying being of some small benefit to the kids who washed up at our door…
One January evening, I cycled home in a downpour. I entered the living room sporting a wet corduroy look. So fetching! Dripping on the carpet in my usual clashing colours — I had NO dress sense then — I plastered my long hair back behind my ears and wiped the raindrops from my face to find a young man staring up at me from the couch. He had eyes like blue saucers — like the dog in the Tinder Box tale.
Michael stared at me all evening.
I don’t think he said one word.
I thought he was a bit weird, and shrugged off the encounter.
Michael was staring and speechless because he recognised me in every detail from those dreams he’d had over a decade before.
His wide-eyed wonder reflected one thought: That’s my wife. How do I tell her?
If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
Perhaps almost as magical was the knowing I had, so soon afterwards, that Michael was indeed my husband. It didn’t take him long to persuade me. Within days he had proposed. Within weeks, I had accepted… No head-over-heels-in-love-ness there. (Not at that point anyway.) A pure, profound knowing. That was all. It was enough.
In my journalling this morning I mentioned magic to Michael.
Instantly the little acronym popped into my mind:
M.A.G.I.C - Me And God In Cahoots
It made me grin. I loved it.
It must have come from Michael because his grammar was always dodgy — a true poet ever, he was free from social norms. I was always too correct to write poetry…
It made me think, What kind of cahoots is that cahoots… and what kind of God is that God?
Cahoots — what a great word that is! What kind of cahoots…? The giggling kind, the carefree kind, the conspiracy to feel good no matter what-ing kind. It’s a cahoots that has clear parameters, in order to stay in the fun-zone…
I have a role to play in the divine cahooting game. God has a role too. And they’re different. Discreet. The game only works when we stay within the parameters. Step outside them and I’m in a heap on the floor. Thrown off by the see-saw, for getting out of my seat.
My role: to decide what is wanted, whilst loving whatever shows up. If life brings something unwanted, my emotions tell me so.
My first cahooting task then is to bathe those emotions in love.
My second task is to turn my attention towards the feelings and states I desire instead.
Then, I carry on cahooting, putting my imagining to work. I play with the clay of my inner world, imagining the relief and delight, the satisfaction and soothing of a world made instantly magical. With a wave of a wand, all desires are made manifest in this world of my magical mind…
My last cahooting action is to leave my imaginings entirely with God and The Crew. “Douse your dreams in joy and leave them with me.” are the divine order of play.
Then walk.
Away.
And have a great day — knowing my cahooting has already achieved its objective: i.e. I feel the deliciousness of real world magic, by pretending it to my inner world Self.
I have been to the ball. I’ve received the abundance. I’ve relaxed in the relief of my dreams come true. I can skip off like a child who’s whispered wishes to Santa with absolute expectation: he’ll come through.
That’s when God gets cracking on the second stage of cahooting. And oh, the fun to be had with the intricacies of a life lived magically! I swear God delights in giving me the impression I’m moving in the opposite direction half the time.
It’s like a trust game of ‘fall and I’ll catch you,’ moving this way and that, in marvellous meanderings, meeting that angel-person by prompted ‘chance’ and stopping that thing altogether… All the time I’m being led intuitively closer to my dreams. Each step sprinkled with the fairy dust of fun.
My emotions guide me faithfully: ‘You’re getting hotter… no, colder… colder… warmer… warmer… boiling!”
And what kind of god is the god of my cahooting?
Definitely NOT the god of my childhood: the god one pleads with for mercy and relief. Or the god of perfection wanting all that humble grovelling. And not the god of cruel bias — answering prayers of the Worthy Ones only…
No, the god of my cahooting is a god entirely love-formed. A god that is energy itself. Pure, pristine, positive energy. The energy that is all that is.
Love energy in free flow, spinning through every wave/particle, connected to every other dancing dot in existence. An infinitely expanding god. An ocean of love-energy god. A god of unfathomable beauty and wonder and awe. A god of all possibilities and limitless potentialities… Mmmm, that kind of god.
When I look back at that magical happenstance, the day I first met Michael, I can see the rules of cahooting ran true. I had imagined and released my dreams of a partner: there was no neediness there.
Michael too, had explored and relinquished his desire. He’d enjoyed his dreams of love in his younger years. And then he’d let them go. He’d actually decided to die before he reached 30. That seemed the simplest option to him then. Understandable enough when you look at his environment. (Scores of his peers thought likewise and did indeed die very young.) He’d let go of all needing. In charge of his destiny, he was content.
Neither of us were focusing on this aspect of life then. Neither one wrestling this problem to the ground. We were both happy playing in other sandpits of our choosing, leaving God and all cahooting to bring divine magic to bear…
And then we met…
This is probably the biggest example of magic in my life so far, but there are plenty, plenty of others. In fact, that was Michael’s encouragement today: “Make a book of magic to appreciate. Show yourself how much magic fills your world. The more you focus on the magic you’ve experienced, the easier it will be to trust in the next revelations…”
Like the ‘felix felicis’ potion in the tale of Harry Potter, focusing on magic, deciding to live in cahoots with the divine, we can live on liquid luck. Following our inner promptings we may move in opposition to common wisdom. Others may wonder what on Earth we are about.
We’re simply following the trail of joy-crumbs.
Every step taken in trust is blessed with the bliss-bated breath of a fairy tale unfolding…
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” - W.B. Yeats
May you have magic and mystery a-plenty, Lovely One, all the days of your life.