Welcome to Communal Magic

This is a place that pays homage to and celebrates the power of interconnection between beings, the space a person exists in and the space within them. It is just as much the interconnection between you and your neighbor as it is between you and your many selves.

Why is it magic? Because its power goes beyond measurements, fact, or scientific process and prescription. No medical professional would “prescribe” a wounded soul a summer night on the porch with a new friend with a glass of iced lemonade, even if it turns out to be exactly the thing a person needs. Similarly, you cannot measure in a clean, quantitative scale the power of a conversion you might have with a stranger in a shared Uber. And yet – that too can hold such an immense power, beauty, and sway that thus stands as a watershed moment in your very existence.

That is magic. It is not a matter of reality vs. make-believe, rather, it’s a matter of something powerful that holds an incalculable power. It’s not the antithesis of fact, it’s the fascia between facts. And after all, aren’t facts little more than hypotheses that simply have yet to be disproven?

And what of community? This of course has been studied and practiced for thousands of years. We are a communal species; there’s evidence in that given how much so many of us thirst for it. Consider the commonalities behind a town, church, book club, or soccer team. It’s a safety net, of course, a woven tapestry of spirits and its members.

The first comfort of community is that it is not about you. You alone are not responsible for its smooth course and survival. It does not stand to eject you, like a fragile relationship might, if you must oscillate from active participant to more passive. You need only show up and be.

The second comfort of community is that you simply being still has tremendous power within it. A real community can be changed and flavored by its participants if they so wish. If you leave a community, it will go on, however it will be irrevocably a little changed without your thread in its mesh. And as such, you are not singularly responsible for a community, but you are not irresponsible, either. It needs you to be its precise flavor that it is in time. It waxes and wanes through time like a skin that sheds and replaces itself many times over across a lifespan.

To appreciate this magic requires only pausing to observe. You are often part of something and only realize it after that “something” has dissolved and faded. If you didn’t stop to pay attention to it and thank it for what it is, then only in memory will you feel magic, rather than reveling in its presence. To revel in magic is to thank it for it being.

So, let us pause in our busy world to admire what deserves attention but never asks us for it. Let us become active practitioners of Communal Magic.