There is magic to be found everywhere. This idea has come up time and time again over the last few years and I have given it so much thought. As someone who had the privilege to grow up in a magical space, amongst the forests, mountains, rivers, and ocean, I found it easy to connect deeply to magic itself. I was also blessed with a magical family. I found this magic and its teachings in my great aunts, grandparents, great grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and my mother. Magic and ritual, how it’s portrayed in movies, were woven into my soul and my surroundings from a very young age.
However, this isn’t the only way to find magic. Magic hides in the space of intention. It is born in the natural world, and as humans, we take that and wield natural magic like a sword, to fight alongside our higher selves. Creation holds the power of magic, natural or manmade. The energy we dump into our surroundings influences this magic.
A few years ago we moved into an abandoned and crumbling building on the west side of Detroit. We found stress and resistance, and I was no longer surrounded by the things I found to be magical. The yard was a dumping ground, filled with trash from decades of neglect. We ordered dumpster after dumpster to not only clean out the house but to clean out the yard along with it. As we did this something magical happened. We began to feel relief and direction within our projects. People we invited into our space stopped reacting in fear and stress and began to find hope and belonging.
I began to heal the earth around me and do rituals for those who left painful memories on the land. The wildlife in my yard began to heal. Trees began producing fruits after many years of being too sick to do so, flowers began to spring up where there weren’t any before, squirrels went from sickly and frail to fat and happy. Rats migrated from our yard and hawks, pheasants, buzzards, cardinals, bluejays and all sorts of other birds started to make their home in the trees above.
The neighbors around us began to heal their perceptions of the outdoors too. They began reaching out to us to help with projects in their homes and yards. Occasionally they would come over and stand in the grasses and enjoy the nature that surrounded all of us. Along with the practice of connecting to nature in the city, I began to find magic within the walls of our home. Each of the items used to make our home was made with intention. They were produced and put together to hold a family. Each one of the items that went into building the four walls that surround us was a different ingredient of a spell. My home carries the power of natural creation and manmade intention.
Once I began to realize this power of intention within my walls I began to quiet myself and listen to the spirit of my home. My focus shifted to the idea of how magic hides in everything through intention and creation. The key to harnessing the magic in manmade spaces is finding an understanding of what ill intention can feel like within a space, and how to create a good intention for yourself and your loved ones. How are you feeding and protecting your spaces? How are the spaces within your city influencing you? It’s important to stop and listen to the sounds, colors and smells of your city and to allow the intention of their creation to speak to you. In this space, we find the magic that they create and we can better understand how to harness that for the benefit of ourselves.
