But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
- Iris DeMent, Let the Mystery Be
It was dusk or maybe a little earlier. It was hard to tell if the sun had already gone down because the cloud cover was thick and dark. And then the sky opened and the rain came pouring down. One hundred campers were sitting on the deck of the dinning hall and my best friend and I were standing in front of them under the overhang. After about ten minutes we turned to the campers and told them that if we could all be absolutely silent for three minutes, we could stop the rain. They looked at us with the perfect mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Across each of their faces we could see variations of the thought, “we can’t stop the rain… wait, can we?” They wanted to believe but they also didn’t want to believe. Eventually they were willing to try. The first few attempts were disrupted by nervous giggles that turned into huge outbursts of laughter and chatter. Then on the fourth or fifth attempt we made it past the halfway point, the rain started letting up, past the two minute point, it was just a drizzle. Just before the three minute mark, one of the counselors stepped out from under the overhang and the rain stopped.
There was a counselor who worked at the summer camp I ran who was impossible to get in touch with. He often didn’t have a phone and was quite unresponsive to emails or other messages. During camp this wasn’t a problem because we were all at camp, but during the off-season, when we were all spread out across the entirety of New York City and only had an activity once every couple of months, connecting with him was a near impossibility. Eventually we discovered that the most consistently reliable way of getting in touch with him was conjuring. If we needed to get in touch with him, one of us in the office would speak his name and he would show up. Sometimes it took a day or two, but most of the time it happened within a couple of hours.
I have a deck of Jewish Values Cards. Each card has a value written on it. A few years ago I started having people pick a card at random to see which value the deck wanted them to contemplate. Over the years, this deck developed a reputation for having powerful magic. Invariably the deck would show people exactly the card they needed to see. One time someone picked patience, immediately got annoyed and asked if they could pick a different card. I usually don’t let people do that but I made an exception. I reshuffled the deck, and this time when the patience card showed up again, she had no choice but to accept the lesson.
Magic is an orientation, a way of experiencing the world that embraces connection, that invites the unexplainable, that sees interconnectivity that the logical mind cannot find reason for. Magic accepts the notion that we are more than our physical form, that we are more than our minds can understand, that there is something going on that is beyond our capacity to make sense of. I choose to embrace this phenomenon. I choose to find joy in the unexplainable. I choose to accept that there is something more that I do not understand, that I will not understand, that will remain a mystery. And I choose to like it that way.