It's a new year for witches. Is that true? I don't know. I heard that somewhere. If so, Happy New Year, witches. I could never be a witch because I don't believe in things. I'm a skeptic. Also I don't look good skyclad. Mostly, though, it's just because I don't believe in things.
On some darking evenings and on some kindling mornings winking grey and moist into the sky the absence of magic in the world howls at me like an accusation, as though it is all my fault, this flatness of our spherical world. "Consider wonders magic never made," I say. "There is a mundane wonder in the world, magic notwithstanding. Close your eyes and feel it embrace you viscerally. Open your eyes and watch it looking at you from across the room, smiling eyes more natural than super, ordinary as eyes ever have been, wonder blinking in kinship with your mundane soul."
"Words. Just words," the world sighs back silently, hitting you with the full blunt force of quiet, motionless inanimation.
Meanwhile you breathe and writhe in this chemical dance of vegetable and animal growth. "There is no life but us," we think to no one else. "There is only everything, but nothing more."
November in the hemisphere of my cultural identity is a vegetable month, tangible as earth beneath your fingernails. Harvest fills our hands and lungs and bellies, reminding us of more than we were, less than we will be. It is time now to love what is more than what isn't, seeds not spirits, no goblin on the wilting bloom. The wind would drown us in cinnamon and soil breath except that we need it. It keeps us alive, because we are indigenous here, perfectly suited to the deluge of air. There are places in the universe where there is no November, places where the air would kill the earthen vessels of our souls. Here there is vegetable harvest and animal plenty, a November for us, a paradise for such as you and me.
When the lack of magic howls at me, digging deeper these caverns in my heart, I hold my breath and slip under the water. I squish my toes into the mud. I open my submerged eyes and stare at the refraction of light bouncing off the blue sky. I cast these mundane spells to ward off the things that aren't but long so much to be.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
P. S. - You may notice the logo in the margin of my blog. This can mean only one thing: It's NaLogoMo, National Logo Month, again. Here are the rules: Post the logo on your blog. Then, for a whole month, you don't have to do anything. Post. Don't post. Write. Don't write. Just do whatever. You can do it. I believe in you. Welcome to NaLogoMo '08. Thanks for stopping by.
