My adult training began with simple steps, with exercises so basic, so powerful, that their magick was overlooked by eyes searching for something astounding and enchanted. But isn't that the way life works? We hope for trumpets and fanfare, while the moments that impact us most profoundly tiptoe in and whisper in our ear.
Looking back, with more than a decade of dedicated practice under my belt, it all makes sense, but back then I thought the exercises that I was given to do were designed to do little more than prove my dedication to my teacher and her instruction.
"For thirty days or thirty nights," she began, "I want you to sit outdoors, watching the world around you. Do nothing but sit there. Don't do anything else for fifteen minutes or a half hour. Watch the world unfold around you. Give Her a chance and Nature will speak if you're only willing to listen."
So there I was, a country boy living in the big city. Sure, I lived in the Pacific Northwest, but didn't you have to DRIVE to get to Nature? I remember looking around my apartment complex, thinking, "Where in the world am I going to do this?" There were a group of trees in the distance, but they were in someone else's yard. And the grass behind our unit wasn't much to look at. All that was left were the shrubs clustered around the parking lot, looking neglected and very much in need of a landscaper's touch.
Like the devoted student, I decided that if that was the best I could do, nothing was going to stop me from doing it. Slipping into an old jacket, I waited in front of the apartment, carefully looking both ways to make sure no one was watching before I sprinted across the parking lot in a mad dash and slipped into the shrubs.
"Okay, Nature. Talk to me."
Fifteen minutes is a long time to wait when you are raised in a media culture. The instruction that I'd received from teachers in my youth had lain neglected for years. All I had to guide me were books I curled up with for a few moments before falling asleep at night and the world I imagined that existed out there somewhere, if only I could find it.
The first night I learned little more than it's really cold in Oregon in late September. That and the cars passing on the street beyond our apartment were really loud. Every time one went by I would turn and look, sure that it was one of my neighbors, that they'd catch me with their headlights and wonder what such a nice young man could possibly be doing, crouched in the bushes in the middle of the night. I was cold, distracted, bored to tears, and constantly looking to my watch, wondering if it was time for me to go back inside.
By the second day, things began to change -- and not for the better! I kept looking at the clock as I sat in front of the television, thinking, "Just another half hour -- then I'll go out and do my fifteen minutes." Oh, how I dreaded the thought of going outside for another evening in the bushes. But, I went. And I sat there, wondering what in the world I was supposed to be getting out of this whole experience.
The third evening slowly crept upon me and once more, I dashed across the parking lot, taking my assigned place in the shrubbery. I crouched down, leaning against the sturdy trunk I'd leaned against for two nights, peeking through the same hole in the foliage overhead, through which I'd watched the stars before.
And that was when it began to slowly make sense to me. It wasn't simply a shrub anymore. It was my shrub. It wasn't just a trunk, it was the trunk that supported me. I began to really look at the world around me and began to open my eyes to a new reality. Somehow, in the midst of the city, huddled in the bushes at the edge of my parking lot, I began to see magick. There was something enchanting in the way the light reflected off the sap that perched on the bark before my eyes. I began to hear the sounds of birds rustling near me, settling down for the night.
As the nights began to slowly pass, a whole new world slowly opened to me. I realized that I could feel the plant life around me - not by touch, but with something else, something that had always existed inside of me. As I sat there quietly, the minutes slowly ticking by, I realized that I could sense the world around me, that everything - the earth beneath me, the sky above, the plant life that surrounded me - had a very distinct sensation to it, like being close enough to a wood stove to sense its heat without being close enough for it to truly warm you.
Over the years, I realized that this was the first part of the lesson. The exercise had been specifically designed to teach me to open my eyes and see the world around me as alive and vibrant, not just as the backdrop for my busy life. Each night the world opened a little more to me. Some days it seemed as if the trees whispered wordlessly to each other, just beyond the reach of my hearing. When the weekend came, I sat in the sun, watching the sparrows trace patterns in the sky. It wasn't so much that each thing I saw had a lesson to teach me - I wasn't far enough along on my path to realize that yet. It was that my perception began to slowly change, that I began to see the world around me as being alive. And, because it was truly alive to me, each thing I saw had an intrinsic value. As a part of that weave of life, as an integral part of the world around me, I realized that my life had value too, and over the years I would learn to see the special gift that each of us holds that makes us magickal and unique.