Don't Do Magic...Become It
As I'm learning how to maintain and use a viable sourdough starter, I'm remembering my grandma, who lived with us for a few years after my mom died when I was a girl.
She made bread every week. Really, really good bread.
One thing I know: she didn't use $500+ of specialized baking gear from Williams Sonoma to make that bread, nor did she fuss with digital thermometers, proofing ovens, or careful measurements weighed to the nth of a gram on a digital scale.
She had her big stoneware mixing bowl and a sturdy wooden spoon. She threw in flour by handfuls and splashed in just the right amount of water warmed to just the right temperature, guided by experience and instinct. She knew how the dough should look and feel at every stage. She knew exactly what spot in the kitchen was the perfect temperature to place the dough for proofing. She knew how the dough should feel under her touch before she could bake it.
I wonder if I'll ever be able to discern if the dough under my hands feels "dynamic and alive" (as the dude whose sourdough advice I'm following online says) enough to proceed to the next step. For now, I'm bound to every last meticulous detail of his instructions, weighing and warming everything according to the charts and graphs he provides.
What my grandma did in the kitchen was nothing less than magic, and I do mean that literally.
She didn't call it that, and she for sure didn't call herself a witch of any kind; what she did do was use her body and her sense - her instinctive, intuitive, informed knowing - to transform flour and water into beautiful, airy, delicious loaves.
I used to "chase" magic, thinking I'd find it through instructions online, or in books...or through purchase and use of the typical trappings: the crystals, the candles, and the like.
But magic can't be procured. No instructions or advice in the world, no matter what expert you take them from, will create magic.
Magic is of the body. The body has a wisdom that, while often initiated by knowledge (but, I think, more often by lineage, tradition, failures, desire, and repetition) is other than knowledge.
When you just know the dough is as dynamic and alive as a songbird...
When you just know the words you wrote will sing and sizzle in someone else's bloodstream when they hear them...
When you just know the thing you just created needs not one thing more or one thing less...
When you just know that every tree, every flower, every blade of grass and the sky above is aware of your presence, and listening...
Then you are doing magic.
We've been taught to outsource our magic. We've been taught to doubt ourselves, to look to others for rightness, to trust what's said versus the murmurs and whisperings within us.
And so magic has become just another brittle, illusory concept, often prettied up these days for purchase. It's not magic at all.
But you can bring it back. You can sing it alive inside of you. You can join hands with it any time you want to. You just have to know how it feels...and that knowing isn't something anyone can teach you.
You already have it.
Here's a spell for you to play with if you're longing to connect with your true magic - the magic I know you carried within you as a child; the magic that's still there, on the inside of the inside of things:
Get yourself to a quiet place, both externally and internally, where you can be in solitude. If it's in nature, even better.
Soften or close your eyes and drop in. Find your own heartbeat with your awareness. Let every cell in your body be animated by the the vitality of your own breath with each new, easy, natural inhale.
Ask for something your body just knows to come forward in your imagination.
Maybe it's how a certain song gets in to body, transforming it into the same thing as the music itself…
...or the way your fingers dance over the keyboard of the piano when you're not trying, yet easily and flawlessly hit every note…
...or the moment your hands leave the handlebars of your bicycle as you fly along a path, your arms stretching outward, you and the bike becoming one, living, thing…
...or the indrawn breath before saying the perfect thing to the exact person needing to hear it at exactly the right moment, with no premeditation whatsoever…
...or the second the sun dips below the dark clouds and illuminates everything while you're driving a stretch of open road, windows open, music blasting, and you know - just know - that absolutely everything is going to be all right.
I don't know what it is for you, but you do.
It isn't the doing; it's the knowing...and how that knowing feels within you.
There it is.
Call forth that feeling often, however you can.
Learn it, from the inside out.
And then go be magic. You're meant to.