It was a quiet Halloween evening in my neighborhood and my parents took my little sister trick or treating. At the age of 17, it was unheard of that I would volunteer to stay and gift candy to the little ones knocking on our door. After the rush swept through there was a calmness and quietness I hadn’t heard in some time. Especially not on Halloween night! This eerie stillness got me all choked up, my throat felt swollen and it was hard to swallow. My breathing became shallow and fear started to creep in. It wasn’t often that I was home all alone at night. I stalked through the house to lock the windows and headed down the long dark hallway to the backdoor. The entire backyard was thick with night. I quickly flipped the switch to illuminate the patio! Though the light shone bright around the door, the light waned as it dimly reached through the yard. It was still dark in the distance and I couldn’t even see the fence. Suddenly, the fear dissipated and the garden called to me. I wanted to respond and for a moment I felt empowered. Just as I gained enough courage to speak out to the abyss of the universe, fear throttled me and my body obeyed with a slam of the door and the click of the lock was the last sound I heard before running back to the brightly lit living room.
*deep breath*
My heart was pounding and a few moments later my little sister, followed by our parents, arrived with her pillowcase bulging with the scent of chocolates and fruity sugar candies. Her giggles radiated throughout the room as she dumped her loot on the floor to sort through. When they asked how my evening went, I simply smiled and shrugged my shoulders, “Quiet and uneventful”. I never spoke about what I experienced.
It wasn’t until 25 years later that I realized what really happened. After years of being spooked by anti-witch rhetoric from religious folks, my teenage mind had been programmed to ignore and even run from any hint of magic. Though my childhood was spent laughing at the comedy of Bewitched, the idea of real magic was demonized by many people I knew and dismissed as fake by the non-religious.
After we spent too many years deeply entrenched in religion, the magic began to call to me again. During our departure, spiritual gifts became stronger as we pushed our way through the foretelling of gloom and doom from our religious friends. We were condemned for leaving their community and told bad things would happen if we didn’t stay. I had spent enough time in a few charismatic churches to believe in spiritual gifts, though the cult we fled demonized those gifts as evil.
“Intuition is the discriminative faculty that enables you to decide which of two lines of reasoning is right. Perfect intuition makes you a master of all.”~Paramahansa Yogananda
Religion has effectively demonized spirituality outside of their own. Devastatingly, the hard-fast sweep of religion coupled by government control caused over 100,000 people to be murdered for not conforming. The mentality of the controlled programming, along with the threat of death, forged a very deep level of control that has spanned the generations who have followed.
Even today, in our society that has embraced more liberalism and freedom in spiritual practice, people who no longer follow a religion have deeply held, fear based, beliefs against magic.
What many people don’t understand is how empowering and freeing it is to work with elements of the earth in your spiritual practice. But isn’t that exactly what a controlling religion doesn’t want for its adherents? To be empowered and free. Though skeptics don’t believe magic leads to freedom. Critics have long held a stance that magic is fraudulent and akin to television evangelists working toward obtaining your bank account. In the critic’s mind, it’s all snake oil.
What about these very real-to-me experiences of spiritual happenings?
I can’t scientifically prove these experiences are real, but to me they were very genuine.
How does a mother know her intuition is real except she obey her intuition and it guides her and her children to safety?
I sincerely believe this energy we experience is a real occurrence. You can call it magic, energy, intuition, or the name of your deity.
If it has guided you well, kept you safe, inspired growth, and any numerous other positive manifestations have come to fruition because you heeded that guidance then stay true to it.
I’m not sure why I felt called to the garden so many years ago. I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened had I stepped out a little further into the darkness. Maybe my intuition, my magic, was telling me to lock the doors and windows for a reason. I’ll never know for sure, but at least I’m here today to tell the story.
Magically yours,
Sisterlisa
