October: Unreal and All Real
We are living in surreal times. Not entirely upside-down, but sideways and strange. We are, as a collective, recognizing parts of our cultural story that we’ve resisted seeing for a long time—structural racism, the reality of the climate crisis, and the death march of late stage capitalism, to name a few. But recognizing them doesn’t mean we know what to do about it—especially because we lack a shared understanding of what it all means. Some people succumb to conspiracy theories—the promise of One Big Truth that exists underneath the everyday confusion and corruption of business as usual. Others are falling into apocalyptic depression—we’re all doomed, why do anything but online shop and watch TV?
So much of the information we’re getting these days is coming to us through screens. And as we spend more time on screens the tangible and intangible worlds seem to collapse in on each other—you might not even be surprised when you’re having a Zoom visit with your sister and her new baby and the baby tries to hand you a block through the screen.
This month, we certainly do not have the One Big Truth for you. We don’t have easy answers, listicles, or strategies for self-improvement that will make our shared reality become any less urgent or stark. Instead, we’ve got a spell that invites us to consider the participatory nature of reality: how we perceive our inner and outer worlds helps shape our reality. Our way into this kind of magic? Rainbows.
Working With this Spell
As we unpack an enigmatic spell like this one, we turn to definitely-real but also partaking-of-the-unreal ephemeral water droplet prisms. Rainbows exist, in that they are part of consensus reality. We experience them under predictable and repeatable conditions. We can nudge the person next to us and say, “Do you see that?” and they’ll say “Yeah.” And yet they do not exist anywhere in particular. Because they require an observer to be seen, their location and existence is relative—and unique—to the observer. A human observer will see only the colors present in our visible spectrum of light. We can only imagine what birds or insects might see, or just how many colors exist spread out beyond that narrow sliver we can see.
It’s hard work to hold the real and the unreal together at the same time. It’s hard to be with the real, long for the ideal, and not know how to weave them more closely together. It’s easier, often, to ignore the real and distract yourself—or to plunge defiantly into the unreal and refuse to come up for air. It’s hard to have our myths shattered and still find faith in ourselves, in the world, in the future.
To work with this spell, we embrace the power of being an observer, a witness for all that is unfolding. This is not a spell to take us away from critical action or engagement, though. This is a spell to help us lean into confusion and discomfort, to orient ourselves as a unique and temporary location where reality is being co-created every moment of every day. This spell is an instant of blurred vision where you get to remember and imagine how much more there is than what is clearly visible to you right now. Working with this spell, we remember horizons and the world that stretches beyond them.
THIS MONTH
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