Becoming the Ones We Need Now

An Invitation to Enchanters at the End of the World (As We Know It)

image by Tahiti Kulia

Enchanté Dear Readers,

Allow me to introduce myself, or for those who’ve been here a while, reintroduce the mélange of winds and waves, voices and silences, channeled and appropriately contained by my physical form known in the everyday, human realm as Jennifer Lighty. Like all modern-day humans, my name contains forgotten mystical codes that link me to Earth in my own unique way. You can read about that here if you choose. Otherwise, I’ll begin with telling you I am an enchanter who inspires.

Have no fear. I’m not here to cast a coercive spell on you. My power is sourced from the roots of words and wraps around my arms as I write like whirling vines. My spells are songs of inspiration, meaning they breathe life into. When I am in my power, I don’t take away from yours, I encourage you to find the rhythm of your own breath coursing through your body like tree sap so you can make your contribution to this material world.

I’m not searching for another world. I understand the chaos and breakdown of the systems that provide us with the illusion of security may cause many of us to long for a world besides the current consensual reality, and I have sympathy for and stand in solidarity with those whose security is at risk or has evaporated at this very moment as the breakdown accelerates. We are not going back is a mantra I’ve heard spoken lately in the political realm. Yes, I say. We are not going back. It’s actually impossible, for matter isn’t really solid and time doesn’t move in lines, both are expressed on their deepest, truest levels, as spirals, and spirals don’t come to an end, they dissipate and lose their distinct shape due to external forces…and then they reform.

(If you’re considering subscribing, new rates and benefits are listed at the bottom of this missive. Thanks for reading on. Also, there’s an audio of this post at the end as well.)

That’s where we come in. We humans. Our souls, expressed in bones, blood, and organs, are contained by skin, a porous border that takes in everything we encounter even when we aren’t aware of it. Some traditions say we are entombed by the body, doomed to live in echo chambers where we hear nothing but ourselves crying out with loneliness for God. I say the holy is here and now, and lives within our bodies through our permeability. We are always receiving and absorbing, even when we define ourselves through delusion and denial. The echo always contains more voices than we think it does.

Now I realize, in the west, going back through Greek mythology to Narcissus and Echo, that echo chambers are viewed as lonely places where we are doomed to be unheard and never unite with who, and I’ll add what, we love, and that in modern times an echo chamber is considered to be a space where one only encounters voices and beliefs that mirror one’s own, but in the way of an enchanter I am going to reinvigorate the phrase by claiming another possibility for the word echo, who, after all, in Greek mythology was a tree nymph, sourced in dark roots who could speak to the clouds passing overhead through branch tips. The tree, in conversation with the Underworld and the Heavens, tells us we are not solitary. We just need to listen for voices other than our own human chatter. No voice is just our own, the tree says. Most of us, indoctrinated into the materialist paradigm, stripped of self-esteem, intuition, and our own magic, have just not been catching that story.

In the trees’ story, we know there is never just one spiral. And remember, even the ones that seem most powerful and threatening like typhoons, dictatorships, tornadoes, and even wars, eventually dissipate when they come in contact with external forces.

It’s time for us to take our place as the external forces that assist the collapsing spirals. They are going to collapse anyway, it’s a law of physics, and while we may be afraid of death, would any of us walk away if we encountered a dying human? Some of us, traumatized, might freeze, but someone will jump up and start CPR. We are at the point in linear and circular time where we need to treat our collapsing political and economic systems the way we would a human in crisis. These systems are a reflection of our collective body. They are us. We can be more. Always, we have the option for compassionate intervention. Even the frozen ones know this in their bones. We don’t have to wait until we need CPR.

It’s time for us to be enchanters, which can literally mean to chant if you’re so inclined. Try it and see how the trees around you respond. Listen for the birds that sing back, and if they don’t, keep trying. The wounds run deep on both sides of the gap between civilization and the wild. It may take some linear time to heal, but don’t cease doing your part to reach across the holy ground between humans and plants; between animals, clouds and stones, reach across with the gift of your breath shaped by bone cavities filled with pulsing marrow. Remember, marrow makes blood, and the sacrum, the sacred bone that hinges the upper and lower worlds of your body, is the last to decay. We are designed to leave behind something holy, our bones, a blessing for those who come after, food for soil, and strength for the spirit of all who encounter the remnants of who we were as they walk on solid ground.

photo by author

Sacrum. Holy bone. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, we humans once knew the power of naming. All we have to do is remember it, which requires some dismembering first, and that will be painful. Grieving is required, a harrowing task to open one’s self up to all that pain, to acknowledging that what we love has been lost and will never again exist in the form of how we loved it.

I used to fear that pain, pushed it all down until I had no choice. Physical illness and depression haunted me to the point where grief came and told me I had the choice to live or die from withholding my tears. Finally, one day on a Yucatán beach, hauled out of the water by a man named Sol who’d just flipped and whirled me through the ocean until I dissolved, I wailed without shame on the sand for a good hour in full view of passersby who thought I needed emergency medical services. I would have stayed longer, but the woman who drove us to the beach wanted lunch, so I staggered to the car and let her whisk me off to eat tacos, where I laughed and smiled through my puffy eyes, because every proper ceremony requires a feast to complete, and I had released it all. I would cry again, but not like that. It was accomplished. I had let go.

What I also learned from that time wailing on the beach, was grief can lead to wonder. Even though I was weeping, I was aware of how beautiful the whole experience was. I was exultant. For the first time in a long line of despair, I was sure I wanted to live more than die. How wonderful we exist! How wonderful we get to love! All the heartbreak became worth it. I moved further into my physical form and have been descending deeper into myself ever since.

When I was on the beach weeping and wailing, the man who had spun me through the water leaned close to my ear and sang. His words, in Spanish, were a thread out of the labyrinth of pain. That’s something we can offer each other. Sacred CPR. So sing, chant. Make sounds if you can’t find words. It’s a practice. Eventually, the words will find you, and you will know when they need to be offered, and will have the courage to sing into the spiraled ear of one who truly needs your song when called.

My enchantments have nothing to do with security. If they do, I know they aren’t sourced from my soul. I’m not here to make you feel secure. I’m here to inspire you to find your own safety, which is a crystal-lined cave inside you thrumming with the tones of your soul. This cave is impenetrable and is the source of your contribution to life. Maybe you’ve caught glimpses of it, heard a voice from deep within some place you can’t quite see calling to you. Maybe you’ve been there for a short visit and fled in terror because you couldn’t bear your own beauty and the pain of the inevitable loss of your own form and all you love.

What you love will be lost. But love cannot be lost.

One by one, the spirals will dissipate. We, as enchanters, can sing them through this metamorphosis and guide them into their next expression of form. If we don’t, they will collapse and the necessary chaos of creation will devolve into more distortions, and the same life-destroying systems will recreate themselves around our self-hatred and fears. If we let this happen, we’ll fail ourselves and the holy ground between us and everything itself in creation.

We humans have been given a sacred task—naming the world. Not to limit it. We name to praise, and when we speak with holy intent, we and everything else in creation, release ourselves in proper rhythm, seeding the next rounds with completions that include the wisdom gleaned through the trials and errors of those we are blessed to inhabit now. Like mighty sequoias, weeping willows, and blazing maples, our blessings are archived in time’s passage through green wood, and our ringing echoes from the edge of civilization into the wild forest where the birds who catch our stories at dusk carry our true notes back to us each morning at dawn.

An Invitation

The words above are my way of inviting you to a monthly experience I will be hosting here on Substack called Enchanters at the End of the World (As We Know It.) In my usual way, I had to channel my powers of enchantment before getting to the point!

Because it took me a bit longer to get there than I intended, I am going to save sharing the details of how this experiment will work for another post, which I will hopefully get out to you in the next couple of days, because I’m really excited about this!

For anyone else who’s excited, this will be an online space where we’ll be inspired as writers or speakers to create our own enchantments guided by the Paiwa Heka, the Nine Principles of the Oscillation of Magic, in the Mū Hawaiian tradition. These nine principles correspond to the seven principles of light as recognized by science. What happened to these other two will be an important part of reclaiming our role as enchanters of the holy ground between us humans and the rest of the world.

I will share some of this process with all subscribers, but the majority of it will be for paid subscribers whose financial offering contributes to sustaining me in the physical world doing work I love. Thank you! It will include access to a private Substack chat to share reflections and creations, and most likely a monthly Zoom gathering to get to know each other live in the virtual world.

In order to create more potential for people to be able to afford paid subscriptions, I’ve lowered the yearly rate from $70 to $50. Monthly rate will remain the same $7. For those who want to become a founding member of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, the exchange is now $150. You’ll receive all the paid subscriber benefits, as well as a private on-line session with me. Take a look at my website through link below to get an idea of what I offer.

Thanks for reading and supporting my work! If any of you out there are interested in this project and truly cannot afford a paid subscription respond to this email and introduce yourself and we’ll see if we can find some other kind of exchange besides monetary that feels good for both of us.

Listen to an audio of this post here:

Acknowledgment

Before I go I want to acknowledge Ke’oni Hanalei, who has so generously shared his wisdom with me and helped me find the unshakeable sense of safety I speak of in this essay. I encourage anyone interested to take a deep dive into his offerings which can be found at www.pohala.net. Aloha mā!

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light