What Do I Mean By Magic?

Exploring the Core Principles of The Coracle: A Mythic Rites of Passage Mentorship

May 09, 2025

Magic is the second core principle of The Coracle.

My use of the word magic hasn’t raised as many questions as principal one, Safety, but I thought I’d take some time and lay out my working woman’s definition of magic, since it is a word that could mean a lot of different things to people.

Magic is another word like mythical—in modern times it signifies something fantastical, something that doesn’t exist. Something that isn’t real.

My first memory of magic as a defined thing, is from the Disney movie Cinderella, which I saw around 5 years old. My parents gave me the record and I remember watching the turn table spin and hearing Cinderella’s fairy godmother sing this:

Salagadoola mechicka boola
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Put them together and what have you got
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

Salagadoola mechicka boola
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
It'll do magic, believe it or not
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

I remember how the fairy godmother waved her wand in the air and turned a pumpkin into a coach that spirited Cinderella off to the ball where she met her prince. (In first grade, I actually sang the song from the film, “Someday, My Prince Will Come,” as a solo. Talk about making a strong imprint!)

Magic was good. It summoned helpers and princes. But as I grew up, I learned magic wasn’t real.

Who knows what the nail in the coffin was? Maybe it was the reality of high school where my prince certainly did not show up. I wanted someone to fall in love and cherish me, instead I got groped in cars and had someone brush my teeth so we could make out after I’d puked up my very first rum and coke served to me illegally in a bar at 16 years old.

I accepted reality. I even enjoyed it. But I was cynical.

Then I moved to Block Island.

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Riding Home

On this small island 13 miles off the northeast corner of Turtle Island, magic came back into my life, and this time it was for real.

I didn’t join a coven. (Though I did hear rumors there was one!) Mostly I just walked. Miles and miles in all weathers, which on Block Island was varied and wild.

If I had to pick one moment when I knew magic was real, I’d choose this one.

I worked for a family business called The Littlefield Bee Farm. During the holiday season we sent baskets of honey and candles around the country. Our shipping office was an old yellow house down The Neck. My shift was 12-8. We stayed open late because back in those days there was no such thing as ordering online, so we needed to man the phones to get sales.

I didn’t have a car, so I rode my bike to the yellow house. It was about a five-mile ride.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right?

If you’re thinking that, you’ve never ridden your bike on a road with zero lights under the dark moon in winter. (Always into the wind at least one of the directions.)

I dreaded the ride home. I don’t know why, but I didn’t have proper winter clothes. No long johns or hat. I did have a decent coat and some gloves, essential so my hands didn’t freeze to the handlebars. A scarf I had to wrap around my face so my nose didn’t fall off. My legs would be like frozen logs when I got home.

One December night, the coldest that year so far, and the darkest, I mounted my bike and started pedaling back up The Neck toward town, to my home in the attic of an old inn. I was cursing my lot, almost moaning, as I gasped at the brittle air biting my lungs with every inhale through the scarf. Not even my death could warm it.

It was pitch dark. No moon.

Sometimes a lone car would come toward me coming home from the bars. I remember feeling so exposed when the car caught me in its headlights. I imagined the people inside, warm, drunk, mocking me, maybe pitying me, definitely calling me crazy. They for sure knew who I was, because everyone on Block Island in December knew everybody. I was ashamed I was too poor to own a car.

Then I heard it.

A clattering on the pavement behind me, coming up fast.

Everyone on Block Island had a ghost story, so I was rightly terrified, I pedaled harder, willing myself to outrun it, but I could tell as the clattering accelerated that I would not escape. My teeth started to chatter at the same rhythm of my pursuer, the purveyor of my upcoming demise.

And then he was next to me, starlight on his antlers and breast. Not a ghost. A living, snorting buck who ran alongside me under the stars that were so bright I had no need of the moon to see. The cold couldn’t pierce me. I blazed with the heat of infinite suns swirling above me in patterns, shaping stories I hadn’t been able to hear until those moments the buck and I ran abreast.

You know how people say their hearts almost burst from their chests? I think mine did. I almost wept with wonder.

That’s the kind of magic we summon in The Coracle. You might call it practical magic (Yes, I love that movie, and every book Alice Hoffman has ever written!), or earth magic. It’s all around us, all the time, and the non-human world hasn’t forgotten this like we modern humans have. It’s called homeostasis, the ability maintain internal stability despite changes in the external world.

And I’m also talking about actual techniques of magic, which is where the Mū Hawaiians come in.

Migrations

I first came to Moku O Keawe, Hawai’i Island, in 1994, when I was 26. I was clueless about just about everything, but two things that come to mind that are relevant to this essay, are colonialism and how to keep myself safe.

I was ignorant and reckless, which I don’t regret, because they are what led to the “bad” choices I made that carried me down to the Underworld.

I survived, and over many years, found my way back up to this world with some gifts, and have finally found a community of people, in person and online, who are grateful to receive them. Amen. May it be so for all of us…

As of now, I have lived on Moku O Keawe four years, my longest stint, and it feels like home. But in between 1994 and now, I came back twice and lived here for a few months. Both times, I longed for a Hawaiian teacher, but now, because I was aware of colonialism, and as a colonizer didn't feel worthy, I was too ashamed to seek one out.

In 2019, living on Kauai, I finally found the Hawaiian teacher I longed for—on Instagram!

Ke’oni Hanalei, is of Mū Hawaiian descent, and has been generously sharing ike (wisdom) from his ancestors going all the way back to pre-cataclysm times on Earth. The Mū Hawaiians are the original inhabitants of the Hawaiian archipelago, living here for millennia before the Marquesan and Tahitian migrations that began around the year 400 CE established what we know today as Hawaiian culture.

For the past several years, he has been contemporizing this archaic wisdom to make it relatable and practical for modern humans. The name of Ke’oni’s body of work is Pōhala, which means, without the okina (line) over the O, to recover consciousness. With the okina, pōhala means to ascend.

This has been my journey with Ke’oni. Consciously ascending while staying right here on Earth.

One of the tools he has generously shared is Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic.

We tend to think of magic as something we do to the outside world, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother waving her wand to turn a pumpkin into a coach, and maybe it was employed that way, or still is, by Hawaiians. I don’t know.

What I do know, is that Heka is a tool for achieving homeostasis, a spiritual technology that can ensure our creations come into form with intention and will, instead of being half-formed impressions or day dreams that keep us disassociated and unable to make our contributions to the world.

Through Ke’oni, I discovered there were principles that kept magic turning (the principles of oscillation), and that these principles corresponded to the properties of light as recognized by science.

But there were two things missing from science’s view of light. Two big somethings—the first and last principles, Revelation and Completion—the alpha and the omega.

(For those interested in a deep dive detailing how the principles of light move through the Grimm’s fairy tale, Iron John, click here.)

Without access to the beginning of light, we can’t complete anything, from the smallest to the largest level. We remain stuck in time. We can’t ascend. Hell becomes never-ending. We believe lies, like war is inevitable.

Amazingly, I realized that all nine properties of light, were still encoded in the Indo-European myths and fairy tales that I loved, in particular, the initiation stories.

My European ancestors also knew that the properties of light and the principles of the oscillation of magic, were a spiritual path and coded it in stories that have been passed down for millennia ear to mouth that I have the sacred honor of sharing with people today.

Magic is more than casting spells, though spelling, signified by the property of Dispersion, is an essential component to achieving the buoyancy of homeostasis.

And buoyancy is what this all about. Why magic exists in the first place.

When we are buoyant we float. We don’t sink; we’re suspended. And from this place of buoyancy, we can collaborate with light itself, with all of its phases, not just the scientific seven that have severed our consciousness from the whole spectrum that could be available to us.

First, we must go through initiation. That’s where the stories come in.

What I learned from the stories, as I traced the nine principles in them, was that they carried the codes of initiation, and that hearing them can activate initiation in the soul.

This is what happens in The Coracle, and what I mean by magic.

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Recovering My Lineage

My longed-for Hawaiian teacher helped me recover the memories encoded in the stories of my own genetic lineage. When I really take this in, it feels like a miracle.

I share this path with deep gratitude and recognition for the traumas of colonialism enacted by my ancestors, traumas that are ongoing; traumas that led to my descent into the Underworld when I first came to Moku O Keawe 31 years ago.

I’ve had some fear about being called out for cultural appropriation that has made me hesitate about sharing this work, even though Ke’oni gave me permission to share it, but I don’t regret that fear, or that hesitation.

It’s allowed me to become firmly grounded in my purpose by checking and re-checking myself—my motivations, my projections, my desires. And I can now say with full authority that I offer this work with integrity.

Part of staying in integrity is committing to healing the wounds of colonialism at their deepest level where they begin within the psyche of all humans that have been separated from nature, no matter what culture, and searching for ways in the world were I can contribute to decolonization in practical ways.

Although The Coracle may not seem practical at first, it is. We can’t be claimed by a place until we know who we are. To know who we are, we need to first feel safe. From safety, stems belonging. When these are established a person can act from the heart, even when afraid. Those voices telling us what we should do fade away, and we listen more to what we must do, how we are called to offer ourselves to the world.

Healing the Brain Divide

Thanks for reading so far! I know I have a jazzy mind. I call myself a word dervish, after all! I love spinning with words so much, it’s hard for me to stick to one thread. I’m not going to apologize for that. It’s one of those gifts I brought back from the Underworld.

If you find my way of communicating frustrating and are still reading my work, thank you even more! You are the evidence that my dance is having the effect I desire.

I write like this, not to simply convey information—I’m trying to get those synapses firing back across the corpus callosum in order to heal the divide between brain hemispheres. Without a unified brain, we’ll continue to be trapped in a world defined by the left-hemisphere, a world without magic. All my leaps and metaphors are an attempt to get those neurons firing, rebuild that bridge. I know it can be exhausting. All the most important quests are, but what kind of world do you want to live in?

A world where we keep repeating our mistakes and create suffering that grows exponentially more horrendous? A world that looks like Gaza, Ukraine, CECOT prison in El Salvador, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Faroese Grindadrap, the Amazon burned and cleared for cattle that no one will be around to eat? A world where every newborn is fated to be chased by ghosts down dark roads in the bitter cold, unable to see the light of the stars?

I’m not saying this work will grant everyone a wand that will enable you to turn pumpkins into coaches, but who knows? I am saying there’s a good chance, if you’re riding your bike on a winter night that a deer might run alongside you, and that you will definitely be awed by the stars.

I am saying your relationship with light will change. You may become heavier for a time, but you will begin to rise. You’ll become more buoyant, and eventually you’ll float with ease.

The Call

The Coracle may not be your version of the quest, but if you are hearing this call to realign with your archaic memories through magic, an initiation by light itself, it would be my honor to be your navigator.

Please reply to this email if you have questions. Please share it with friends. Together, we are magnetic.

And if you’re still looking for a simple of definition of magic, I give you Starhawk’s, heard 21 years ago as I stood in a circle and sang with others for the first time after standing in chorus rows for all my youth.

“Magic is the changing of consciousness at will.” —Starhawk

I still remember how afraid I was to step out of that line, to stand in front of the front row in first grade to sing my solo, “Someday, My Prince Will Come.”

The prince did not come. At least not the way I thought he would.

He lives inside me. I mean really lives. He’s not an archetype. That’s too abstract for the kind of nobility he’s granted me. He’s beaming from the front row of the audience as little first grade me summons him with her song. Behind him, is a king. Encirclingthem, are all of us, humans granted life by light, who will return to darkness when we remember where we came from.

If you are feeling called to this journey, our online group odyssey begins Sunday, May 18th, 2025.

Five sessions, five stories, five invitations to go within and get to know yourself in a safe, contained journey (a coracle is a craft expert at navigating waters close to shore!) that will offer you the opportunity to unravel the wounds that have harmed your sense of inner safety through the deep images of fairy tales and myth, and imprint your cells with images that will move you toward a direct, internal experience of safety, and the belonging that stems from it.

Through folk tales, myth, and ceremony, you will be moved on the currents you need to establish yourself in your body, while deepening your connection with your soul in a way that makes the relationship permanent, or at least until death do us part.

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