Magic is a Dancing Gorilla
CHAPTER 125
MAGIC IS
A DANCING GORILLA
The story for the new moon time:
December 12 – December 25
MOON DETAILS:
New Moon
20°50′ Sagittarius
Dec. 12, 2023
6:32 PM EST
12 MINUTE READ
I prepare the tea carefully, whispering my desires over each herb as I place it in the bag:
Oatstraw to calm my nerves. Rose to open my heart. Goldenrod to heal my pain. Anise for protection, and three scoops of saffron — for plenty.
A spoonful of honey for even more.
I snuggle into the corner of the couch, watching the snow fall from the sky. It covers the wooden fence, the top of the grill, the young evergreen a neighbor wrapped in colored lights. They are shining blue and red and green, even now, at 11 am.
In my lap lies a red and gold book. My fingers hover above its cover before turning to page thirty-three, the place where I stopped reading two weeks earlier.
The aroma of anise and rose hits my nose as I sip my tea and read: “The intoxicating perfume that the roses and spices create lulls the beasts into a stupor, and they all lie down and fall asleep.”
I look down at my tea and laugh, say a silent thank you to the voice inside, which encouraged me to read these particular pages while drinking this particular tea. I had no way of knowing, of course, that the herbs I’d chosen were also in the book.
It felt like magic. Not some big wand-waving magic, but the kind of magic that quietly weaves through everything. It’s the kind of magic that’s easy to ignore or dismiss. The kind that if you’re really focused on something else, you probably wouldn’t even notice.
Like the dancing gorilla in scene after scene of a recent documentary my husband and I watched. Most of the time, we didn’t even notice the gorilla, and that was the point. The documentary — How to Focus — was about the nature of human attention, and it demonstrated (via said dancing gorilla) how most of the time, we are so focused on one thing or another, that we ignore even the most blatant things happening around us.
This is the nature of the human mind. This is how our attention works. If we’re asked to look in one direction, we focus there and tend to miss everything else.
See! This is what I think is happening. I make my husband pause so I can explain: Most people just miss the magic because they’re so focused on other things.
Magic is dancing around us all the time, like a big gorilla, but we’re so busy unloading the dishwasher, looking at our phones, meeting deadlines, making money, cooking dinner, traveling to all the places we need or want to be that most of the time, we just don’t see it.
As we focus on what we think is important, we tend to convince ourselves that everything we see is everything there is. From our daily to-dos to the analytical processes learned in school, our attention has been trained, honed, focused like a blade. And it never stops.
We are constantly training ourselves by focusing on one thing or another.
As your attention is sharpened over time, everything else falls away, and soon, you might even find yourself proclaiming with absolute certainty, THERE ARE NO GORILLAS!
Someone might come up to you and tell you a story about seeing a gorilla, but because you never see any gorillas, you think, “Woah, that person is crazy. They think gorillas are dancing around…”
You might even point to an experiment where people tried to capture a gorilla, but the gorilla was quick on its feet. It couldn’t be caught, so the results were a resounding womp womp, confirming what you already believed to be true: No gorillas!
And the next thing you know, we’re all living in a world where a huge swath of people are Gorilla Deniers.
Not so much because they aren’t paying attention, but actually, because they’re paying such close attention to certain things that they are distracted from the magic that’s blatantly dancing all around them. Because let me tell you, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about magic, it’s that it is very, rarely subtle. But also, it requires a whole lot of unstructured space — its dance floor, its stage — to move around and be seen.
Magic wants you to be soft and open. It wants you to laugh and play. It wants to carry your attention away like the leaves in the fall. Only then, I think, can you start to see what’s underneath it all — a hidden pattern? a dancing gorilla? perhaps something akin to God?
☆
Let us rewind:
I’m sitting on the couch. A mug of herbal tea is sitting beside me. I know exactly what I’m going to read — the next chapter of Mary Magdalene Revealed. It tells the story of a woman named Thecla.
Her story was first told circa 160–180 AD. It was soon deemed heretical and destroyed by the rising Christian majority. But before that happened, it was claimed that there was once a woman named Thecla. She was so moved by the apostle Paul’s preaching that she renounced her wealth, her family, and her fiancé. She chose to commit herself to God instead. This was completely socially unacceptable, and Thecla was tied to the pyre to burn for her beliefs.
Behold! Through a series of miracles, Thecla did not die. The flames could not get to her. Neither could the chomping wild animals unleashed upon her. The women in the crowd watched as Thecla could not be destroyed. Despite everything the ruling men threw at her, Thecla was protected. She baptized herself right there in the center of the ring that was meant to be her death. The other women rallied to her defense. They threw roses and spices at her feet, lulling the beasts to sleep. And sleep they did. Thecla went on to preach and live out her commitment to God until she was ninety years old.
This is the story. And whether it’s true or not, it is a beautiful story. A story of female divinity, authority, and ministry in the early days of Christianity (back when Christianity was still a rebel cause, before it became a killer of rebels).
After reading, I was curious if Thecla had an asteroid named after her. I didn’t have anything else to do. It was snowing outside, and besides, I’d kept these hours of my day clear for just this — being, observing, seeing what was dancing around the room. So, I followed my curiosity. I looked up “Thecla asteroid” and learned that in 1906, an asteroid was named after her.
I entered its corresponding number (586) into my planetary mapping software and Ha!
I started laughing again. (It’s hard not to laugh at a dancing gorilla!) Because on that day — the day that the voice told me to open the book and read the story about Thecla — the asteroid Thekla was about to cross the exact spot in the sky where it was when I was born.
(I quickly pull up my software again to see where Thekla is now, on the day I am writing this story, and Ha! Today is the day it is perfectly aligned, at the exact same degree of my birth.)
Delighted by the synchronicity of the herbs in my cup, the herbs in Thecla’s story, and the position of her asteroid in the sky, I kept reading.
The next chapter was about Saint Perpetua, another early Christian woman (still in the rebel days here) who had committed herself to God and was ultimately killed for the act (though not before experiencing a series of visionary dreams convincing her of her soul’s protection despite her body’s demise).
I was struck by the stories of these spiritual rebels, these women who stayed true to what they believed despite the forces acting against them. There had of course been many female spiritual leaders (mostly high priestesses) in ancient times, but for the last two thousand years or so, women’s spiritual authority has mostly been denied by the world’s major religions.
This is what I was thinking about when the next day, I received an email from The Marginalian by Maria Popova. I’ve long enjoyed Maria’s work, but most of the time, I’m not focused on what she’s doing. I delete her emails, only clicking them when something catches my eye, which on this day, it did.
The subject line mentioned C.S. Lewis, and as I was recently writing about him, I opened the email, but inside, what grabbed my attention next had nothing to do with him. Rather, it was a summary of Virginia Woolf’s “shock-receiving capacity.”
That’s what she called it — this ability of hers to suddenly see the truth of something with radiant clarity. It always came as a shock, like an electric burst snapping her to attention, revealing how things really were, beneath the wool of life.
“From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”
A hidden pattern that we are all connected to — yesssss, my inner voice cheered in recognition and agreement. But also — there is no God. I found her philosophy fascinating, curious. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to understand where she drew the line between the pattern and God. The line that for me — throughout my lifetime of “shocks” as she might call them — has become all but completely obliterated as the pattern and God have shown themselves to be inexorably linked:
What is God? I wondered in a dream.
And the man sitting across from me said: God is greatness.
God is greatness.
And all that connection you see? That’s God’s greatness in you.
But for Virginia (the other Virginia), there was no God hidden in the pattern or acting as artist to this great work she was regularly shocked to see.
I searched to learn more about her philosophy and found that Harvard Divinity School Professor Stephanie Paulsell has written extensively on the subject, claiming that while Woolf was a self-proclaimed atheist, her words formed a ministry of sorts, capturing the reverence endowed to her by these shocks.
Woolf referenced the human soul both literally and figuratively again and again, asserting that “‘the duty of heaven-making’…needs more than a bishop can bring to it: ‘it needs time and concentration. It needs the imagination of a poet.’”
And she seemed to long for heaven-making. She wrote about the need for sacred spaces and the desire for the sacred to return to our spaces. She might not have called it God, but perhaps she was simply too focused on an early twentieth-century Christian notion of God to see the word as its own sacred space worth claiming. For that’s how I see it — the curve of its letters, the sound of its single syllable, the way it resonates at the center of my chest as it fills the chamber of my mouth with a low resounding ahh.
The word God is a sacred space. In it, I’ve found a room of my own. Not defined by any other person, but loved by me.
And regardless of the words they chose and the rooms they uncovered — Thecla, Perpetua, Virginia — all of these women found a way to create their own informal ministries, and that’s the realization that hit me — like a shock — with the full moon at the end of November.
As a gorilla danced across rose petals and book pages and asteroids and emails, I saw how even when religion has shut them out, women all over the world have found ways to create their own ministries.
And this is true — not just for women but for all the people who have been excluded from spiritual community because their experience of God didn’t conform to what others believed.
And I think that this is what we all get — this is what we all have — a room of our own to soften into, a mind through which we can see and experience the world and all its magic.
☆
Breathe deeply.
Let the air out.
Let your to-do list float away on whatever’s left of 2023.
Give yourself the gift of making space in your life to soften your focus so you’re not just staring at a specific spot on the screen, but instead, you’re able to absorb the entire image. You’re able to laugh when you see the big gorilla dancing in the corner — the one you had completely missed while you were focused on the drama at the center of the screen.
This holiday season, I wish you space. I wish for all of us to see the dancing gorilla. I wish for the direct experience of the gorilla to leave you shattered in awe. I wish for it to build you back up in its splendorous dancing image until you find yourself comfortably at home, in a room of your own.
I leave you with no specific guidance or insights other than that. Sure, I see the asteroid Psyche, whose name means “soul,” aligning with the sun and the moon on December 12. I see Mercury turning retrograde on December 13 and the days stretching to fit more sun on December 21. But there’s no need to worry about any of that. No need to focus on it.
All that’s needed now is to let yourself relax, rest, soften into the seconds and minutes as if they were made of golden threads, not pulling you forward but scooping you up, wrapping you inside them until you are so completely still at the center of it all that you yourself have become the gift.
Keep it safe there — under the tree, atop the table — until the time is right for unwrapping, until the dancing gorilla appears and says TA-DA.
It’s time.
☆
Happy Chanukah, may your candles burn brightly without any cause for fear.
Merry Christmas, may your heart swell to feel the love he showed us.
For together, we are swimming through wondrous miracles of light. May we be blessed with the awareness to see them. May we remember even when our attention is focused and frayed that they are there, they are there, they are there.
And you are loved.
And magic is real.
Happy holidays.
☆
To be continued…
LONG STORY SHORT
During this Sagittarius new moon time, which lasts from December 12 to December 25, I wish you space. I hope you set down your to-do list, that you allow yourself the grace of rest and relaxation. I hope you find ways to grant yourself this each and every day, for it is there, in the nothingness, that you stop being distracted. That your focus softens to see something, and perhaps that is why this time of year is known for being so magical. Not because of all the holidays celebrating miracles (though, yes), not because of all the lights strung beautifully (though, yes), but because of our collective choice to take a break, to step away from work, to come together to just enjoy and see and feel. And that is all you have to do. And that is all you have to be. Happy Holidays!
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