Are You One of Us?

Are You One of Us?

Magic dwells all around us, loose and watchful. Mostly Magic is silent now and still as a hawk surveying its world.

Long ago Magic was not so subdued. It flowed into naked feet and melded them to the soft, black peat-rich soil, pungent from the scent of Mother Earth. It soared upwards through hands uplifted, uniting the powers that dwell in the stars and planets; the soft mists of cool, damp air; the wide, sturdy sacred oaks; and all who lived in the lands of the Celts.

Then it was that Magic reigned in England, Wales, Ireland, and France -- strong as the brawny shoulders of a warrior king -- mysterious as the snow-cold fogs that shrouded all.

But Magic, torn asunder and discarded, maimed as the blood-soiled garment from a maiden's rape, has vanished from the Isles. Likewise has it also fled from France's once verdant lands now covered by cathedrals and smothered in disbelief. Magic roams most heartily in newer countries, in lands where its seeds are unplanted, yet lie dormant with promise.

You scorn my words. I see it in your eyes, eyes that bear the wisdom of books but have lost the ancient knowledge of the Earth Soul.

"Magic is a fantasy," you say. "It is nothing but a pagan religion. It is the refuse dumped from the beliefs of modern man."

Your eyes have grown dark as a closed door, yet through the babble of words flows one tiny streak of light. The curiosity within that faint glow has not permitted your avoidance. You issue protests, but you question, probing deeper.

"Magic is only found in moldering books," you inform me, "books of fables and fairy tales."

Thus you speak to me. Yet, you do not wound me, for I know you are wrong. I have felt the tendrils of Magic threading its way about my feet, nestling in between my toes, securing me gently to my Mother Earth. Magic has not perished. It lingers, even as we read or sit; it watches.

The Power of Magic talks with me, telling me of our long, long wait into the future. It explains that we of the Celtic blood have forgotten how to control the part of our brain that once harnessed our forces. We are no longer entwined with the Earth and the raw strength of nature. We do not sway in the light of the midnight moon, pulled by the call of the stars. In this educated land of ours, where science has replaced mystery, Magic is ignored. It knows all this, but it waits for us to return, and it watches.

The Power tests those of our heritage often, searching, searching. That is how I was discovered. That is how I learned of the tests.

"How does Magic test?" you jeer, as your eyes cast about, gathering in normality for reassurance to any doubt.

Your voice scorns my knowledge, yet in the sound of your high-pitched bleat, I hear the cry of a straying lamb, lost and afraid. Are you one of the fold?

You ignore my thought. You pretend you cannot hear, or is it that your ears are closed to the question you do not wish to ponder?

"Never has Magic tested me!" you suddenly exclaim.

Do I detect sadness within your dissent?

"The echo of our loss, Brother, is the emptiness inside our souls." I attempt to explain. "Magic was stolen from us by the Roman conquerors. Do you not remember? Do you not feel that loss?

My lips twitch at the earnestness of your disbelief, because I can see inside you the shadow of your desire to awaken.

You read my half-hearted smile. In a haze of recollection, your forehead wrinkles. Is that a memory you call up, faint and forgotten, stashed beneath your educated brow?

"You have been tested," I reply, and my smile broadens as I watch the tiny phantom thoughts flutter against the thousand facts your brain has stored.

"How would I know if I'd been tested?" you demand. Your face is warm plastic, soft and molded easily by your doubts and questions. It changes with each flickered thought.

"You would know, if you had listened," I answer. Did you not hear the soft voice of Magic's call?

Again I have spoken with my special voice. Sometimes it unlocks a clouded vision. Will it unlock yours?

"What was the sound of this voice?" you ask almost breathlessly.

You have begun to remember. I see the webs of the past circling you. Will you permit their embrace? Will your mind, your educated mind, accept their presence?

"The sound of Magic, the sound of the past," I begin, "is sweet, crushingly sweet, yet plaintively sad and lonely. It is the call of the morning dove awakening you at daybreak.

"Magic makes your lungs ache as if a frost were in the air, and each breath you take is a sharp pain from the cold, cold crispness of it. But when you halt your breath, and for a moment you listen -- just listen, through your soul's wanting and needing, then Magic is a melody of Puccini, and you glide upward through the sunrise."

I pause to watch your face. Your eyes hold the memory and the need. You are Druid, my brother, yet still you insist, even more forcefully, that Magic has never called to you.

"Magic has tested you, my friend," I repeat. "Close your suspicion and heed my words. I shall attempt to battle your walls of scientific prejudice. I shall remind you of the simplest of all the tests.

"May the Soul of the Celts and the Mother Earth guide my words," I whisper softly, and then I begin.

"Remember once when you placed your pencil just so, knowing you'd be using it in a moment, but you rested it on the coffee table, or your desk, or the little telephone stand in the hall. Do you remember how you put that yellow pencil down for just a minute?

"You paused only to sip at a drink, or to change the channel on TV, or to move the sprinkler on the front lawn. Then having finished, you returned to exactly the same spot. You threw yourself back down onto the couch or chair, and without looking, because you knew just where that pencil was, you reached out.

"For a moment, your fingers crawled around the table. Scientifically, you knew without thinking, that the little yellow pencil -- the one with only a slightly dulled point --must be where you left it. You knew that fact because all through grade school, junior high, and high school they told you it was true, and they named that fact 'cause and effect.'

"So you knew with a certainty that when you put that pencil down, it would still be there when you returned, and yet, it was not.

"Lazily your eyes scanned the surface of that table, desk, or stand. You still believed that the little yellow pencil with the barely sharpened point and the half-used eraser, had to be there. But your eyes could see that it was not.

"Suddenly you became curious, and the faintest tickle of worry crept down your neck, prickling at your 'cause and effect.'

"Your eyes focused sharply. They searched the table, desk, or stand with a steadfast intentness. But that small yellow #2 was not there.

You sat up a little straighter then. Your brain began to whirl, puzzling. Your eyes fell to the floor. Perhaps the pencil had rolled, you muttered logically. You searched once more. All around your chair, you peered, pried, poked, and probed. And even though your highly analytical brain knew the pencil could not have traveled as far as you were searching, you kept on looking.

"The mystery became a challenge. You would not accept that a pencil could disappear. Your mind was far too rational for that. So you stood up and assaulted the chair where you had sat, stripping away its pillows and cushions. When there was still no success, when the pencil -- yellow and softly pointed, all six inches of it -- was still mysteriously absent, your brain allowed two exits for your logic.

"You were a stubborn person, or if you wish the truth, a slightly frightened one by then. You had begun to feel the tendrils of disquiet that 'the irrational' brings to those who choose to walk in the path of the modern world. So you retraced your steps to where ever you could possibly have traveled in that moment's break.

"But when you still did not find the pencil -- that small yellow #2 with the teeth marks in the side where you had chewed your answers to the crossword puzzle -- you searched in places you had never even gone: the bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen cupboard . . .

"The non-questioner -- the one who shutters his eyes all too frequently because he dares not think that there could be an alternate reality in this space-age world -- he, poor soul, simply lets the mystery go. He walks to his desk, his mind in hibernation, and he chooses another pencil that will do just as well.

"But you are not like him. You did not choose that second exit -- the exit of the common man. You persisted, and all the time while you were searching, you were being watched.

"Did you not feel it -- the tingling on your spine -- like fingers softly, teasingly tracing every digit of your spinal column? Did you not feel that, my brother? Do you remember now?

"Magic was watching you then, because sometimes, not often enough anymore, but sometimes, the mind that searches for that small yellow pencil, becomes so frustrated, that it forgets all the 'cause and effect' facts drilled into it, and then in a flare of anger, it calls out. It uses a special voice then, and it calls in a certain way -- a way that only some of us have the inward knowledge of -- and when it does, the pencil returns.

"He who has that voice, the voice that sings of Magic, and the limbs that touch the Earth Soul and call up this Power, he is one of us.

"And when Magic sees that, it smiles. For you see it knows that as long as there are souls that harbor the ancient kernels of what once was in the land of the Druids, one day Magic will be welcome again. Then the heritage of Stonehenge, the sacred oaks, the joining of Earth Mother with the moon and stars, and all the powers of the Celts will live again.

Will you be ready, my brother? Tell me. You must remember by now. Tell me, are you one of us?

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