Letter To A Young Wizard
The world's waiting for the wave of your wand! The meaning of magic is that meaning is magic.
To be human is to straddle the line between the world of matter and the world of meaning. There’s the “matter” of factness of what’s physically there and there’s the meaning we meet it with. The same tree could be a beauty, an eyesore, a cache of lumber, or the root of a treehouse depending on how it’s met. Gold found in a stream becomes a coin or a ring—a flower: a tincture or a Mother’s Day present.
To meet matter and mold it with meaning is man’s gift; it’s our magic wand. And what a powerful wand it is! When I first found mine, I was filled with questions. “How do I use it?” “What are the rules?” “Why didn’t anybody tell me I had this?”
I went searching for someone to teach me how to use my wand and came across an old wizard. He gave me this letter and I thought I’d share it with you.
Aah! You’ve finally found it! O it brings me such joy each time someone wakes up to the power they’re wielding. I can hardly stand watching everyone swing those things around all day not knowing what they’re holding! It’s almost as bad as seeing people waste their power or give it away, all the while complaining about how bleak the world is and how there’s nothing they can do about it. Agh, but here I go complaining myself! I’m sure you’d like some instruction.
The first lesson that’s available to everyone is to remember what it was like when you were a child. You wielded your wand joyfully, playfully, and often! You turned sticks into swords, couch cushions into wrestling rings, and cardboard boxes into studio apartments. The world occurred to you as much more pliable and the sooner you get back to that orientation, the better time you'll have with the more advanced magic.
There was an effortlessness to this as a kid because you didn't know how or even that you were casting spells, it was just second nature. Now you can learn a bit more consciously how it works.
Two of the fundamentals of magic are naming and framing. When you name something, you transform how it’s seen and therefore how it’s interacted with; this is a core principle of magic. When I call a wooden stump a chair, it becomes sittable to me. You can’t just call anything whatever you want, the name has to fit the object or it won’t stick (but you’d be surprised how far you can push those bounds to achieve certain ends…).
The same applies with framing. When a little girl decides her and her brothers are playing house, the meaning of everything around them shifts because they are in a new frame. What, a moment ago, were just different areas in their bedroom, are now a kitchen, a bathroom, a dining room, and a garage. If you’ve ever started giving yourself points for doing chores or working out by turning it into a game, then you’re already familiar with how effective frameshifting is at affecting your motivation.
Naming and framing are deeply linked and they are your fundamental tools in transforming your world, along with the most basic function that underlies them: your attention.
Fundamentally, your attention is your wand. Everything else depends on it and all higher level spells are more complex ways of shifting and orienting your attention. What you’re attending to and how you attend to it is everything. The same long car ride can be a boring chore or a wondrous journey all depending on what you’re attending to and how you attend to it. Training your attention is the primary way to level up your magic.
The first part of training is to simply notice your attention and how it works. Notice the ways it gets pulled away from the thing you want to attend to. Notice what things you find harder to attend to. Notice the kinds of things your attention gets sucked up in. A practice like meditation can help with this, but don’t stop there! Along with seeing the way you’re attending now, you must open yourself up to the heights of what’s possible.
Reading good books as well as looking to the works of the masters is a great way to do this. Nothing shows you the depths of attention that you’ve been blind to like the experience of wonder! When you’re struck by beauty, the possibility of what your wand is capable of is revealed to you. Let’s look at one of my favorite examples for teaching new wizards.
Where you or I might’ve just seen a block of marble, Michelangelo attended to it in a way that turned it into David. I love this example for new wizards because all magic operates just like this. David was already present in the marble, Michelangelo simply cleared out everything in the way and called him forth.
In just the same way, you can go outside and pick some flowers and give them to someone you care about and BOOM! You’ve transformed some ordinary flowers into a loving gesture! Just like the marble, the potential for the flowers to be an act of love was in them all along, it just took you attending to and interacting with them in the right way to call it forth.
Musicians are masters at this! A guitar has an infinite potential of songs lying in wait within it, it just takes an attuned wizard to attend to it and interact with it to call forth feelings of joy, sorrow, love, or much more!
I hope these few examples give you a sense of the possibilities there are and perhaps show you the ways that you’re already using your wand all the time. The sky's the limit, it’s just up to what you can imagine. Your imagination is the mana that fuels your wand, and stories, songs, poetry, art, and nature are your gas stations. Anywhere you encounter beauty can charge your wand if you open yourself to it.
So have fun and start practicing! The world is waiting to be shaped by you. We need more good wizards out there molding the world in lovely ways. There are far too many people out there unconsciously casting spells that make things ugly. There are also too many people casting spells for their own power and greed. The best protection from both of these is to start taking power into your own hands and calling forth the world you want to see.
And don’t be afraid to start small. Even if you don’t cast it, start to notice all the spells you could cast. There are heeps of spells you knew as a kid but don’t use anymore. You could turn a blade of grass into a weird kazoo, a hotel hallway into a racetrack, a rain puddle into a dance floor. You know a lot of these spells already; how many more are there to find?
I hope you found his words as helpful as I did. Since taking up his teaching I’ve learned some cool new spells. I spent some time with a whittling spell book and turned a block of wood into a carving of the wizard.
I tried the simple yet powerful spell he suggested in the letter and turned some flowers I found outside into a loving gesture for my girlfriend!
It took a lot of training but I was eventually able to cast a more advanced spell which turned a blank page in my notebook into the portal you’re going through right now.
Let me know if it worked, I’m still practicing. My favorite kind of spells are those that bring out more magic in others; I hope to master them one day. That said, I’m not sure I ever will. The more I learn, the more I see that all true magic has a generative effect and there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how well you can wield it.
We all need more magicians around!