Grief spells for the New Year: Remembering ourselves as Magicians/ breaking into song

“Metamorphosis” By Hiroko Otake

Dear Shapeshifter,

Here we are, according to the Gregorian calendar, in a new year, loaded with expectations of resolutions and growth, which can feel a little stale when we consider the resolutions we’ve abandoned in the past, the cyclical nature of our experience, the non-linearity of healing, modern myths of progress, yada yada. 

And simultaneously we may also feel nearer to the possibility of transformation in our lives, to the ways change is a constant energy we can tap into. We may feel powerful in our own capacity to change form, to listen for what needs response in our lives and the world, and to respond creatively. We may feel a little closer to the magicians we always are. 

In the Magician card in the Rider-Waite deck, a figure is behind an altar surrounded by roses, one hand gesturing towards the ground, rooting us to earth, and a hand held upward, reaching with a double sided wand towards the sky. This magician recognizes that within the ruins, uncertainty, and chaos of our lives, dwells the possibility to join the world in its endless changing and to live life as art together. Holding simultaneously the ways we are both ephemeral and still very much alive, the magician bows to, draws from, and becomes a channel for forces of change, creativity, and mystery.  In stepping fully into this role, which is to say, their creative capacity, the magician gestures to a collective capacity to be both small and powerful together. 

I’m interested in the ways grief can make us into magicians. Pull us down onto the earth, collapse us into the soil. Lift our faces to the stars and the mystery of our breath. Push us into intuitive ritual, metamorphosis, and an expanded sense of self. Roll stories, spells, and poems off our tongues. If, as Sophie Strand shares in The Flowering Wand, “each death opens up a wound, and a song”, then the griever magician is the one who sings. We are unmade and remade by this singing, a singing of ourselves into the world as the world sings itself into us. As grievers, we may no longer see ourselves as neat and tidy individual selves, but entangled webs of relationships and dimensions. 

In grief, we learn to bear unbearable feelings alongside feelings of love and awe. Perhaps the magician is the wisdom of our animal bodies that allows us to be both ruined and blooming. As Martín Prechtel says, “we must be willing to fail magnificently.” This is not a passive surrender. It is a breaking and bursting into song, a celebration of voices that risk cracking and singing off key.

It is also a merging with the world. And it is risky.

The magician takes this risk. In their piece, We Must Risk New Shapes, Sophie Strand writes:

“Becoming new is never safe. Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. It is a leap across the abyss.”

For examples of this kind of risk taking and shapeshifting, we need only slow down enough to sense to the worlds around us and inside of us. We have never done grief, death, life, or magic alone, as individuals, or as a single species. The greatest magicians and shapeshifters are perhaps the ecosystems we find ourselves in, and other more than human beings.

I learned from Xenia Viray that imaginal cells are the only cells in the caterpillar that know they will become a butterfly. These cells are at first attacked by their immune system as they experience their caterpillar body failing, being turned to goo in their cocoon. And eventually these cells allow themselves to be pulled by the imaginal cells’ future memory into new shapes. 

Perhaps the magician is that part of us with future memory, our imaginal cells, holding open the possibility for the new forms we will take. Perhaps to grieve is to be pulled by an embodied knowledge of how to shapeshift, revealing to us that we are always multidimensional, never truly a final form or single being.

So what are your songs? What are your shapes? What does it feel like to take the magician’s hand, and to recognize it as your own?

A spell for this new year:

May grief make us into magicians.

Pull us into metamorphosis.

Reveal our multidimensional + entangled nature.

May our bodies remember grieving like snakes molting.

May grief digest the illusion of isolated selves & linear time.

May grief slow and still us

enough that we may be moved

by our listening & longing,

into song,

that we may be cracked 

and made into new shapes.

Yours,

Mara

P.S. If you have a spell you’d like to share, consider submitting to this Spring’s collaborative zine Grieving as Shapeshifting: Spells for Coming Undone - click here for details

Grief spells is a monthly creative project/love letter/newsletter for fellow grieflings. Sign up here. You’ll receive love notes like this one, resources, and updates on offerings.