Magic, Mastery, and the Free Spirit Gathering

On the longest day / shortest night, to find some small magic, like the last outside table at the wine bar...it is enough...

Just about recovered from my return to the Free Spirit Gathering. It was a worthwhile endeavor, a creative effort, but an exhausting one.

This was my fifteenth FSG, and my fourteenth on staff -- and as this was FSG XXVIII, that means I've now attended a majority of them and been on staff for half of them. (And I ended up sort of unofficially on staff at my first one, when Joe recruited me to work at the Dancing Tree Cafe.) Last summer was the first one I skipped since I started going; I stayed away for political reasons, which I won't go into them here since I've said my piece elsewhere. (Google "What Ever Happened to Free Spirit Beltane?") So I had some uncertainty about returning this year, but I decided to try to define a new role for myself. I literally wrote my own job description for an overall "Master of Ceremonies" position and sent it to the coordinator. And (largely out of desperation for help, I suspect) he took me up on it.

And despite my utter exhaustion, I'm glad he did.

A big part of the job I wrote myself into was dealing with our nightly Fire Circles, helping to poke up the energy and focus the magic a little bit at what is (IMHO) the heart of any magical/Pagan gathering.

How'd that work out? Pretty darned well, I think. It seemed to me that the Fire Circles were the best they'd been in several years, especially considering the lower attendance at FSG this year. Reviews from attendees have been positive. From my perspective is was good enough that something like this came out of my mouth late Saturday night or early Sunday morning:

"Friends, I tell you this: I've been around. I have visited the grave of the one and only Emperor of the United States. I have lain on the side of a mountain while meteors streaked down and fireballs lit the sky. I have seen the thirty-foot-tall bronze Buddha in Nara, Japan, during the New Year's festival. I have fought men bigger than myself, lain with beautiful women, travelled to the other side of the world and sung my songs there. But if the powers that be told me I had one night, just one night, to justify my life...how could I choose other than a night like this? With people like this? And I do not say 'tonight', my friends, because with your help I hope that there will be many more nights like this."

Indeed, I'm feeling like the Fire Circles worked well enough to be a masterpiece of magic.

By that I don't mean a flawless perfect creation, but a masterpiece in the original sense of a work demonstrating the creator's ability and competence, something like a thesis or dissertation in modern academia.

Some context: thirteen and a half years ago, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday by getting my first tattoo and then going off for a long weekend in the mountains ("all true paths lead through mountains", as I would later learn), just me and my dogs (Piccolo and Chewbacca) and whatever I dragged out there in my own mind. I went to wrestle with my demons, but they didn't show, and I won by default. I realized that what I had thought was the sound of various monsters and unspeakable horrors creeping up behind me, was the sound of the garbage I was dragging behind me. And so that weekend, I declared to myself and to the Universe that my apprenticeship was over. I promoted myself to "journeyman magician". (Understanding here that "magic" is something like "the art and science of changing consciousness at will", and not (necessarily) anything supernatural.)

Two years ago at FSG, I took on a role around the Fire Circle similar to what I did this year. I was also acting as FSA's President at the time...between the stress of that, plus the festival work I was doing, plus a romantic relationship pretty much running aground at the festival, plus a day-job crisis Saturday, that year's FSG was not overall a fun time for me. But I still felt like I was able to help set the Fire Circle on track after several years of problems.

I specifically remember from that year one fellow, at his first festival ever, dancing skyclad around the fire on a rainy night when only a few of us were crazy enough to be down there, turning water jugs and anything else we could bang on into drums. This year, that same gentleman came up to me and told me that he had found his spiritual path thanks to the work I had done that year. That was an intensely humbling and yet gratifying experience...humbling because I know that any good done there is not through my own energy but through the work of many others that at best I helped invoke (I''ve been reflecting a lot on the old folk story about stone soup), but also gratifying to know that I must be on a right path (not the right path, mind, but a right path) when people are having this sort of life-altering experience.

In the karate school in which I train, I think that we might map the apprentice -- journeyman -- master model to the ranks of yudansha (below black belt), shodan through sandan (first through third degree black belt), and yondan and above. I've been competing in the "Master's Division" and having people call me "sensei" since I reached yondan (fourth degree black belt) in 2007; it seems fair to say that after 22 years of training and study, and 12 years after I ended my "apprenticeship" by achieving black belt, I reached a sort of "master" level. Again, that doesn't mean perfection or an end to learning, but a level where one can contribute as a teacher and a leader.

Taking that as a comparison, if I think of starting my magical/Pagan path in 1990, and graduating to "journeyman" in 2000...then it seems just about the right time now, with the book coming out soon, and with years as a presenter at FSG and Starwood and other festivals under my belt, and having just achieved a significant magical working in the Fire Circles at FSG this year, to declare that by the power vested in me by...well, whatever I can get you to believe has vested power in me, I promote myself to master magician.