An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

Delving Within or Magic?

[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha'Tara]

I've been reading Charles deLint's "Moonlight and Vines" and now I'm at "Wild Horses" where a fortune teller has a table at a fair and a pretty girl walks up to her wearing a face that says she's seen more than her years should have allowed. The fortune teller explains how the cards work and gives her a choice: you can use the "reading" to go inside yourself and deal with what you have become and who you want to be, or you can work some magic instead, using the ritual of the cards.

It's not hard to see that most people choose to go for the magic instead of the delving within. Isn't it much easier to believe in some benign other-worldly forces one can conjure up to manifest and magically make all things wonderful again, than it is to take the bull by the horns, look within, make an assessment of what's there, what's gone wrong, what needs to be changed in order for real change to actually happen?

I am quite familiar with this choice, having had to make it time and again. I've done both, the delving and the magic. The delving has always been a very unpleasant performance. Delving means taking responsibility for whatever has happened and what it has done; dealing with the present and working out a process whereby the past mistakes are left behind and a new path to self-empowerment is forged from whatever reserves one has left to draw on.

The magic, well that's a funny thing. I was raised in magic: the magic of organized religion where you live by "faith" which means you believe in whatever your religion tells you to believe in, and there it is: some assorted angels, a saint, a virgin, a savior, a God, will take care of your problems, clean up your mess, and continually remind you that it's OK, that as long as you continue to perform the magic ritual and pay your dues, the dragons of accountability are kept safely at bay.

I don't know yet where "Wild Horses" will take the girl, or me. But this I know: that life doesn't give us a choice between delving and magic. It demands a constant balance of both. Delving without magic is Summer without sun or beach. All magic and no delving is icing with no cake. You don't need to self-flagellate or sleep in sackcloth and ashes to become the kind of person you like living with, the kind of person you can trust to be there for you come hell or high water. And you don't need to walk around sucking on candy and soda pop to feel happy. (This reminds me of the current Coca Cola claim: "Bringing 125 years of happiness to the planet." and wondering if that includes 2 world wars, several seriously attempted genocides, the Vietnam war, the endless Middle East fiasco, the Twin Towers catastrophe, Aids, African famines, earthquakes, hurricanes, Homeland Security, among other happy event?)

Life isn't about extremes but about balance and in the current melt-down of Neo-Capitalism planet-wide, people could take a minute or two each day to meditate on that before they plunge into their next credit card purchase!

Here's a not so untypical Canadian story my friend Vic related to me recently: Two eastern Canada people with high school education find jobs in the auto manufacturing industry some years back. Union wages, benefits package, the works. They get married and with their combined income can manage a sizeable mortgage on a monster house and other assorted sizeable debts. They have a couple of kids who grow up to own motorcycles and all the fun and games technology provides. Parents each drive a latest model SUV. Life's great. Then the auto manufacturing plant shuts down and relocates to Mexico or the dark side of the Moon. These people have no education to fall back on, and no skills beyond assembly line production. From a combined gross income of about $120,000 down to zilch overnight. How do you sustain your accustomed level of lifestyle? You don't. You tumble and lose everything. And so goes that wonderful illusory "middle class" that was deliberately created to consume the endless flow of useless, resource depleting and polluting gadgets created with technology and the slave assembly line in Third World manufacturing plants. The consumers consumed themselves.

A few observers and students of history have been able to see through the illusion of the "middle class" bubble. Throughout history you've had two basic classes of people on this world: the rich and richer, the poor and poorer. The "bourgeoisie" or middle class which is supposed to exist somewhere between the high poor and low rich is an aberration within any form of capitalistic economy. It is a convenience; a product of the so-called "free market" which I call the "carrot on the stick" economy. Any "free market" economy (now seen for what it is: corporate greed on crack) is fuelled by four basic conditions: an endless supply of cheap natural resources, cheap labour, avoidance of taxes and a consumer base broad enough to absorb whatever the market produces, rich enough to provide the expected, ever growing, profit margin.

Naturally, when cheap natural resources become rarer and more costly to extract and transform, something has to give. Within an incredibly short span of time, the greedy execs and share holders of large corporations realized their returns on investment would slow down if they had to pay rising costs of raw resources, high maintenance of wages and benefits being paid to employees and income taxes. Technology made it possible for them to relocate lock, stock and barrel, to whatever country would provide the cheaper labour and less, quote, government interference, as well as continued access to raw materials. That was secured through a liberal use of bribes to local governments and tribal chieftains; the expedient use of "military advisers" and mercenary forces supplied by the home country, the UN or the local governments; the enslavement into sweat shops and concentration camp style assembly line production facilities mostly manned by people forcefully evicted from traditional lands. Well, we all know that sad story and frankly, who wants to dwell on it around the barbecue or during the after church brunch?

What should have been evident from the start had greed not completely blinded the corporate fools is that changing the moves in the game without changing the game itself would bring the whole house of cards crashing down. Yes, they got preferential treatment in Third World countries. Yes, they saved big time on wages and benefits with their slave labour. Yes they were able to contravene growing environmental concerns and safeguards and continue to rape the planet. Yes, they were able to increase their production and flood the North American markets with more and more gadgetry. Yes, they were able to buy and bring successive consumer nations' governments into their scams. Yes, to this day they continue to convince remaining consumers to rely on credit to make up for their loss of disposable income, since union wages, the mainstay of the consumer bubble, are long gone.

So here we are. The consumer class has been decimated. The credit-laden neo-poor are once again losing everything they thought was theirs by virtue of having signed a promissory note or slipped their card through the slot machine. The middle class bubble has burst as anyone with a brain should have been able to predict. I don't even hear much talk of "recovery" anymore. No balance, you see? No self-discipline, only the ritual of belief in an economy hyped up on steroids of credit and greed. Wild horses, wild cards. An outer natural wilderness destroyed only to develop a noxious wilderness within. Listen to the four horses of the apocalypse neighing on the horizon.

Laura reached out her hand, not quite touching the box with its cards. "Are they real?" she asked.
"How do you mean, real?"
"Magic. Can you work magic with them?"
Cassie didn't like to lie, but there was magic and there was magic. One lay in the heart of the world and was as much a natural part of how things were as it was deep mystery. The other was the thing people were looking for to solve their problems with and it never quite worked the way they felt it should. "Magic's all about perception," she said. (from the short story, 'Wild Horses' by Charles deLint.)