Heraclitus (and more recently Gordon) said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
This is true, literally as well as on a deep metaphysical level, but it’s also incomplete. Because while you can never step in the same river twice, it’s also correct to say that all rivers are part of the same river. Whether that’s literally because all water on the earth has been flowing and evaporating and condensing and falling and flowing into new rivers since the start of water on earth, or metaphysically because each river is part of The River — the archetypal Ur River that flows in our collective unconscious and the spirit realm.
So both those things are true and if you can hold both those truths inside yourself, you’ll find your magic greatly improved.
When we moved to the Peaceable Kingdom in the summer of 2020, everything was closed and locked down. That meant that I didn’t really have a chance to meet a lot of my neighbors and we didn’t explore the cute little downtown with its shops and restaurants and, most notably, I couldn’t go to the library. Yes, they were providing curbside pickup, but I didn’t even have a library card for this county and, frankly, I had a lot else on my mind.
Libraries have been a part of my life since I was very young. They allowed me to feed my voracious appetite for the written word, research the things that interested me (true to form, I was obsessed with moon phases and ancient alphabets and witchcraft and psychic powers and UFOs as a child), and enlarged my sheltered, small-town world.
When the kid was little, we also spent a lot of time in the library. We’d both load up on books and choose DVDs and music. Summer reading was a regular activity. I have a lot of really close to the heart memories about these various libraries.
So the other week, it suddenly occurred to me that the library was open. The library here is lovely, really large and with a café in the foyer. They are well supplied (they even have a tool library) and staffed. It was fun getting a new card and finding where the holds are shelved and wandering through the shelves.
What really surprised me though was how nostalgic it all was. Being in this (new to me) library felt the exact same as the library in our old neighborhood and the library where we used to live and the library from when the kid was tiny and the library at university and the one from my hometown and my own childhood. All the way back through the libraries of my life…
My recent post talked about time travel and one way to travel through time magically is to connect something in the present to something in the past. And I realized that the library was a way to do that. I could use the library as a tool to reach back in time — to when the kid was young or when I was. I can also use the library (and indeed have used the library) as a powerful tool for divination.
It also struck me that because all libraries are the one library, that means there’s a spirit library, an Ur library. Which is an idea that makes me very happy (and for The Sandman stans out there, reminds me of the library of the Dream Realm).
All highways are the one highway. All glades are the Ur glade. And naturally, all forests are part of the one forest, a place real and mythical, past / present / future, and extant all around the world. Some trees are connected to the World Tree, whether or not they are part of a forest.
Now, not all grocery stores are the one grocery store… but all markets are the one market. So when you go to the grocery store, you’re just going to the store. But when you go to a market, you are participating in a ancient tradition of exchanging goods and services and building local networks. There’s magic you can do with that that you can’t do at Safeway.
Places with a spirit corollary are open to being enchanted the way other places aren’t. But that doesn’t mean that every place has that connection. A tree farm, with trees in straight lines and trimmed branches isn’t a forest. And while there’s an Ur Garden (with a history that goes back to early creation stories) not everyone’s manicured lawn and box hedge counts.
So seek out the places that are part of the spirit version of the place to do your enchantment, and the more powerful that connection, the more enchantable they are.
