Tiny Revolutions №127: Let’s Become Wizards
our conjuring era 🪄
This essay grew out of ideas I’ve been collecting on Sublime, a magical online place where I’ve been hanging out for years. Part note-taking app, part collective mood board, part living library, there’s nothing else like it.
One of my favorite recent musical discoveries happened late last year. The rapper Danny Brown, whose range I always appreciated (“hipster by heart / but I can tell you how the streets feel”), recently got sober and put out a new record in which he collaborates with a bunch of hyperpop artists. I recommend it if you like hip hop, but the reason I mention it here is because god, do I love a redemption arc. Seeing a guy in his mid-40s keep finding new tricks in one of the world’s most ruthless industries is genuinely inspiring. On a creative level, yes, but also just on a personal level. Danny’s an entertaining personality and that makes a lot of people willing to follow where he leads, but it still takes guts to get in the arena with 21-year-olds without worrying you’ll make an ass of yourself. I admire it.
I love to read about magic. As a kid I liked stories of witches and wizards, people who were able to pull something out of the world the rest of us weren’t. There’s a whole steep rabbit hole about magic you can go down (I love Mitch Horowitz’s newsletter), but the magic that appeals most to me in this moment is that of conjuring.
What can we do with our lives as they exist right now, given our curiosities, commitments, constraints, and conditions? It’s a conversation we have at the Zen Center all the time (it’s maybe the conversation we have at the Zen Center all the time), and the fascinating thing is that you can have it constantly without getting bored.
And that’s because the people and the conditions are in a constant state of change. We are a constant state of change.
When I think about conjuring, it’s about hope and possibility and imagination. Grab an ingredient from the cupboard, nip out to the market for something else, stir in a few things we’re really not sure about, and see what happens. That’s a project, but it’s also a life.
In my case, at 49, I find myself living in a 10’x10’ room off the kitchen of a house I share with three dudes. I ended up here because the house is also home to Angel City Zen Center, a place where we carry on a spiritual tradition with roots going back thousands of years.
And then outside of that I read, I write, go for long walks, and look at websites that want to influence me or maybe sell me shoes and sweatshirts, and do all sorts of things most women my age do. Listen to experimental music on NTS, devour fantasy and historical fiction, care for my scruffy old lady dog, who loves to cuddle and have you try to pry stuffed animals from her fearsome little jaws.
I’ve written this newsletter for years, which is brilliant because if I come here and tell you I’m really into, say, Arthurian legend right now, I can assume with some certainty that you’ll go with me. (I had a whole reading arc last summer.)
And then maybe it inspires me to create a new coaching offer, one in which the client goes on a quest. The offer is inspired by my experiences with past coaching clients, of course, but then everything I do is inspired by my Zen practice, and all the things I’ve picked up not only from the teachings, but from the business of running a Zen Center. Which is all influenced by my entire career history, from its beginnings in working in restaurants to all the different types of client service I’ve done in PR, comms, marketing, etc. And then there’s my lifelong love of reading and travel, and obviously, my relationships with everyone who steps into my orbit.
It’s all a stew of me. Or rather, a potion. A conjuring. Yes, there’s a dash of imagination, but it’s mostly just building on everything I’ve been into up to now.
The thing about the world right now is that it’s easy to see how the internet is killing us and forget how much it can open us up. I love Katherine Dee’s thesis that we should be thinking about the internet as a portal to the Otherworld. It can be a gateway to everything you’ve ever been curious about, it just should all be regarded with the understanding that everything you encounter is at least a little bit (and sometimes VERY) warped.
But if you use it to let your fancy go wherever it leads you, there is so much it can unlock. Dee’s essay reminded me of how much I like reading about the Fae. In recent years I, like so many other shameless grown women, have read the A Court of Thorns and Roses romantasy novels, in which they are objects of desire, but I’ve also expanded my horizons into other books about fairies. Fairy lore is part of my cultural heritage (I’m mostly British and Irish), so I found some good books that took me deeper into that world.
And you know what? That’s fun. Allowing myself to go down those strange roads is fun. It feels good, it feels freeing, it feels like being pulled along by something bigger than me.
This is completely different from being online when you’re seeking approval, or when you need the internet to define you or give you something. When you’re led by curiosity and finding a path, you get the rush of connections, a juicy spark inside you that’s very different from the dopamine rush of a like. Curiosity pulls you forward into the unknown; approval-seeking pulls you backward into what already got validated.
We used to understand this better, I think, before social media became a thing. You could surf blogs and read articles and travel relatively unfettered in the time before the super-networked web. Before everything you did was immediately fed into an algorithm that ranked, rewarded, or ignored it.
The spark is something that lights you up that you might want to return to. It’s like when you’re strolling around in a new city and you come across a little shop or pub or something that has that je ne sais quoi that calls to you. You might not want to stop and explore it right then, but you do want to make a note so you can return. So that maybe when you’re next in the act of conjuring, you have things you can pull in, in new combinations.
I don’t think anyone actually decides what they want. You can force yourself to pursue something because you think it’ll benefit you or pay off in some way, but actual desire? That’s mysterious. You’re either drawn to something or you’re not.
What I see often is people not allowing themselves to follow their desires. They’re afraid they don’t make sense, or they tell themselves they’re silly or ridiculous, or, darker, that they’ll lead to their destruction.
And then there’s the financial pressure. It’s hard to let your curiosity about, say, Appalachian hand weaving in, because you quickly determine that it’ll never be useful or profitable. We’ve absorbed the truly cursed idea that if something can’t be optimized, scaled, or automated, it’s a waste of time. Both of these are cages, and the approval economy and monetization mindset keep the door firmly shut.
I know people are scared right now. Work is unstable and the machines are getting better at the things we were told would make us indispensable. “Follow what lights you up” can sound like advice given by someone who’s already made it. (Reader, I have not “made it” in any traditional sense.)
But the irony is that following what lights you up isn’t a detour from getting ahead. On the contrary, it’s the only way I’ve ever seen it happen without breaking the person in the process. So when you view it from that lens, wizardry isn’t opting out of the world. It’s learning how to move through it without burning yourself out trying to outguess it.
Yes, my weird stew of ingredients has become my (admittedly modest) livelihood. Coaching, Zen practice, writing all came from following the sparks and relationships I cultivated in the process. But I could never have planned it that way. The only way it all happened was that I was willing to follow without knowing where it all was going to lead. Which is not to say that I haven’t been scared. I’m scared all the time, but it’s like a good scared.
And also: some sparks just stay sparks. They make your life richer and stranger and more yours. Not everything has to become a business. Especially now, when so much of what’s being rewarded is efficiency, mimicry, and speed—things the machines are very good at.
It’s why for years I haven’t known what to tell people I do for a living. Lately I’ve just been saying I’m a Zen teacher because it’s fun (and true), but that doesn’t fully cover it.
It’s been a shift into trusting that whatever “this” is is fine. I often think of Esther Perel saying we’re now in an identity economy, one where instead of asking “what am I going to do next,” you’re asking “who am I going to be next.” If you spend one third of your life working, don’t you want it to be in service of something you care about? The question may be existential, but I say if you’re going to do something, go with what you already know, just in combinations that are specific to you. The parts of you that don’t make sense to an algorithm are often the most alive.
This is also what we talk about at the Zen Center, actually. Developing the ability to get out of your own way and trusting that when you stop grasping so hard, something shows up that you could never have come up with on your own.
And that’s the wizardry. Bringing all the varied aspects of your life to swirl together to help you find a way forward. There’s no recipe anymore, no path to follow. Just bushwhacking our way to the next thing and the next thing and the one after that.
So in that sense the wizardry is just permission. Allowing what lights you up to light you up and seeing where it leads. Every last one of us already has the ingredients. Time to start conjuring.
And speaking of conjuring! This issue represents a historical Tiny Revolutions first (lol), in that it’s sponsored by the aforementioned Sublime. I’ve been using it since its early days because I love the way it moves with me on my roaming across the open web. I use Sublime to collect interesting things I come across—quotes, articles, images, ideas—without having to stop and figure out what they mean yet. Over time it becomes a searchable archive of everything I've been curious about, ready to pull from when I'm working on something new. It also turns me on to related ideas and is fun and beautiful to use, which matters more than people think (look at the above branding!). You can view my public library here, and if you’d like to join me, use the code TINYREVOLUTIONS for 20% off a paid subscription.
Escape Artist
Here’s my latest talk on the ACZC podcast:
“It’s sad that we humans have to learn this way, but it seems to be the case.”
Sara takes a hard hitting honest look at commitment, its phobia, and the choices we seem to be making for better or worse. What are we committing to whether we avoid it or not? Is regret the truest path to wisdom? Is there still time to take the path not taken?? Find out here!
Tell me about what you’re curious about lately.
Thanks for reading, as ever.
😘
Sara
p.s. …
Do it Alan Moore style. Turn your midlife crisis into becoming a wizard.
https://youtu.be/k1qACd0wHd0?si=5CP2jYgosTbQgMTa
Sublime sounds almost as sublime as you! hurrah! checking it out. This edition made me feel like i could maybe just consider RELAXING a bit! maybe even muse…love