Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Briana Saussy. Briana Saussy is a teacher, a spiritual counselor, and founder of the Sacred Arts Academy where she teaches tarot, ceremony, alchemy, and other sacred arts for everyday life. Briana is well grounded in the world’s great religious and intellectual traditions as well as Western psychological practices. She holds a BA and an MA in Eastern and Western classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science from St. John’s College and is a student of ancient Greek and Sanskrit. And she has a new book with Sounds True called Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary.
Briana is a gorgeous storyteller and most of all she says that each one of us needs to discover our own relationship to weaving together the extraordinary and the ordinary and all of the moments of our lives. She puts the power back on each one of us. Here’s my conversation with Briana Saucy.
Briana, I think sometimes people turn to a podcast like this, listen to a podcast like this, because secretly they’re looking for magic, and I’m hoping we can give them some today. So let’s start off. Your new book is called Making Magic. What do you mean by magic?
Briana Saussy: It is such a good question and you may or may not be surprised to know that I do not ever define magic in my book; and it is very intentional that I don’t. And the reason why is because magic is, above all, relational. It’s really about your particular and unique relationship with an object, with another person, with a creature that you love, with the world. And that is something that really only each individual can give voice and color too. So with that as our starting point, what I can say about magic and the signposts that have certainly led me to magic in my own life, and that I’ve seen work for others as well—there are three of them.
The first is that magic is much bigger than we think it is. I think that when we think of magic, we often think of a stage magician performing an illusion, or we think of the wonderful world of Harry Potter; maybe we think of an enchantress or a sorceress surrounded by arcane instruments. Well, all of this has a place in magic, for sure. They only capture a tiny sliver of what magic really is. And so the first thing to remember is that it is bigger than we think it is. And so that means, for instance, that we find it in every spiritual tradition. Whether they recognize it or not, it’s there. We find it in odd places like philosophy or mathematics. We find it in high-level physics. We find magic and all of these places because it is much bigger than what we normally think.
Another signpost for magic is that it is closer than we think. Often when I first am talking to people, there’s a sense of, “I need to go to this sacred land. I need to go on retreat to this sacred site.” Or, “I need to go study with this special person five continents away.” And while all of these things can be valuable and worthwhile and amazing experiences, they are things that are not open to much of the world. And yet magic is found throughout the world. It’s found in every culture. It is found in every people. So that tells us that magic is much closer to the everyday, right? It’s much closer to the bones of our daily lives from what we normally think. It’s not something resting in an exotic locale that we have to go pursue in order to get to participate in it.
And the third signpost that I think is really helpful to keep in mind is that magic is simpler than we think. In my book I talk about things like lighting candles, but I also talk about things like putting on lipstick or even deciding what clothes you’re going to wear for the day. And those are actually all magical acts. They can be magical acts. They’re very simple. They don’t involve long incantations and foreign languages or fancy illusions with lots of stage equipment. They don’t involve strange symbols or circles made of salt. They involve the things that we do every single day. And so while I cannot define what magic is for any one person, I can definitely say that if you keep those three things in mind, then you are in good company and very close to your own magic.
TS: I love it. Very helpful. The subtitle of Making Magic is Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary. And as you were talking about something like putting on lipstick, I thought about that and I thought, how could putting on lipstick—something that we think of as so everyday for some people, I guess—be extraordinary? What do you do when you put lipstick on?
BS: When I was studying Sanskrit, I learned that the word for “ornament” in that language is the same word for “cosmos,” for the universe. And the same is true for ancient Greek. It’s one of those interesting little linguistic things that happens and it really changed my attitude. That was a moment for me where magic pierced into my everyday because I realized . . . Alright, I come from Texas. I come from South Texas, so the higher the hair, the closer to God. Right? All of us ladies learn from an early age how to do ourselves up and whether you stick with that or not, right? That’s personal preference. But we learn.
And so for me, putting on makeup, which I had often kind of discounted and saw as vain and not really worth my time—and I have a lot of feminist arguments against it. All of a sudden I was reading this beautiful erotic Indian poetry where these women are just getting completely gussied up with their jewels, and their scents, and their silks. And I thought like, “This can be really sexy. This can be really beautiful.” And when I now choose the makeup that I’m going to wear, when I apply my lipstick—one of the things that I do—first of all, I look at the colors and I decide, “Well, what do I want to call in and what do I want to carry with my words today?” As I am ornamenting my mouth—this is where I speak. And so do I need my words to be really powerful today? Do I need my words to be really kind and compassionate today? Do I maybe need to not talk as much and listen more today? And so I choose my color based on that.
And then I also have that intention when I actually apply my makeup. When I do my eye shadow, I’m thinking, “How do I need to see today?” Right? Like, “How do I actually need to go through the world and see things? Do I need to see with clarity? Am I devising strategies and tactics or do I need to see with gentleness because I’m going to be dealing with somebody who really triggers me?”
TS: Really from reading the book, Making Magic, I started having this experience—because you talk about so many simple things that we do every day. You’ve just gone through the example of putting lipstick on and eye shadow, but walking through doorways, having a cup of tea or a drink of water, taking a bath—these are things that people do every single day. And throughout the book, you’re teaching us how to weave together this extraordinary—or we could say sort of non-ordinary—perception with our everyday ordinary. And I started thinking, “I wonder what it’s like for Briana.” Do you feel like you’re living in two worlds all the time or more than two? I’m curious about that.
BS: I do. And I think that for me, that started very early on. I was born with a cleft palate, and so the roof of my mouth was literally woven back together. And so the theme and the image of weaving has always been really powerful in my family and in my personal story. And as I came of age, I did recognize that I really am very much in both worlds and I think we all are, right? I think that that’s our natural state. Our natural state is to be in both worlds, to be here and fully present here and now and also aware of what we would call the extraordinary, or the mystical, or the numinous—whatever word, whatever nomenclature you want to use—that infuses everything around us.
And what life looks like when you’re in that state is what life looks like when you’re not in that state, right? I go get groceries, and I walk through my front door, and I straighten up my living room, and I change my 11-month-old’s diaper, and my husband and I have a business meeting with coffee when we kick off our morning. So all of the external actions look the same. It’s the way of holding the internal juice, the internal medicine, or the internal mojo that I would say is really where things start to become different. And so little things take on more significance for me.
So, for instance, if I walk through the front door, and I’ve had a crappy day, and I’m frustrated, and I’m short tempered, I may pause at my door and I may just take a moment, and take a breath, and make sure that I don’t carry that attitude into the hearth and home of my house where my family is. Because I don’t want to carry that in to the place where I dwell, the place where I relax with the people that I love. And so at my door I have a variety of sprays—magical sprays, we could say. They’re herbal based, nothing too fancy. And I might just spray a little bit in the air and then walk through. And I have a really nice frankincense actually that I’ve been using, just kind of clear the air and reset the tone so that I’m coming in with a little bit more intentionality, a little bit more conscientiousness. So that’s what it looks like. That’s one tiny example.
TS: You know, in the introduction to Making Magic, I pulled out this sentence because I really loved it. What you wrote is, “While we seek out magic for many reasons, chief among them is the fact that it restores our sense of sovereignty.” And I wanted to hear you talk about that. You just gave an example of coming in through your front door, but what are some other ways that your intentional connection with the extraordinary restores your sense of sovereignty?
BS: When I first started talking about magic and teaching magic to people in my community, a lot of what I encountered were people who were interested in having more meaningful, magical lives. But the first thing they would tell me is, “Well, I’m not a magical person.” And I realized as I talked with people like, “OK, well we feel that way because we weren’t raised in “a magical family,” or maybe you didn’t get a book of spells, or whatever the idea is that people have. And so I started really working to unpack that and I realized that what many people feel—and I mean every tradition I think has a version of this—is that we often feel like we’re cut off from the most vital part of ourselves. It’s so easy, especially in developed countries, but also in undeveloped countries, to go through the motions of your day—day after day—and not give yourself the time to pause and to reflect, and to find what’s meaningful and to find what’s magical there.
And the way that I see it in the way that the traditions that I was brought up in talk about it, in slightly different ways, but more or less the same, is that the two worlds—the world of here and now and the world of the extraordinary or the mystical, the numinous, the spirit world, whatever you want to call it—those worlds, at one time were connected. And we pass through both of them with relative ease. Over time, that connection has been severed. It’s been broken. And I think that many of us feel that sense of brokenness in one respect or another. So when I talk about magic bringing us back into our sovereignty, what starts to happen is when we see one area of our life that is more pregnant with meaning and more pregnant with mystery than what we originally thought, it’s kind of contagious. We start to see more and more of the areas of our life like that until finally our life as a whole is infused with magic and we’ve woven ourselves back into both worlds.
And I think when we do that weaving of ourselves, that remembering, literally piecing ourselves back together, I think when we commit to that work, that’s when we really stand in our own sovereignty. And for me, that word has a deep meaning because sovereignty, before it was a political term, of course, it referred to an ancient goddess of the lands. And part of this for me, part of what really comes through when we start to rediscover our own magic is a deep relationship with land, with the actual land where we live and with land in a more general sense as well. And we start to enter into a sense of power that isn’t trying to influence or exercise over something or someone else, but rather working with and also working for things that are greater than any one individual. So it reminds me of the axiom in Euclid, “The whole is greater than the parts.” That to me is what sovereignty is about. It’s about wholeness, and it’s about health, and it’s about holiness in the most radical, reverent sense of that word.
TS: Living in two worlds—I’m just going to get it right out here, Briana. Do you ever feel a little kind of like “kooky” inside? I don’t really know quite what word to use. I mean, meaning there’s a quality when you’re living in two worlds. Where’s this coming from? Is it coming from the numinous world? Is it coming from the literal external world? “Oh, I feel my eyes are rolling up in top of my head.” Something like that.
BS: Yes. I mean, when I first was called to do this work full-time, I had very much a, “Are you for real?” conversation with the universe. Because [laughter] was like, “Seriously?” Because I am super Type A and I was a straight-A student. I was going to go to law school, so I am being derailed in a significant way. But it was very clear. It was one of those things where it was very much like, “This is the path that you’re supposed to walk.” And so I did and I felt like . . . I had this vision that my business outfit would be like a three-piece suit, and instead I was being handed a jester’s hat. And I was like, “Really?” But what I have found is that, OK, everyone feels this way and nobody talks about it because everyone is afraid that they are going to be called crazy.
What’s funny is that I actually have a few clients that are mentally ill. I have one who wrote a book about it and talked about our work in her book. And so I’ve seen there is like bifurcated reality that becomes a mental health concern that needs to be addressed as such. But the sense that there’s more than what we see, there is more than what we physically can touch—I mean, science proved that years and years ago. Right? So we all have this sense and nobody talks about it, but when you read tarot cards or you do astrology charts like I do, everybody tells you because they’re sure that you are even crazier than they are.
And so I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it from every possible corner of society, every professional walk of life. And that is what I think really has allowed me to talk about it so openly, because I feel like in not talking about our experience of the seen and unseen, and in not talking about our experiences of the mundane that all of a sudden becomes something else, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. It’s kind of like we’ve got this delicious dessert and we’re hoarding it and we’re not sharing it with anybody. And I mean at some point that’s just rude, right? [laughter]
And so that’s what I’ve become really committed to doing. And a lot of my work is actually around normalizing these experiences because what I discovered is everybody has these experiences, but everybody is looking for magic and everybody has had these magical moments and we don’t share them, by and large, because we’re afraid of the stigma. So I am invested in bringing the conversation forward, and normalizing it, and saying it’s OK to talk about these things. And it’s actually good to talk about these things because I want my boys to grow up in a world where they can talk about their dreams and take their night dreams really seriously as guiding posts for their real daylight experiences. I want that for them. I want that for all of our children.
TS: Beautiful. Beautiful answer. Thank you. I’m glad I asked it. It was a little edgy, but I went for it and your answer . . .
BS: I like it.
TS: . . . your answer made it well worth it. Briana, I have to be honest here. I kind of fell in love with the book Making Magic and with you when I read the story that’s right in the introduction of the book about Golden Locks and the Bear People. And I want you to tell that story to our audience, but before you do, where did this story come from—Golden Locks and the Bear People?
BS: I’m so glad you asked, Tami, because I was going to ask you if I can tell where the story came from before I told it. So, as I mentioned, I was born with a cleft palate and I told you I’m from south Texas and I have a very big . . . a fierce family and it’s full of characters, right? Just lots of colorful people—off the wall. And what we do really well is we love one another really well. So when I was very young, I had to have two major surgeries before I was four years old. Part of that experience was driving from San Antonio to Houston. And I did that with my grandparents—with my mother and my grandparents actually—and they all told wonderful stories, and it turned what would have been a really terrifying experience for a two-year-old and a three-year-old into something that really felt like a modern fairytale.
And so this story that I share in Making Magic, of Golden Locks and the Bear People, this was one of the versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears that my maternal grandfather shared with me. And he was a wonderful storyteller. He grew up in east Texas and his lineage was half Irish and half Cherokee. He had to quit school in the eighth grade because his family demanded that he work on the farm, and he was very resentful about that his entire life because he loved education very much and he prized it and was always very supportive of myself and my sister getting an education, as he put it. But he was—and I think that in part because of his own experience—he was a wonderful storyteller.
And so he would tell stories. And he would tell many different versions of the same story. And sometimes, they were so different that I wasn’t sure. Like, “Are we talking about Hansel and Gretel or have we gone into some totally other things?” And so the version of the Three Bears that I share in Making Magic, the root stock of that story, I would say, it was given to me by him. And then of course I made it my own, as any good teller is supposed to do, with my own flourishes and so on.
TS: Alright, let’s hear it. Golden Locks and the Bear People—and help us understand how this story is so critical to discovering our own magic, if you will.
BS: Absolutely. So let’s begin at the beginning.
Before the room that you’re sitting in right now was built, before the building that the room is in was built, long before any land had been cleared or rivers had been dammed, there was a forest. And on the edge of this forest, there was a village. Within the village, there were many bright-eyed, curious children who wanted nothing more than to explore the mysteries in the forest. And yet they were told by the grownups of the village, “You cannot go into the forest, for the Bear People will find you and grab you and will gobble you up!”
And so it went. And there was one young girl with flashing eyes whose mother had made for her a beautiful golden headband embroidered with birds and roses and fruits. And she was known as Golden Locks. Now Golden Locks, like all of the children, longed for the mysteries of the forest. And she wanted something more. She wanted to learn what magic really was and she dreamed of learning what magic really was. And she asked all of the grownups up from the village, “Can you teach me magic? Can you teach me magic?” And they scoffed. And they said, “No, no. That’s old wives’ tales. Nonsensical old women pay attention to that. Nobody else does. Silliness.” And Golden Locks went to the old women in the village and they stared at her through their rheumy eyes. And she wasn’t sure if they heard what she asked or not. And one of them clicked her toothless gums together and said, “If you want to know what magic is, you’ll have to go into the woods.”
Golden Locks dreamed that night and she dreamed of the Bear People. And she remembered that once upon a time, her people had talked to the Bear People, and her people had gone into the forest. And so she committed to going into the woods. She took honey—she knew it was the best offering to bring the Bear People. She ignored the jeers of her father and her brother, and the worried glances of her mother. She tied her skirts up above her ankles and she set off. She walked for a very long time. And the forest grew darker and larger and the scents of sharp pine and wet bark filled her nose.
As she got deeper into the forest, she saw that there was a rushing river. And she saw that on the other side of this river there was a cave covered in moss and lichen. And she could smell, with a flare of her nostrils, the musk that told her that this was where the Bear People lived. The sun was beginning to set and the wind was beginning to howl. Golden Locks new now was her only opportunity.
So she plunged into the icy river and her skin felt numb and her teeth began to chatter. She continued forward and as she did, she felt so slightly, so subtly, some of the cares and the callousness of her village wash off her skin. She came to the entrance to the cave hanging with moss and she saw that there were three pairs of eyes. One pair was fierce and looked at her sternly, and they were set in a huge head on top of a huge body. And Golden Locks knew that this was a father bear. Another set of eyes gazed at her with caution and Golden Locks saw that the mother bear had swollen teeth that were still oozing milk. And then a pair of eyes, almost on the same level as Golden Locks’s eyes herself, peered at her curiously and she saw that this was a little bear.
The gravelly voice of Papa Bear spoke and broke the dusk that had fallen over the woods, “What do you want here?” Golden Locks was trembling. She began to doubt herself. Was she mad? Was she crazy? Had she just made a terrible blunder? She set down the offering of honey, the bread that she had secreted away. She bowed with politeness, as was the custom of her people, and said with her eyes demurely cast down, “Oh Bear People. I have come here today in the hope that you will teach me magic. For I am sure, I am quite sure that your people still remember it.” The Bear People waited at the entrance to the cave for a long time without answering her. And Golden Locks then learned that the first lesson of magic was that she would have to wait and see, and be patient in order to find it.
Finally, the mother bear turned and Golden Locks followed her into a warm dark cave where a roaring fire blazed and there were scents of roasting meat and rich burning wood. At the fire there were three plates that had been set and the mother bear gestured to them, “Magic involves choice, and so choose and we will see if you are able to be a student or not.” Golden Locks looked at the first plate that was the largest. It had a hunk of meat on it. It had a bone. There were fronds from the evergreen trees and sour juniper berries piled high on it.
She turned up her nose and looked at the second plate. Here there was every flower you can imagine from the forest. Nectar shining in the fire light, berries were piled high, and dabs of honey lined the plate as well. Golden Locks flared her nostrils at the scent of the flowers and thought maybe, but wasn’t yet sure. She then looked at the smallest plate. This plate had a beautiful raven wing on it and its feathers looked glossy. And there were more berries, and roots, and mushrooms that had been found on the forest floor.
Golden Locks looked, shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She didn’t want to fail her first test, but none of these plates had what she would want to eat. Finally, she found the fourth plate in the corner, almost cast aside. She grabbed it, blew the dust off of it, and she began to take a little from the largest plate which belonged to Papa Bear. A few flowers from the second plate belonging to mother bear. And the raven wing, not for eating but for decoration. She liked it from baby brother’s, Baby Bear’s plate. And then she proffered her own plate to Mother Bear and said, “This is what I want. This is just right.”
The Mother Bear smiled and took her deeper into the cave. In the middle of the cave there were three boulders. Mother Bear said, “Magic involves learning how to sit still and then sovereignty. Which boulder is yours?” The first boulder had rough bark all over it, scratchy boughs of pine pricked her when she tried to sit down. The second boulder was covered in furs, more flowers, and lots of moss. It was almost too cushy. She sank into it and couldn’t find any structure to sit against. The third boulder was covered in animal pelts, more feathers found on the forest floor, and it had a good earthy smell. Golden Locks felt comfortable there, moreso than the other two, but it wasn’t her shape. It wasn’t quite right. And so without a boulder, she made a space on the floor and she took one especially fragrant pine bough from the biggest boulder, and she took some of the mosses from the second boulder, and she took some of the feathers from the third, and made her own place to sit—her own throne—and said looking at Papa Bear, “Now this, this is just right.”
And finally Baby Bear, who’s paws were sticky with honey, and whose long pink tongue was busy licking the last drops out of the jar, took Golden Locks’s hand in his own paw and led her back to the deepest reaches of the cave where was it was dark and fetid and humid. And Golden Locks again became afraid once more wondering, have they taken her to the very back and belly of the cave so that they could devour her, just as the village people had promised they would? But no, they had not. Baby Bear showed her three nests—for all creatures make nests—and said, “Magic requires that you know how to rest and dream. Which one?”
Again, Golden Locks looked at all three, and neither were perfectly right for her: not the largest that was Papa Bear’s, not the second that was Mama Bear’s, not the middle one that was Baby Bear’s. Instead, she took an animal’s skin here and she took a fragrant bunch of herbs there. She took mosses for her pillow and she took a warm woolen blanket that someone had found and left on Baby Bear’s bed, one of several. And she made own nest, and she fell asleep, and she dreamed. And she dreamed of a time when her people knew how to talk to the Bear People, and the Deer People, the Bird People, and the Snake People. And she dreamed that time would come once more.
When she awoke, the moon was peering down over her from a crevice in the top of the cave. As she opened her eyes and rubbed the sleep out of them, she saw three sets of ursine eyes peering down at her, blinking slowly. Mama Bear patted her on the head and said, “We will now teach you magic, for you have shown that you know the most important thing.” And so they did.
And years later, when everybody was sure that she had been devoured and left for dead—a pile of bones in the forest somewhere—Golden Locks returned to her village, now a woman known as Headstrong Woman and Heartstrong Woman. And she was known as a great healer and a great dreamer. And although at times people feared her, more people sought her out. And she remembered how to speak to the bears and learned how to speak to the other people of the forest. And though the whole of her village never did, she taught her children and they taught their children. And so it goes so that today, I can teach you how to talk to the various people and how to make magic.
TS: I just love that story, Briana. I just love it. Now I think it’s interesting, Golden Locks is called Headstrong and Heartstrong Woman. And it’s interesting, heartstrong is a quality that . . . We want people to be heartstrong, but headstrong, I mean, that’s often a word that’s used in a derogatory way to refer to someone. “That person’s really headstrong, what a pain in the ass.”
BS:: Absolutely, especially women.
TS: Yes, exactly. Tell me why you need to be headstrong to be a magic maker.
BS: Because people will tell you that you are crazy, because we live in a time . . . I mean, magic is becoming more popular, and in certain places it’s slipping out of its little sacred springs and into the mainstream. But it is still really “out there” for so many people. And so you have to be headstrong. You have to be headstrong to say that the world is sentient, that “there is more to heaven and earth than we find in our philosophy,” as Shakespeare said, to say that there are experiences that may not be able to be rationally explained and may not fit into your nice and neat categories. And yet they are still valid and they’re legitimate. And they actually might be the most important experiences that we have. That takes heart, but that also takes head. And to be discerning. When we talk about magic, we have to talk about illusion. One of the dangers of working in those worlds, and being in both worlds, is it’s easy to get blown off course. I mean that’s easy to have happen in this world, here and now.
We don’t even need to talk about dreams or “out there” experiences. So we have to also be headstrong to stay on course, to remain discerning, to discover what is just right for us, for our own unique and particular needs and our own unique and particular relationships. And that takes clarity of vision. That takes clarity of voice. It takes courage, which is found in the heart, but it also takes wisdom, which we associate with the head, and I would say with the body too. So that’s why I think it’s really important that those who would find their own magic—rediscover, remember their magic—need to be headstrong. Because people are going to tell you that you’re wrong, or it’s nonsense, or it’s crazy—and you’re going to have to tell them, “I’m doing it anyway.”
TS: Now, I want to make sure that our listeners get a couple of key ideas that they can take to start experimenting with this “weaving together of the extraordinary and the ordinary” in their own lives. You talked about the doorway at your own home when you come home. How can people give some instructions, if you will, to take the doorways they go through, whether it’s the doorway at their house or the doorway at their work, and turn it into a living-in-two-worlds type of meaningful passage instead of just, OK, I’m home, throwing my shoes down.
BS: Yes, yes, yes. Great question. And this is a really good place to start because doors, of course, are things that we all go through. So start by looking at your door, right? Sounds pretty obvious, but this is the thing you do. Begin by looking the door that you go through when you leave your house every day. So for some people that’s your front door and for other people that might be a side door, it might be the door that goes out to your garage, whatever door it is, right? Begin there. And just look at that door, and look at the color, look at the shape, look at what is around it. Can you access it easily, or is there trash? And are there a ton of shoes piled up by the door? I have two boys and so often in front of our door there’s a bunch of sports equipment from eight different sports and I didn’t know that my child played half of them. So look at what is actually around your door, on the outside of your door and under plants. If there are plants, are they alive or are they dead?
I’m always so surprised—at myself included—to see that sometimes there will be a dead plant by the door for a week and nobody moves it. OK guys. So just begin by looking at your door and ask, “How does this door make me feel?” Like, “Do I like the color of it? Do I like the shape of it? Would I like to have something around it or would I like to have something maybe rearranged, so that it doesn’t feel so cluttered when I go outside of the door? How does the outside of the door make me feel? Does it need a new coat of paint and are the address numbers dingy? Do they need to be polished so that the numbers of the apartment or the home can be seen? Are the plants, if there are plants, are they thriving? If there aren’t plants, would I like there to be plants?” Whatever is around your door. Is there trash? Is there yesterday’s laundry basket? Is there the cat’s scratching post, and every time that you go out the door, the cat snags you and scratches your arm. Just think about it really practically.
And I know that often when we start down this path, the question obviously is, “What does this has to do with magic?” Well, this has everything to do with magic, right? Because of the way that your entrance makes you feel, your first impressions, you are taking those in whether you consciously know it or not. If you look at your door, and your door is painted red, and you hate the color red, then what is happening every time you go through that door? If your door has no ornamentation on it and you love ornamentation, and it’s super plain, how do you feel every time you go through that? That’s not your door. It hasn’t been made your door.
And so sometimes look at it and observe, “What would I change if I wanted to change something?” I like starting with the door because usually any changes you want to do are pretty small and pretty manageable from a cost perspective as well. If you really wanted to get a hinge, you might look at your door and say, “I want a different kind of door. I want a farmhouse door that has a top and bottom that open separately.” Or, “I want a window in my door.” But that’s getting really fancy. We can just start with color and what’s around it. What would I like to have around it, what color would I like it to be? On my door knobs, I have tassles because they are called upon in many different traditions as talismans of luck and good fortune. So when I turn that knob to go outside, I’m activating that particular talisman.
So just taking the notes, right? You can talk. And if you live with somebody and they’re open to it, you can talk with them to see like, “How do you feel about the door?” And go from there or you can journal about it, “These are my impressions of my door.” And then from there, ask yourself, “What would make this door more present for me? What would deepen my relationship with this door? What do I need?” And think about when you go through that door in the morning when you leave, and in the evening when you return, what needs to be present for you?
I used as an example, earlier in our call, one of the main things we use my door for, is my eight-year-old comes home from school, and comes home from school through our front door. And school is always for an eight-year-old . . . Worlds are created and destroyed in the school that has an eight-year-old. It’s very intense. And I have a corner shelf where all of his papers go, because part of what I need is for our home to be organized. And then I have an incense by a door. I usually have fresh flowers by my door to remind everyone to focus on beauty and to bring beauty into that act of coming through the door.
We take our shoes off when we come through the door. We don’t want to track the day literally and metaphysically through the home. And so we have a place to put our shoes. Those are some of the things I have—and an Archangel Michael packet, the old New Orleans’ talisman that hangs above my door as blessing and protection for my family. Our doors and our windows, if you look around the world, they’re the entrances to our home. So they’re very precious and they usually are blessed and they’re protected in some way.
After you do that and you make whatever changes you want to make—and by the way, now you’re making magic, right? You’re taking something that you weren’t very conscious of before and you’re developing a real relationship with it. So you’re there. There you have it. Now you can say it, “I do magic, bam!” And then if you want to take it a step further, you can take an oil. An olive oil is a very traditional . . . Olive oil has been used for blessing work since we’ve had olive oil; it’s been used forever. You can anoint the four corners of your door and the center of your door that’s called a five spot pattern or a quincunx pattern, sometimes is what it’s called. And it’s the instant old pattern you see repeated over and over again.
And as you do that, just breathe in a blessing on your home and everyone who lives within it, breathe in a blessing on yourself going through that door every day. And you might want to say words out loud or you might want to simply hold that intention and that thought in your heart, in your mind, in your body as you do it. Maybe you burn a little bit of incense or maybe you spray your favorite fragrance around the door to seal that work. And then you go about your everyday life of going through and coming back into your now-extraordinary door.
TS: I love it. Now, I want you to teach us how to make magic in another everyday example. All of us drink water, hopefully, many times a day.
BS: Yes.
TS: You describe how water is a liminal element. Help me know how I can make drinking a glass of water an extraordinary experience.
BS: So when I was first learning how to do active imagination work, journeying work, meditative work, my family members told me, “You have to make sure that you drink plenty of water.” And especially after we would do work like this. And I always thought that was really curious. So in some way, a very cursory glance, that very telling myth shows us that water is this magical substance that goes wherever it wants to, basically. And it goes between the worlds. And often the way from the world here and now to the isle of the blessed, or to the heavens, or to the next phase of life involves water, right? Whether you’re talking about the Arthurian legends, or the river Lethe from ancient Greek myth, the beautiful river that flows from Shiva’s hair, as crescent moon flows from his hair, the Ganges. So, we have these magical waters all over the world. And we drink water. Hopefully we are all drinking water.
So in magic and in various mystical traditions, we talk a lot about cleansing, and there are sacred bathing rites, and there are all kinds of ways to work with water to cleanse us now. I’m from San Antonio; half my family is Catholic. So the way that this shows up in my family on an everyday basis is the use of holy water, right? And some little holy . . . Sprinkle a little holy water on the kids before they go off to school. And this is something that all of my family members on the Catholic side did as just a matter of course. And we have some beautiful grottos here in San Antonio where people go and, I mean, they fill up milk jugs full of holy water to take back to your home to bless your home and bless your family.
So we don’t all do that, but we all do hopefully, like you said, Tami, drink water. And when we drink water, what we’re doing is we’re actually giving our internal selves a cleansing. So you can see the water that you drink as rivers that are flowing through your body, they’re flowing around your organs that are cleaning you literally from the inside out. The water is removing any impurities that you’ve taken in. And so yes, there are impurities in food we eat or in the air that we breathe, but it’s more than that, right? It’s the impurity that landed in your heart when you had those hard words with your lover, or it’s the little piece of debris that’s there when your coworker said that critical thing about you that you feel is just totally not fair and off base, or it’s the remains of not sleeping well last night and being really tired, and still having eight hours to go before your day is over.
So when we drink water, we can put ourselves in that frame of mind and understand what’s actually happening. What’s happening on an extraordinary level and on a magical level is that we’re performing a cleansing or a saining, is what the Celts would call it, a blessing for ourselves. And we’re removing what does not need to be held on to by letting these internal rivers wash it away. So it takes a very simple act and then folds it into this profound thing that often I find has the practical result of getting everyone to drink more water.
TS: One more thing, Briana, that talk to you about, and then I’m going to have you conclude our conversation with reading a little excerpt from Making Magic that I just love. But here’s the last thing I want to talk to you about. You write that we can bring a magical perspective to time. And I think this is so important to me because here at Sounds True, I work with people. Everybody’s like, when we check in with each other, what’s my problem? I just don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough time, too much to do, not enough time. And here you write in Making Magic, “You’ll discover that there is after all, more than enough time for what you need to do in this life. Time is a super-abundant resource. We’re living in a state of poverty amid riches.” So help me understand how time is a super-abundant resource, especially for all those people who feel like they don’t have enough time.
BS: Yes. Which is everyone, which is absolutely everyone. I thought that this was the most radical chapter in the book. Everybody else will think that it’s other chapters about—here I am making claims about magic—but I thought that this claim about time, which is really pretty radical and edgy. So what happens when we really are rooted in both worlds, what we start to discover is that our priorities start to shift, and what really matters, and what really calls us and needs to be done, starts to change and starts to shift. And so it doesn’t mean that we get rid of our daily priorities. It doesn’t mean that we change them, or we neglect them, or we don’t do something that we say that we’re going to do. But what it does mean is that we start to—and this is kind of weird, but it really does happen—we start to work more efficiently.
And I think that happens for a lot of reasons. I think it happens because we’re in more alignment with our energy. We’re more aware of not just our discursive surface thoughts, but our deeper thoughts, our deeper concerns. We’re aware of the space and energy that we carry into something, and so we can start to organize ourselves better. Like we can know, “I’m really anxious about this. So this is not the best time to try to write this email where I have to ask my boss for a raise, because I’m really anxious about this other thing. I’m going to table that and instead I’m going to take this nervous energy and I am going to make dinner with it. And I’m going to ground myself by handling vegetables and handling roots. And I’m going to drink a glass of water. And I’m going to bless the food that I’m making so that it nourishes the family.”
And then, lo and behold, after dinner is made, you often have the energy and the clarity of mind to write that email that you probably would have spent way too long trying to write and then have to do it over again. So that’s one way that we find that there’s a super-abundance of time. Another way that we find it is that we start to pay attention to how little things can open up into a much more vast territory than what we originally thought. The same thing is true for a minute, or an hour, or half an hour, right? All of a sudden these allotments of time that are measured by the clock, they have the ability to become much fuller and much broader. And what we often find is that, and I think that what many of the Eastern traditions really show beautifully, is that by taking a few minutes to be still and to quiet that sense of busyness, we actually will create more time for ourselves. We will be able to get more accomplished in the time that we have and do it well.
And the other thing that happens is that we look at what we’ve signed up for and we’re discerning, like Golden Locks. We’re looking for what is just right. And we recognize, “These three things that I signed up for are not just right, and they are not ride-or-die situations, and I am not going to keep doing them. I’m going to say no. Instead of going to that regimented hour-long exercise class, I’m going to go for a walk in my neighborhood for half an hour and I’m going to use the other half-hour to journal.” So we start to make better decisions about the ways that we relate to our times. And it stops being a thing we have or that we need and it starts being another part of our world that we’re in relationship with.
TS: Yes. It seems like sometimes when people have this notion that there’s not enough time, they’re judging their life from the outside. Like, “I’m X age, I should have already done it. Now there’s not enough time.” There’s some external thing. They’re not really coming from the inside out.
BS: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. Yes, I mean there’s all kinds of external judgments that we make, “Where am I supposed to be?” Is often a question that I encounter and it’s like magic, right? It’s like, define magic, define where you’re supposed to be. Nobody gets to define that for you. You define that for yourself.
TS: Briana, read our listeners the postlude of Making Magic.
BS: Yes, let me do that. Alright.
Somewhere in the world right now, you are remembering your very own wild magic. Striving alongside it, you will find that you had discovered a set of instructions after all. They will guide you in creating rituals, fostering transformation, coming into right relationship with your uncharted soul soil. Soil that has up until this point remained unseen, hearing what has up until this point remained unheard, and giving voice to that which has been voiceless. They are the signposts for making magic. Dream true. Listen to your dreams. Ask a question, seek an answer, be purposeful. Bring an offering. Discern with care who is worth listening to. Go into the wild. Show kindness to strangers. Accept that the journey will take as much time as it takes. Do not rush. Do not dwell. Pay attention. Find the cave. Ford the river. Be willing to wait for what is worthwhile. Sit by the fire. Make it your own. Stay as long as it takes. Lust, love, tell stories. Say thank you. Know your true name. Remember what matters. Live life so that others can remember, too. Dare to speak to bears.
TS: Dare to speak to bears, Briana Saussy.
BS: Dare to speak to bears.
TS: I just loved talking with you so much and I love your new book, Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary. Thank you so much for your courage and your beautiful, beautiful writing, really. Thank you so much.
BS: Thank you so much, Tami. Thank you very, very much.
TS: And thanks everyone for listening. Go out and make some magic—your own personal magic. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
