This year we created a Dead Letter Office so that we can communicate with the dead. I know, it sounds spooky, occult...taboo. I can even imagine someone thinking, "Who in their right mind would teach a child to do that?" When in fact, it was my children who taught me how to do it. Like all great inventions it came from necessity. Baanko's desire to talk to her ancestors was a natural result of her time spent at our family ancestor altar. She had heard funny, inspiring, sometimes unbelievable stories. She had touched vintage tea cups and stones from grave sites far away. She had spent hours looking at crumbling black and white photographs. So it was no surprise when she wanted to tell her grandpa, a man whom she would never meet in person, a few things. As I processed the request she almost instantaneously offered the solution: "Maybe I could write a letter to him?"
And as it often does, her little idea expanded into an entire crafternoon.
In the basement we found the goose feathers that we gathered last May. They were seasoned and dry.
Following the natural curve of the feather we sliced a tip and cleaned out the shaft.
You already know our policy on glitter making things feel even more magical.
We prepared paper that evoked feelings of days gone by.
And of course, magical ink. We chose a coffee base and read up on recipes for dragon's blood and other magical inks.
We were ready to get to work on fulfilling a wish: for our ancestors to know how much we still care for them and appreciate the lives that they lived.
My addition to the altar was a vintage Royal typewriter that I've had since I was my daughter's age. It is impossibly heavy which makes its transport, even from one room of the house to another, an event. Placing it down is like a dinosaurs foot impacting the earth. Heavy with the accumulation of all of the history that it has helped to document it is incredibly grounding for me. It's an artifact. It commands respect, I see that in my children's slow approach and exaggerated "whoa". It is a natural choice for connecting with the past.
I realize that although no seance is necessary a medium certainly is and that medium should be well chosen since it has a profound affect on the very message that it conveys. The scratch of the quill pen against thick rough paper. Errant drops of coffee and dragon blood scented ink on fingers that are rhythmically dipping to deliver a precious few words at a time. The smell of sulfur followed by melted sealing wax. The slow extension of long metal arms imprinting one inky letter at a time at the expense of one strong, and tiring push of a finger after the next. These are mediums of communication that allow for magic to happen. They remind us that our words have force and that meaningful communication takes time and effort. They command all of our senses to be present as they move at a different pace. They slow us, like a special effect in a movie, to show us how important this very moment is. These mediums truly are the message, as Marshall McCluhan suggested, and they are saying, "Be here now."
Which, come to think of it, is what a medium is commanding in a seance in traditional necromancy. Except the command is made of the deceased to join the living to offer insights, messages, perhaps even to portend the future. In our magical workings we are commanding only ourselves, our full selves, to be here now. In fact, the longer we do magic at the Warthogs School the more I am convinced we are really one trick witches and wizards. We have one spell that we are ever casting, or more accurately ever under the influence of - the magic of the present moment. Yes, our magic is simple but definitely not easy and I am confident it could take an entire lifetime to master this one power. For us, we are not interested in the supernatural because we've found, again and again, that the best magic seems to be ever afoot in the natural world all around us. If only, we are full present, in the moment, to experience it.
Which Baanko and I did at the tail/tale end of our crafternoon. Shortly after placing her letter on the altar we noticed three mule deers casually walking down our sidewalk. We watched in wonder. It was a wonder for us recent rural dwellers that even close to town we could count on deer visitations. We wondered if they could sense things we could not including if any of our ancestors were close by, or if they might be our ancestors in another form. We wondered about the mystery of life and death. We read a letter written by my now deceased cousin about tracking, loving, and hunting deer. We thanked them all, animal and ancestor, for keeping us awake while we are alive.
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