Image descriptiong: green background with multicolor leaves swirling in a spiral toward the center of the page. Words follow the edge of the swirl and say “I am learning to love all of my cycles. Repetition is not failure. Seasons change and return, never quite the same.”

At the age of 31, I’m slowly working my way through a crisis of faith. When I was a kid, in the hollow point between being told fairies and Santa Claus aren’t real and losing all hope in magic, my older sibling brought home a book about witchcraft from a trip to Salem Massachusetts. This book looked me in the eye and then uprooted everything I thought I had to believe. Suddenly I could transmute all of my fantastical imaginings of childhood into spirits that live in everything. I could believe that when my vision blurred at the edges there was a ghost cat weaving its way around my ankles and when I got dizzy it was just a surge of energy through my body. I wore a pentacle every day and talked to trees. I thanked the wind for the ways it kissed my cheeks when I was sad. I danced with the ocean waves and cried for the tiniest pains I knew our world experienced.

Over the last couple years especially, I lost hope in magic. With the surge of fake news and the focus on not being tricked into believing lies, I pushed away any and all spiritual beliefs. If I couldn’t completely confirm it then I couldn’t believe in it. I was scared to look uneducated or ignorant. I couldn’t even consider it. I wouldn’t be duped into spending money on something someone else had judged as worthless. I wanted to be taken seriously because the world was in serious crisis.

Within that, I did a lot of learning and unlearning I am so grateful for. I unpacked my understandings of colonialism and practiced being anti-racist. I read and researched, and recognized the systems that have been holding people back for lifetimes. As I pulled at my white privilege blinders and recognized my trans-ness and looked at the world with a more critical lens, I didn’t understand how anyone could believe in magic in this world. With systems that set people up to fail, how could I believe that anything could come true, that all I needed was available to me because there are people in the world who don’t have everything they need, and they don’t deserve that.

I know myself, now that my analytical brain is activated, I need to find something to believe again. I still hold witchcraft and paganism as my core set of beliefs, but I misplaced my favorite pentacle of all time years ago and haven’t gotten a new one yet. And my witchcraft is very low key. It’s stayed stubbornly at my center no matter how much my faith falters, I can’t fight the feeling of this being right. Whether I believe it or not, the act of doing it is nourishing. I meditate, I put cardamom in my coffee and say a prayer, I give thanks to the universe. But I’m trying to find something to grab on to. Something to believe.

Yesterday, while scrolling through Netflix, I got stuck on a documentary trailer about theoretical physics and they talked about the concept that based on what we believe to be true, there should be an uncountable amount of universes that contain nearly exactly the same outcomes as are happening here, with minor differences. According to them, multiple universes likely do exist. Universes that are both the same and different from ours.

That brings us to the thought that started my writing today… What if storytelling isn’t actually completely about us, in this universe. What if the act of storytelling is collaborating with the universe. What if we are just recounting memories of the universe that are asking to be told?

I imagine in much the same way I remember, my mind is full of fog and I get flashes of the imagery, like a scared animal catching only the most important details, or what it thinks is important. And when I am immersed in a story, it almost feels like I am in fact remembering it. That’s part of why the writing process is so frustrating to me sometimes, because the story feels like it already exists. I just have to find the truth of it in the remnants left behind in my memory. There’s a voice in my head every time I get confused or caught up that seems to whisper you should know this! You already know this! Don’t you already know this?

Its not the feeling of wanting to be closer to being done, of feeling like I’m behind, although that’s present too. Sometimes it feels like I’m chasing the story. But that’s not the truth. The truth is that the story is a scared child. They are asking for their story to be told, but slow to trust. I am sitting down by the fire I built for us every day and listening to them, connecting with them, seeing them. And every time we do this it can get a little bit easier. And some days it gets harder again. Some days the blackberries we pick are sour and the wood is wet so the fire sputters out, we shiver together and don’t say much except that I will come back tomorrow to try again.

It’s not the frantic running that gets me where I need to be. It’s the deliberate measured steps. It’s the creating a safe place to land. It’s building the fire so that you and everyone you need help from can feel warm and cared for while with you. It’s a deep inner listening. And it’s showing up in the ways that you can as often as you can.

So maybe the theoretical physicists are right. Maybe there are uncountable versions of me out there in the universe. And if that’s true, maybe this world that I’m creating is true somewhere in the universe too. Maybe this is someone’s story. Maybe this child stepping into the firelight with me actually exists somewhere out there. What if we are connecting to that reality to tell their stories. What if out there in another reality, someone is telling my story and it is helping heal someone’s heart too. That doesn’t fix anything here in the short term. That doesn’t take a oppressive system and overturn it. But it does give me something to believe in. I may not be able to solve the injustices of the world no matter how many protests I attend or how much mutual aid I contribute, but if there’s a story the universe is asking be told, I can tell it, and that feels like something small and wondrous.

Improbable? Oh hell yes. Possible? Maybe? But it feels right and I love to listen to that feeling.