In the early 1980s, right around the time I was beginning to explore witchcraft, I read a book that transformed the way I viewed the world and All That Is. Was it Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon? Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance?
Nope.
It was Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters, an exploration (in laypeople’s terms) of quantum physics using metaphorical language taken from Eastern philosophies and spiritualities. Winner of the 1980 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Zukav’s text reinforced for me the idea that energy not only transmits but transmutes—energies are always present, always passing from one or more forms to and through another and/or several others, seen and/or unseen.
This is hardly a revolutionary concept these days, but back then it was a game changer. A worldview changer, or at least it was for me as a nascent witchling.
Science Daily tells us:
Energy refers to a concept that can be paraphrased as “the potential for causing changes”, and therefore one can say that energy is the cause of any change. […] Energy is a conserved quantity, meaning that it cannot be created or destroyed, but only converted from one form into another. […] Thus, the total energy of the universe always remains constant.
(excerpted from Wikipedia via Science Daily)
Yet while the total energy of the Universe remains constant, the ways we live and move and have our being within it do not. I’ve thought about this a lot, and written a meditation on the concept of energies that pass through and around us and how we interact with them, either by choice or otherwise.
Whether you are Witch or Pagan, whether you work with a deity (or deities) or not, it highly probable you have some sort of philosophy about the energy exchanges you engage in as you go about your day.
How does your mindfulness about the energetic exchanges you are making impact those exchanges? We’re not always in charge—much as we’d like to be—how does the way you receive energies affect their effect on you? If we block or deflect, where does that bounced-around energy really go?
As usual, I don’t have any answers to any of these questions, but even so I think they’re worth pondering as we each try to figure out how our own little corners of the Universe work and how we manifest, or convert, our energies during our dances with the great All That Is.
You can hear more of The Corner Crone during her Moments For Meditation on KPPR Pure Pagan Radio on TuneIn or on YouTube. Follow her on Twitter and on Instagram.
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