The magician let a long sigh, sat back and looked at the cards in silence. Only one card left, his own card. It was transparent.
-The time has come, I guess – said the magician, in a low voice, his gaze filled with sorrow.
Yes – I said – The time has come to enter the card. You did a great job.
-I wanted to keep playing with the cards.
It’s not about what you want – I continued – It is about what it enfolds. You are not the master of Imagination. You are just a servant, a vessel, a card. We all are.
-But I am the magician! – he retorted – I came up with the cards.
No, you didn’t. I used your Card to come up with the rest of the Cards.
-You used me! You monster! – the magician stood up and looked at me, with murderous intent. He brandished his rod against me. He fired an electric bolt. But the electricity just covered the dark room of the Tower. And the only Door out was now charged with deadly electricity.
You understand what you did.
The magician, blinded by rage, took all the cards and threw them into the Fire. But the Cards extinguished that fire and became even more powerful. The magician’s clothes started to burn. He screamed. He took out his clothes. Naked, his pale, old, wrinkled skin.
You understand what you did.
He then drew a pentagram on the floor, stood at the center and chanted an incantation. And a storm of storms broke out. Wind and Rain. Water and air. And soon, the roof of the tower collapsed. A spiraling whirlpool. Everything, the books, the cards, the manuscripts and the magician Himself, went into the whirlpool. He opened his arms, desperately, and made another incantation. An earthquake. The earth shattered, the Tower collapsed. Everything in ruins, but the Cards. Now, shining with a wonderful, celestial light.
I approached the ruins, clad in my green tunic. No wand, no rod. Just my bare hands. I stopped in front of the mountain of rubble. For a moment, I was tempted to join my hands in prayer, but I shook my head.
You understand what you did.
And in the wind, the last breath of the magician’s wind, I could hear his voice. And in his voice, there was a joy and a liberation.
I understand. The Card is yours.
No, this is your Card. Own it. I am not the Magician.
I am the Master of Cards.
And I took the card and held it against the Wind.
And the Magician understood.
And got into the Card.
A summer shower, lukewarm rain. I am the Wanderer, the Master of Cards. I am walking the green hills that are now breathing with life, frogs, clay. I don’t have anywhere to go, and that is a huge relief. I have accepted my wandering nature, that I must walk, fly, swim. Explore. The inner worlds, the outer worlds. Walking barefoot, I feel a lightness upon my being. The wet grass under my feet, the damping sound of my subtle steps. There are certain places in this world. Places that are still sacred, but forgotten. And now I start to understand. Those are not the places of a certain religion, of a certain sect, of a certain Order. Those are MY sacred places. They belong to the Cards. I am not separate from the cards, from all those beings within. I am just another Card. The Master of Cards. The Whisperer of Spirits. The madman that talks to the invisible. Is it appropriate to talk about being “The Master of Spirits”?. We are not masters of spirits. Spirits are part of us. I am also a spirit of one of those mirrors of mine. And I noticed that those cards had one thing in common: they were all wanderers.
And it occurred to me that, perhaps, they could also meet each other.
Writing stories is like opening Portals. The Cards are also Portals. You get in there, and you are swept by a story. You don’t write stories. You become them. You are possessed by them. The Cards are just a medium, a visual representation for something that runs much deeper. They are just convenient. Tarot is convenient. But Tarot is not the stories, the divination Itself. The same with my story cards. They are fixed, because we need to have an ordering, structuring model so that we can attempt to make sense of all this Chaos. But this is an illusion. Cards are shape-shifters. You can look at the same card, in a thousand different angles, and you’ll always see something different. But the essence remains the same.
The King, The Builder, The Lover, the Magician, the Traveler. The Sage, the Artist. The Child, the Free Man. The Rebel.
And the Master of Cards.
The Explorer of the Soul.
Once I had come up with the cards, I took them all to the Center of the Forest. The Navel of my Universe. There, there lies a blue fire. And a Cauldron.
And I threw all the Cards into the Cauldron. And as they burned, from the blue smoke a blue-haired girl manifested. And we danced and sang, and made love to each other, for six days and six nights, until the Work was done.
And when the work was done, the girl took a Stone from the depths of the Cauldron, kissed my forehead. And then, she placed the stone between my eyes. And it shined with intense blue light. And disappeared from mortal eyes.
But it keeps shining for me and for her, at all times.
So what was the point of the Cards, if I had to burn them into the fire? It could seem pointless. But it is far from it. It is the same process as the monks drawing a mandala for days. When they finish their work, they delete and destroy the mandala in seconds. The Creation leads to detachment. The Magician insists in becoming the Lord of the Tower. The tower must be destroyed. The Cards, burned. And allow the worlds to unfold, as they want to unfold.
Because in this, is where lies true creativity.
True magic.
The magic of the Storyteller.
It is all about the Journey, and never about the goal. Once we have expressed what we needed to express, you are now free to back away from it, detach from it, forget about it. Because you planted the Seed and the Seed shall grow and give fruit. You don’t wait for the harvest to grow, you don’t sit in front of the field, and wait for it to germinate. You walk away knowing, that the Harvest is Done. And that it will bear fruit, in due time.
At that time, I was trying to control my stories all the time, I was trying hard to figure out the archetypes behind them, the energies, their essence. And I wanted to take hold of them, to possess them. But that is not how it works. When you try to “possess” a story, its essence escapes and you are only left with a corpse, with a superficial, mediocre creation. It goes against the flow. It’s like water: if you try to grasp it, if you try to take it by force, it will escape from your hands. Instead, you become the container of the water, and thus, it stays in your hand. And the more it says in your hand, the more you let it be, the more fertile it becomes.