My First Magic Teacher

I took the exit off the parkway to avoid the traffic, quickly discovering everybody else had the same idea.

Closed streets, dead ends, the mass of cars seeking to escape the gridlock by just keeping moving.

A turn here, a turn there and I found myself at a park had not thought about or visited in years.

The last time was long ago, a memorial service where the ashes were scattered to the air and water.

I parked the car, followed the trail along the rocks, the gazebo on the cliff overlooking the water.

Consciously I had not thought about her since that day, but unconsciously she was the one who gave me a map of an inner architecture.

One that I would now call magic, but for many years after I had no name for it.

She was my first magic teacher.

My parents and academic advisors had no idea what to do with me in school as my grades and studies were all over the place. Some subjects were solid A, while others a passing C, there was no pattern so the system and my parents gave up on me.

Certainly part of it was I preferred reading my science fiction books, but it was *how* I learned versus how the material was presented. I had to unlock myself, some years later after graduation, and to late after all my formal education that I learn by immersion and by doing.

Not memorization or tests.

I don’t know how I wound up in the classes I did, but the first class with her was mythology in the Western world. For that academic year we studied the Gods, explored the tragedies, and immersed ourselves in the myths.  

She instructed through action, assigning various Gods any Heroes to play in class as we read and acted out the stories.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton became the map.

For forty five minutes each day between the pages of that book and the classroom something else was brought to life, a something of possibility that she made possible.

Thank you.