THE MAGICIANS IN HIDING (Keirah Vey | Tmple of Aethral Vision | Annual Gathering of Creationaries)

I thought I’d forgotten this.

But last night beneath the Star Grove, when the sky opened just enough to show us the old constellations, I remembered.

Not the facts, really.

The feeling.

That ache I used to carry while I was creating.

That quiet desperation to be seen by the very structures that never truly saw me.

That strange exhaustion that came after the praise, when the applause faded and the doubt returned.

Maybe you felt it too.

We were the artists.

Brilliant, precise, prolific.

We knew how to deliver.

How to fill the brief.

How to shape ourselves into what the knowers celebrated.

And the knowers loved us, until they didn’t.

Until we changed.

Looking back, I see it so clearly now.

We weren’t just making art.

We were trying to earn something we already had.

Not from our communities, but from the appointed ones.

The ones feeling entitled to be in dominion over our creations.

The ones who had handed themselves the role of knowers.

We chased their nods like they were magick.

But they weren’t.

The real Magick was the thing we were trained not to trust.

And trained is the right word.

We were indoctrinated, systematically, through a mind-altering process we were all subjected to as children in confined spaces, infiltrating doubt of our Inner Knowing into our young, forming brains.

It wasn’t learning.

It was forgetting.

They gave us names for our instincts, “talent,” “potential,” “promise”, and then built entire institutions around managing those names.

They taught us how to measure beauty, how to justify emotion, how to carve our visions down until they could be critiqued.

They told us what mattered and what needed to be dismissed.

And we believed them.

But we never stopped knowing.

Even when we doubted ourselves, even when the work became our life line to survival, something still lived beneath it all.

A way of doing things you’d never been taught.

A gesture your body made before you could name the impulse.

The unbearable sensation that you were more than you’d been told, but not knowing how to prove it. Or to who, for that matter.

That was the fire.

Still burning.

Still intact.

And then, something shifted.

Not all at once.

Not dramatically.

It began when we stopped asking.

When we picked up the brush or pen or clay without checking for permission.

When we stopped performing and started listening.

Inside.

And that’s when it all came rushing back.

Our inner living Templates.

The worlds.

The memory that we hadn’t lost the Magick, just the belief that we could trust it.

We changed.

And so did the work.

It wasn’t just art anymore, it was a carrier.

A portal.

A Living Creation.

People didn’t just admire it.

They were moved by it.

Altered by it.

Realigned.

And here’s what I know now:

We never needed their language.

We never needed their metrics.

We were never supposed to fit inside the enforced frames they handed us.

We weren’t performers.

We were rememberers.

We were keepers.

Full of Magick, that is now in full use.

Uninhibited.

Unrestricted.

And maybe; if you’re here, if you’re still reading, you feel your Magick stirring too..

There’s something waiting inside you.

Follow it, and the map will make itself known.