MAGIC | From Listening to Living

Author’s Note

This piece is a threshold marker—a pause to name a crossing already underway for bigger than the new year.
Not a conclusion. Not a declaration.
Simply a moment to acknowledge what has shifted, and what now feels possible to carry forward with care.

From Spark to Steps, From Steps to Self, From Self to Service

The years have changed how I understand imagination.

It didn’t arrive as a crisis or a reinvention. It came quietly—as a realization that there were inner needs I could no longer override, and no clean roadmap yet for how to honor them. What I felt first wasn’t certainty. It was permission. Permission to imagine a life that hadn’t learned its steps yet.

Only later did I recognize that year—2024—as my year of Magical Thinking. Not believing thoughts alone could shape reality, but allowing myself to name truths I could no longer ignore. The imagination wasn’t wrong. It was early.

2025 became my year of Magical Doingness. Not big declarations or dramatic exits, but the unglamorous work of dissolving old containers—routines, relationships, workloads, habits of self-abandonment—and rebuilding daily life so the intuition of the year before could actually live somewhere. Structure came online. The body followed.

And 2026 and beyond feels like Magical Beingness: the era where magic is no longer assumed as complete, but practiced. Embodied. Witnessed. Given outward—to clients, to community, to creative work, to human moments that ask for presence more than polish.

This wasn’t regret about imagining.
This was imagination staying long enough to become inhabitable.

Where I Feel Magic Most Reliably

These aren’t aspirations.
They’re places I return to—moments where intuition and structure stop competing and start cooperating. They move in a sequence —beginning in the body, sharpening perception, integrating through language, and finally offering themselves outward in service.

1. Floating

Whether floating in water or suspended between trees, there’s a moment when the body remembers itself before definition. No edges. No proof required.

Presence replaces decoding.
A devotional reset—without argument, without performance.

2. Holding the Camera

With a camera in my hands, thought drops away. My eye finds relationships before language gets involved—space, adjacency, framing. When the shutter clicks, it isn’t chasing meaning. It’s recognizing it.

The world reveals itself back more clearly.
That clarity feels trustworthy.

3. Writing at 5AM

At dawn—when the house is still dark and the world hasn’t started asking questions yet—I sit at the keyboard and let words arrive without forcing them to perform. Silence invites them. Thought, intuition, and being thread together naturally.

Nothing is trying to sound bigger than it is.
The writing feels honest because it’s early enough to still be true.

4. Listening, Then Serving

(Right brain tuning, followed by left brain action)

When I’m sitting or standing with someone—often over coffee, sometimes inside a quiet, empty house—I begin by listening. Not just to what they say, but to what’s underneath it. I listen to the pauses, the hesitations, the things they circle without naming.
What I’m really listening for is recognition—seeing what’s already present without rushing to explain or improve it.

I listen to the house too: how it holds light, where it exhales, what it’s asking for.

Somewhere in that shared stillness, recognition arrives. I hear what hasn’t been said yet—the longing beneath the logistics, the fear beneath the plan. When that clarity settles, my work becomes translation: turning instinct into steps, intuition into sequence, so that truth and reality can walk forward together.

The imagined world becomes one they can actually enter.

That’s where my work feels like love.
Not in wishing—but in recognizing what’s already here, and serving it carefully as it takes form.Thinking, Doing, Being — A Non-Competitive Alignment

Thinking, Doing, Being — A Non-Competitive Alignment

Science notices pieces of this—the mind’s patterns, the way expectation shapes action.
It’s helpful. It’s not the whole story.

What matters more is simpler:

Thinking doesn’t finish creation.
Being carries it forward.

The brain maps structure.
The heart maps meaning.
The self performs the crossing—then offers it outward through service, listening, witnessing, and building bridges that others can walk across.

Magic doesn’t disappear when it becomes practical.
It becomes trustworthy.

I use the word magic because I don’t have a better word for what happens when the inner argument quiets — when the self stops overriding itself, and life begins to move with a trustworthy coherence.

Where I’m Walking Toward

I want my life to feel aligned—not as theory, but in practice.

To listen more than prove.
To build what I can actually carry.
To witness without bargaining.
To offer what I’ve learned outward—not as certainty, but as presence.

Not because imagination guaranteed arrival,
but because it invited becoming.

Imagination ignited the spark.
Action built the steps.
Beingness carries it forward.
And service becomes the proof.

If I can live this way,
I can greet the years ahead without regret.

Happy New Year.