The Questions That Started It All

An excerpt from Letting Magic In!

Photograph by me of my makeshift desk in Carmel

In 2016, I gave myself a week-long writing retreat in Carmel, California.

Each day I’d set up my makeshift desk on a picnic table in the garden. The air was rich with rosemary, sharp with sea salt. Other scents ghosted through my mind—black tea and rose geranium oil, the honey-sweet smell of hot wax, the musk of manure. As I typed, memories of a year I’d spent in Ireland gently draped themselves over the California landscape.

I have no photos from my time in Ireland. My teacher—an herbalist and self-described witch—had told us to put our cameras away and be present in the moment. So instead, my nose took snapshots: the grassy smell of drying nettles, the unexpected citrus snap of clary sage crushed carelessly underfoot. As I was clicking at my keyboard in Carmel, the scents of Ireland became scenes. Scenes became chapters. A through-line began to appear and, along with it, a hopeful thought: maybe, just maybe, I’ve begun drafting a book.

In the evenings, the seven women on retreat would come together, gathering by the fire to read aloud from our day’s work. Afterward, my roommate and I would sleepily climb the stairs to our room on the second floor. Sliding open the glass door, I’d step out onto the balcony. Below, the driveway twisted down through sea pines and cedar. The moon’s trail rippled as the Pacific stretched and sighed in the distance. Each night my roommate and I would take full advantage of this enchantment, using it to set an intention for our dreams.

One night, midweek, I sat on my single bed, grounding into my feet and stretching through my crown. On the nightstand, I’d already placed an open notebook and pen as invitations to my subconscious. Breathing in and out, I settled. My mind wandered to the writing I’d been doing. It was beginning to feel like the start of a memoir. What should the title be? I mused. Giving in to whimsy, I used that thought to set my intention.

I awoke to seabirds carousing beyond the balcony. Vaguely, I remembered scrawling something in the dark hours before dawn. Was that a memory? A dream? I felt around for my spiral-bound notebook, which had fallen to the floor. As I leaned over the edge of the bed to retrieve it, I saw words dashed off in blue ink:

Letting Magic In.

Letting Magic In. . . .

In the years since the Carmel retreat, I’ve rolled these words on my tongue, testing the taste of them. I’ve asked: What exactly is magic? What do I mean by magic?

This is not a new question for me, but instead one I’ve been pondering in one form or another since I was young. My answer usually revolves around feelings for which I can’t find language: What is the word for craving a relationship with the earth, plants, rocks, and stars? What do you call someone who finds their spirit sparked by these connections, whose concept of the sacred is altered by the scent of jasmine in bloom or the deep indigo of a sky awaiting nightfall?

We’re taught that doctors know our bodies and clergy know our souls. But what if you’re a person seeking to understand both for yourself without an intermediary? What is the word for these feelings and the person we become when we honor them?

We don’t have good language to help us name and address the longing for a life that’s richer and truer than the one we’re currently leading. So, while the word magic is, perhaps, not quite right, I’ve realized it points to a gnawing craving for a connection that includes, but also stretches beyond, the human realm. It’s the word I use to mark those moments when I allow myself to lean into my intuition, to revel in synchronicity, to be in awe of mystery, and to sink into the cycles that exist outside of myself.

Sometimes magic has felt like a cosmic zap, and I’ve known immediately that something notable has shifted within me. But often magic has snuck in without me being consciously aware of it, nesting like a mouse in a forgotten corner of my mind, chewing through outdated neural wiring and making a mess of what I previously thought of as oh-so-logical.

The trick, it seems, is learning how to come to center, to find one’s balance through both the huge revelations and the tiny but persistent shifts.

As I was finding my personal equilibrium between these two poles, there were times when I felt like the Fool from the tarot deck, stepping blithely over the cliff’s edge. The beginning of my journey was confusing; the middle was messy. Western culture doesn’t have a model for the deep interiority required to attune to our inner senses. The process can be—and was!—unsettling.

Luckily, I found mentors who both allowed me to find my way and gave me a stern talking-to when I wallowed in the muck. Sometimes I got yankyanked back into prevailing cultural precepts. Other times I felt silly or judged by other people.

I questioned myself, wondering if I was a little crazy or a lot weird. Then I learned that in Middle English, weird referred to one who could control fate.

And isn’t that what we all want? To be weird enough to take control of our own lives? To know who we are and what we are becoming? To be willing to choose an outlook that allows life to be a joyous adventure?

As my thinking shifted, I began to see patterns. I started to feel how my inner world reflected the outer world and vice versa. I noticed the cycles swirling around me—the seasons, the moons, my own breath—and began to work with them to create flow and balance. I realized that I was crafting something very important with my every thought: my own life.

When I look back, even seemingly insignificant moments can be strung together, allowing me—and you!—to see the beadwork of the larger story, a journey that began in my childhood but gained momentum in my thirtieth year when I moved from Brooklyn to the small town of Beacon, New York. During my three years in Beacon—which spanned the unexpected and tragic events that centered on September 11, 2001—I learned to use my sixth sense, or intuition, as a doorway to the inner realms. Through this work, I developed a profound ability to trust myself, which allowed me to make large and wondrous changes in my life. These changes culminated in selling my house in Beacon and moving across the ocean. To study with a witch. In Ireland.

While my hours typing away in the garden during the writing retreat in Carmel helped me begin this book, my focus then had been on Ireland. It’s easy, even for me, to romanticize “witch school” on the Emerald Isle. But as I dug deeper, it became clear that the most essential parts of the story happened before I traveled across the sea. I realized that Ireland was possible only because I’d gone through a series of transformations in the years leading up to that trip.

What were the steps to becoming a person who believed in herself enough, who trusted her intuition enough, who could feel the pull of life’s currents enough, that she could find the courage to allow herself to step off the mapped edge? To believe that she could live that kind of magic?

And so I wrote a book about that becoming. It’s about how I learned to let magic in (thus the title!) so I could live the life I longed for—one filled with curiosity, connection, and the deepest kind of inner knowing.

It’s about the things that change you in unexpected ways and guide you to become the person you never knew you wanted to be but, perhaps, always were.

From the book Letting Magic In by Maia Toll. Reprinted by permission of Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2023 by Maia Toll.

Letting Magic In is about the nurturing and life-changing lessons we can learn when we have the courage to change our narrative from "What is possible?" to "Everything is possible." A must-read for the soul searcher, the magic seeker and anyone who just loves a story well told.

-Sarah Addison Allen, New York Times bestselling author of Other Birds