Real Magic, Part 2

I cannot explain how or why I have arrived at this place in my life. I am surprised I am talking about it! It simply feels as if experiencing and writing about real magic is my purpose or mission at this time in my life. Regardless of explanations, I find that I am filled with awe and respect for this unexpected part of my life path.

I am intrigued with Leo Tolstoy, in part because of what I see as parallels between his life and mine. He was a famous author during his lifetime and a man who had spent much of his life in hedonistic pursuits, one who had no spiritual bent in his early writings but witnessed in his own life a shift that seemed to be happening to, him without his consent. His writing began to reflect a spiritual quality, and he wrote of the journey of the soul and the world of real magic. Yet he was uncertain about why or how this transformation had taken place.

Recently a copy of a handwritten portion of Tolstoy's will, written by him twenty years before his death, was given to me by a woman who is one of the world's leading experts on Russian literature. In this will Tolstoy described how he felt about his life's work, which is precisely how I feel as I contemplate my own:

Furthermore, and in particular, I ask all people near and far not to praise me. (I know they will do so because they have done so in my lifetime in the most unseemly way.) But if they want to study my writings, let them look carefully at those passages in them in which I know the power of God spoke through me, and make use of them for their own lives. There have been times when I felt I was becoming the bearer of God's will. I have often been so impure, so full of personal passions, that the light of this truth has been obscured by my own darkness, but nevertheless this truth has sometimes passed through me, and these have been the happiest moments of my life. God grant that these truths should not have been defiled in passing through me, and that people might feed on them, despite the superficial and impure form which I have given them.