Once, a very long time ago, there was a magician who knew only one spell, and it was a spell that could change the world. They’d hoped, upon becoming a magician, to be able to battle dragons or to create gold from straw or to make villains see the error of their ways, but none of those were the spell that the magician knew. They thought that being a magician would allow them to tame wild animals, improve their singing voice, or travel through time. But those weren’t the spell the magician knew, either.
Flying! Surely flying was magic, and as a magician they could soar with the hawks or at least flap with the jays. And yet this, too, was not the spell they knew.
The spell – the one solitary world-changing spell – the magician knew was this. They knew the spell to summon their soul. To invite and to welcome and to invoke their self and their gifts into the world. The magician cast this spell not with incantations or intonations or arcane gestures, but by setting a table with four very important things. All spells have ingredients, after all, though not always the ones we might expect.
To cast this spell, the magician laid out: something they knew, something they loved, something they believed in, and something they had made. And because this happened so very long ago, we don’t know what these things were, exactly. We don’t know what the magician knew, or loved, or believed, or made. But we know that they knew, and loved, and believed, and made.
And we know, too, that the world changed when they cast the spell, and we know that this spell – this one spell, and perhaps only this spell – still works today, and may be cast by anyone.