I like to think of this piece in the collection produced by Jenna Miller as the ‘oracle card.’ Jenna told the illustrator I was ‘a sorcerer of light.’ She asked for the image to be half an acid trip, or a third. Over the top colourful, light shooting out from the bracelet and ending up everywhere. Big, bold, unafraid. Fantasy and magic and a little sci-fi, but also pretty.
I think it looks like I'm dissolving into light which gives away some of the trick to light sorcery. light is something you can receive, but not have. You can feel it —it will lay across your skin and warm you— but you can’t keep it.
The way my body disappears where I lack sensation is the secret to my light sorcery. My entire life, I’ve been imagining the feel of movements I have never made. I have never felt certain muscles flex or move. I have never felt the particular physics of unsupported bi-pedal motion. So when I imagine them, my fantasy body floats or twirls without any regard for the usual physics. When I watch dancers, I let my imaginary body twirl with them and my skin hums and tingles with sympathetic response. If a dancer swooshes, my stomach will swoosh in resonance. Sometimes I use this trick to create movement in my physical body despite the lack of sensation or muscle control. Sometimes I just let someone else’s physical body take me for a delightful ride. That’s not magic, that’s just visualization. Our brains do it all the time. Science and athletics and complex mental processing are quite aware of this synaptic harmony between image and sensation and function. The magic part is if my physical body translates human movements I have never made into sensations, how different is it to feel myself move like a particle of light? It’s not different at all. It’s no different if you’re a bird or a breeze or a psychedelic stream of light beams.
Illustrated by@smarcanoart
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