If you listen closely, an old word is finding its way back into the world: Magi.

In ancient lineages, the magi were pattern-readers and star-watchers. They could feel subtle forces moving beneath ordinary perception. Their craft was not sorcery but attunement: a skillful way of noticing how human action sits inside larger currents. A way of living attuned to what poet John O’Donohue called an enlarged life.

Long before strategic plans and innovation frameworks, there were the magos of Greece, the magia of Rome, the Persian sky-readers who linked human action to cosmic rhythms. In Wales, they have a word for the work of art of shaping reality through a skillful relationship with the unseen: hud.

Despite what modernity insists, Magi never disappeared. They live on in those who can feel tremors in the collective and pick up on what the field is whispering beneath the surface.

Perhaps you feel it too, something unusual moving at the edges of your perception. A tug, a shimmer, a quiet and unruly insistence that leadership at this time requires a little less certainty and more apprenticeship to mystery.

Let me show you what I mean.

A Field Report

Here is what happened at the Coralus (un)Summit. Things unfolded less as a sequence of events and more as a series of shifts in our collective perception. some magic-making. There was magic-making. And a wall that began to whisper.

On our first day, we shared what we were noticing in our corners of the Coralus world and placed our observations, insights, odd combinations, synchronicities on a large board we called the Whispering Wall. By noon, it was pulsing with sketches, quotes, intuitions. By the end of day, it was a field-sensor: a physical expression of what anthropologist Kathleen Stewart might call “the charged atmospheres of collective life.”

Emergence leaves clues before it reveals itself. To attend to emergence is to court the shimmer—not to explain it, but to let it accumulate enough body for it to speak.

This is the first taste of magic:
Pay attention to what is shimmering.

On the second day, our attention widened. We listened not only to each other, but to the larger field – the land, the voices of future generations, and to wisdom that arrives without words. We invited the strangeness in and let it reorganize us.

And to share what was arising, we hosted a Festival. Through song, movement, ritual, theatre, and voice, the group began to live into a different kind of being. What began as a two-dimensional map morphed into a warm-blooded, three-dimensional intelligence moving between us.

And then, as often happens when a field gathers enough coherence, land and place stepped forward—and magic started to work us.

2D to 4D: When Place Becomes Co-Author

By late afternoon, the entire group moved to the pine forest to ask ourselves: What is mine to do?

We wrote our future commitments and strung them between trees. To begin to make meaning of the many threads, Vanessa and Azul began gathering from the Whispering Wall, the embodied insights from the Festival, and the dreams for the future hanging in the forest. 

What came through was a call and response, an improvised song, co-composed with wind, birdsong, pine needles, and the late-afternoon light. It was what philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls cosmopolitical composition: the co-creation of meaning across human and non-human agencies. 

Azul shared her practice of song as a living entity and reframed creativity as custodianship:

“My song practice is a relationship with song as a living entity. I empty my mind so the body can become a vessel—a nest—for the songs orbiting that place. Some songs are ancestral. Some are emergent. Some come from the future. 

What matters is letting them come through. Because then the song resonates in the intimate chambers of people’s bodies. I’m amplifying something that already lives there, through the resonance of the land.”

A hush fell. Reverence.

Something in the pine forest pointed to a fourth dimension, an emergent intelligence, co-created with place, weather, synchronicity, and the more-than-human world.

2-D reporting tells the story.
3-D embodiment brings us into the story.
4-D emergence reveals the story we didn’t know we were a part of

The Thing to Know is This

What looked from the outside like a well-planned gathering was, at its core, a collective apprenticeship to an older lineage. The hosting and program team were no longer following a plan; we were following the field. As we became more connected to these signals, rhythms, and invitations, our original design dissolved. We began responding to conditions that reveal themselves only when a group begins to listen with magi-like awareness.

The move to the pine forest was a response to a shift in the field’s centre of gravity. In magi traditions, such shifts may be understood as invitations—moments when the unseen, place, and time align to make the deeper work possible. When birdsong flirts, light shifts, or atmosphere shimmers, a magus pays attention. It is called instruction—and you follow it.

Our MC Andrea Menard, for example, moved as a bridge-being. She was ushering people between activities, but also dimensions. She guided, shaped, and invited the group into each new location not so much by directing, but attuning, opening, sensing when the field was ready to move, and finding the right language and posture to make those invitations.

Around her, the program team, alongside the Saunders Farm land stewards, enacted a kind of distributed magi practice: 

• wild and perceptive listening,
• adaptive timing,
• somatic and other intelligences,
• tracking parts and the whole.

The real turning point arrived only when we relinquished the impulse to direct and allowed ourselves to be directed by the field itself. This is a quintessential magi posture: the ability to withdraw one’s organizing force so that a larger intelligence can move through.

The moment we stopped trying to “make it happen,” the moment we stopped trying to weave it all together, the threads began weaving us.

What This Makes Possible

At first glance, this could be read as a special moment that occurred in a special place. But that is not where its power lies. 

What unfolded here is transferable. It offers a glimpse of how magi move in the world through disciplined, relational, ecologically attuned forms of intelligence. Beneath what we call “magic” is a sophisticated skillset: a kind of perceptual precision, a sensitivity to context, humility in the face of complexity, and a willingness to let go of one’s own will in service to a larger design.

Magic is not an event; it is an entire worldview and a way of perceiving.

The question becomes: What becomes possible if each of us begins to apprentice ourselves to magic?

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Collective Magic

Transformation doesn’t come from individual mastery—it comes from co-creation with forces larger than us. It happens when we stop trying to control emergence and start learning to move with it, reading patterns across different dimensions, listening to what wants to be born, and creating conditions for the improbable to become possible.

“We’re all serious transformers,” says Hilary Van Welter, Coralus’ resident Mad Hatter. “We are now going to bring that magic and wisdom into Coralus to co-create the next version. We’re evolutionaries. We’re going to evolve this crisis into something powerful for the good of all.”

Perhaps Coralus is apprenticing to a collective magic, circles capable of sensing what no single leader can.

This is serious magic. Practical magic. Beautiful, destabilizing magic. It disrupts our conditioning and interrupts obedience. This magic reawakens capacities the dominant systems have tried to exile: sensing, improvising, surrendering, discerning what is alive rather than what is socially validated.

Something luminous is trying to emerge. Perhaps the work now is simple: to be porous enough, brave enough, and quietly disciplined enough to let it through.

Make a Magi Move