To date I’ve been one of the “silent partners” in this whole enterprise. Not quite Bash silent, but pretty quiet. I have a somewhat fractured working life so I unfortunately haven’t prioritised much of this. You may notice that from my sporadic Tweets. But that’s about to change. What’s been going on, what’s happening in the world, what this community has been through – it all feels too important to sit back and not take action.

I think I’d been used to not much happening in our world. I was used to being involved at the fringe and almost blindly following our leadership without having my voice heard. My voice wasn’t suppressed, I just wasn’t projecting it or voicing it in the right direction. Everyone else has their roles, their specialisms. I was just that odd social media guy that was forgotten about, stuck out here in the English countryside. And I was sort of happy with that role.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer. I’m invested. I’ve been part of this journey for a long time. But you go through years with just belief and no sign of anything much happening, it can test your faith I suppose. But this year, and these last few months… Well we’re all feeling it, yes? The world’s going mad, the haters are hating and people like us (well like me) we start to cower. We start to believe what they say about us. So we freeze, we pause. A little lost in the chaos and the fear. It’s like I’ve been waiting for that thing, that sign to get me started, to light my fire. Well the signs have been there, I just couldn’t see them, but now I can. They’re screaming. They’ve grabbed me and they’re shaking me.

Brandon’s revelation has become mine. I can see it. Magic is real, it exists. But not, perhaps, in the way that we have been led to believe. It’s not quite wands and wizards so much as everything that’s already with us – seen and unseen. It’s all there in history and pre-history, but it is being obscured from us somehow. If there’s one thing I have really taken hold of in Brandon’s words it’s this: imagination is memory transposed. That’s where the magic is. It’s not just in things, but around them. The spaces in between. We create it. We bring it forth. The more we imagine and the more we create, the more we will see. It’s all there for the taking. We’re going to be the ones to enable it, to break out, to break through.

How? I hear my fellow Mountaineers cry. By creating. We’re going to write, draw, compose, build. We’re going to play! And we’re going to do it on the forum. I’ve asked my wonderful friend Endri to create a space for us. We’re going to take over the Campfire category and see what happens. I’m going to create some guides for what I think we need to do and how we can all contribute. And we’re going to start with the Guilds. Their history, their meaning, it’s hidden inside of us. It’s already known to us, we just have to allow it to surface. I’ll explain all that when the space is ready in the next few days.

I’m excited. I’m beyond excited. Magic is real. Magic is here.

And we can all do it.

Itsuki.