A few weeks ago I was teaching particularly about the Faery and the topics of power and came up.  The initial discussion was that in faery, all is not as it seems. Appearances are deceiving. Small doesn’t mean insignificant, big doesn’t mean powerful.

But the lesson of faery and power is much deeper than that. If you ask them about power, they will likely shrug and brush you off. They simply don’t view or understand power in the same limited way we do. Instead they work with affinities, applications, and effectiveness. In that regard, everything is powerful when used with affinity (or against affinity, depending on what you’re doing), and well applied.

The example they gave us was water. At first glance to humans, not powerful. Water is the stuff of our daily lives, of our bodies. But when you look more deeply (I tried to avoid the pun, it just wasn’t possible!) water holds the power of life and death in a thousand ways.  There is no life without water. Without water, we die. With too much water, we die. When dealing with water that moves too quickly, we are endangered. Water can refresh our bodies on a hot day, or clean our skin and hair -  yet a small amount of water applied to our lungs ends our breathing. So is water powerful? Infinitely. But water is so much a part of our daily lives, we’ve forgotten to see its power.  And ultimately, water doesn’t have power, water is powerful in being itself operating in our surface world. It doesn’t need power or display power. Water is.

Faery live in awareness of the true power of things; of their inherent nature. They do not need the answer to be yes or no; strong or powerful. Power and magic are where you find them when you need them. The most power is in the smallest, most effective application. Anything else is superfluous. Power is not something that you have or wield like a weapon, it is simply what is. The power of a thing (or a person, or a being) is simply in the nature of that thing.

Faery magic is not much different. A faery guide once said to me, “Nudge a heartbeat a little in one direction and life is sustained where it was failing. Nudge it in the other direction and life is ended.” That is the nature of faery magic and faery power – working with things as they are and seeing the inherent power and magic they already possess.