First, We Were Wanderers, paper collage, 2024

I love making collages that feature a single person (or several small people) against a cosmic background, like a vast, starry sky, a galaxy, or a larger-than-life planet looming over the horizon. I find compositions like these comforting, even reassuring, because they give me a distinct sense that other ways of being are possible. They remind me that, just beyond the horizon of the inconceivable and the incomprehensible, there lies a realm of infinite possibility. 

What does that mean, exactly? On one level, it means that change in the external world is always possible, including radical change in the ways that we live, perhaps through something like a collective evolution in consciousness. Maybe. But there’s another explanation that’s more plausible—and that I like better—and that has to do with our own sense of possibility, or the realm of the unknown or inconceivable within.

Indeed, everything about these compositions is metaphorical. The small person alone in a vast cosmic field is me (or any one of us). The horizon line is my perception. It is my conditioning, my programming. It defines my limits, or the limits set by who I think I am and how I should be in the world. And beyond it, in the vast, starry night, is the unknown, the incomprehensible, the inconceivable, and the infinitely possible.

The whole of the universe, to my mind, is a constant unfolding of infinite potential, or possibility. So, too, are we. Beyond the boundary of our conditioning, our patterns, and our limits, lies a realm of infinite possibility for being in the world: for responding to life, for making decisions, for taking action, for changing attitudes, for discovering yet unknown talents and skills. Those possibilities, while they remain unconscious, underdeveloped, or unactualized, are inconceivable or incomprehensible to us. They might as well constitute another planet or a far-off galaxy. They are the metaphorical star for which we yearn and on which we pin our dreams, hopes, and wishes in the vast, uncharted night.

We are always one decision or one shift in perspective away from encountering the inconceivable within ourselves. This is what I think Jung means when he says, “The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive.”  When we encounter the inconceivable, or the non-comprehensible, within or without, it feels like magic. It feels otherworldly. Cosmic. Awe-inspiring. This is the perception of infinite potential. As above, so below.

I would define magic that way—as the perception of infinite potential. We experience magic the moment we cross the metaphorical horizon line. It is there that we find that which cannot be explained, both inside and outside. “With God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). To understand ourselves this way is to place ourselves in the context of eternity. It is to confront our own mystery and to know that we ourselves are the mystery we are seeking. The comfort of knowing different ways of being are possible is the comfort perceiving ourselves, if only momentarily, as part of a universe of infinite possibility.