The Magician's Crutches

My alarm went off at 4am — the world was dark, and my body trembled in protest. I hadn't really slept. I was cracked open. Raw. The weight of what lay ahead pressed into me before I'd even moved. A part of me pleaded — turn over, disappear, forget it all. But something deeper stirred, ancient and unavoidable. I sat up slowly. My bag lay by the bed. Still soaked from last night's spilled juice, I couldn't bring it. No water. No extra layers. Just a vague, half-mad resolve. I whispered into the silence, tried to wake the friends who'd said they'd come with me — but no one rose. No one could. This was mine to walk alone. Something in me had called this moment into being. Today was my birthday. I was climbing the Tor for sunrise — on crutches. And I was walking to meet the Magician.

I stepped outside. The cold met me like a blade — clean, unforgiving, sacred. It cut through the remnants of sleep. The silence was thick, almost holy. Every sound — the click of the latch, the rustle of fabric, the first thud of the crutch on stone — echoed louder than it should have. I moved slowly, swing by swing, step by measured step, the world still dark around me, the air steeped in the kind of stillness that holds secrets. And I realised then — truly — I was alone. No one else was coming. Not today. Not for this. A shimmer of memory stirred. My awareness drifted, unbidden, to last year — when friends had rallied around me, encouraged me to mark the day, brought guitars, laughter, warmth. We'd stood together under the same rising sun. But this year was something else. The ache of it tightened my chest, not in despair, but in something deeper. At first I wallowed in my loneliness. But then the world began to whisper: this year, you walk alone. Not as punishment. Not as exile. But as initiation.

The walk was slow. Agonisingly so. Each step a deliberate act of will. Crutch by crutch, breath by breath, I moved through the dark. There was so much time — time to feel the cold, to hear the silence, to listen to the ache in my body and the ache in my life. Time for visions to come. Somewhere in that cold silence, the Magician began to stir in me. He lives in the mountain, I've heard — high up where the air is thin and clear, where he can see the whole kingdom. It's from that vantage point that he counsels the King. From above, with vision. With stillness. With truth.

However, as I climbed the Tor, I began to realise something strange — I wasn't looking up. Not toward the horizon, not toward the summit. My gaze stayed low, fixed on the ground, on my feet, on each careful placement of the crutches beneath me. And in that, I began to see the deeper symbolism unfolding. The Magician had always represented heights to me — clarity, vision, the wide view from above, seeing the whole kingdom with detachment and wisdom. But this birthday ascent was not about looking out. It was about looking down.

Each step asked for full attention, each stone and shift in terrain calling me into presence, not elevation. Survival focus. One misstep, and I could fall. The wind whipped across the slopes, unpredictable, wild. I had to move carefully, deliberately, measuring every footfall. The slope was uneven and I was on crutches — one slip could have ended the journey. There was no space to think of anything else. No space to carry anyone. This was about meeting my own needs. Securing my balance. Taking responsibility for every inch of progress. And in that, I realised I was tracing the roots — not reaching toward the stars, but communing with the ground.

And then I saw them: my crutches, the tools beneath my arms, bearing my weight. They became symbols in that moment — of all the things I've leant on to get by. Vices, comforts, attachments. The mechanisms of survival I've used to steady myself when the internal terrain was too unstable to walk alone.

They have carried me — but not without cost. And yet, even so, I walked. Not with grandeur, but with grit. Not as a wisdom keeper gazing down from on high, but as a wounded soldier returning from battle, returning to his body, to his pain, to the honest truth of how much it has taken to keep going. The Magician in me was not sitting in the tower — he was walking with me, step by step, relearning the land of his own soul.

And I remembered — no one is coming to save me. Not in the way I longed for. This walk, this ache, this breath — it was mine. And so was the strength to keep moving. It was always mine. At first, that truth felt cruel. Cold. Another weight to bear. But then, beneath the ache, something else emerged — quiet, but steady. The remembrance of my own two feet. The long-forgotten trust that I could one day walk again. That I was, even now, already on the way.

Because the Magician doesn't wait for the path to be easy. He walks it anyway.

And so I kept walking — slowly, inwardly, with no destination except the next honest breath. I had to be patient with myself. Gentle. Forgiving. I couldn't run anymore — not from my feelings, not from the grief, not from the broken parts of me I'd long tried to outpace. The injury made sure of that. I had to sit with myself. With the ache. With the questions. With the mirror. And in that stillness, something unexpected happened: I began to hear the exiled children inside me. The ones I'd left behind in my quest to be loved, to be strong, to be enough. I began to listen — not just to them, but to my body. To my foot.

I had to sit with the grief of it all — to lay things to rest, to cry the tears I hadn't let fall, to breathe, to be still, to feel the weight of all I had carried — the grief, the memories, the blood, sweat and tears it had taken to get here. I couldn't walk away from the ache anymore. So I sat with it, listened to it, held it like a long-lost child, and I cried and I cried and I cried. Slowly, the journey became one of listening — not just to my emotions, but to my foot itself. What it needed. What it was expressing. What it was ready for. It became like a child to me — tender, shy, and wise in its own way. I couldn't rush it. I couldn't force it. I had to raise it with gentleness, to honour its pace, to rebuild trust between us. Each time I moved it, each time I stretched just a little more, I felt life return — flickers of strength, new neural fire, a whisper of what might be possible. And so I walk again, not just with feet, but with a new kind of listening. A new kind of love.

Every dragon has to clip its own wing before it can learn to fly — not as punishment, but as a rite, a remembering, a way to meet the ground and listen to what the wind has to teach.

Because only those who have truly fallen know what it means to rise.