The black magicians

Back in the wild and crazy sixties, I used to read Carlos Castaneda, who invented a universe in the American Southwest and told it was real, which made me suspend judgment and wonder if it could be? (Try books like a Separate Reality to figure out for yourself).
One of his best metaphors was that the people who know us--especially the ones who love us--are black magicians. Each of us shapes others selves, molding them into our image of what they want us to be.
When you think of something you ought to do, you typically think of someone's face, of what they will say if you don't get it done--you can imagine their response, even have a dialogue with them (much of talking to oneself is this sort of dialogue with imagined others).
This process becomes true black magic when others tell you not just what you need to do to advance a project, meet a deadline, help a friend, but when they connect it to who you are: "I thought you were the kind of person who always meets deadlines" or "Would put a friend's need above your own" or "a hopeless loser who always lets me down". Sometimes people actually utter cliches like these, but often they are hinted by indirect language and nonverbal cues. (In another blog, I will tell you the way to undo the black magic).
Love is the most wonderful and desperate example. People often fall in love with an imagined other, and when all their black magic fails to create the person they imagined, they abandon the relationship.
Love does mean having to say you are sorry, sometimes. Love does mean wanting to help the person you love avoid traps and pitfalls. But love also means seeing them for who they are, at a particular moment--and loving that real person, not in spite of their 'faults', but because of them--because she or he is wonderfully, desperately human.
Being a parent means being in love with a self that is changing, that will be totally dependent on you for more years than the child grown to boy or girl wants to admit. Here the razor's edge between love and black magic is particularly sharp--but breathtaking to dance along. Your child needs someone who loves them for who they are--even as you set limits, correct behaviors, insist that you also have rights as a parent. I remember one day when I was irritated with my eldest and I said (less eloquently than I am writing here), "Philip, I have a right to be irritated with you, to be crabby around you, and you have the same right with me, but never doubt for a moment that I love you." The child should always be able to fall back on that ocean of love, even as you are struggling to set clear limits so they will grow up safe--knowing the limits move as they grow, knowing they will leave home and (in the case of my lads) fly afar--with that ocean of love always there--strong enough so that even after I die, they can still fall into it.
Parenting is not black magic--it is diapering a wind that needs to be nurtured and made strong so it can blow everyone it touches some good.