The Magic Teapots

Max, an “urban explorer, has a website called action squad.org (listed under websites of interest), where he writes about his explorations of caves, tunnels, rooftops and basements – “spaces between, spaces forgotten, spaces forbidden.” And he says he loves crawl spaces. That’s important, as you’ll see, since he lives in an old house built in 1912.

In mid-January 2006, Max traveled to California and he and a friend hiked to the very end of Tomales Point – the northernmost tip of land on the western side of the San Andreas fault line. Here, he had some sort of mystical experience. “We were surrounded on three sides by ocean, miles from the nearest road, buffeted by the wind cresting over the cliffs, in the most surreal, stunning landscape I have ever witnessed. The interplay of earth, water, light, and life were breathtaking, and the immediacy of the place and moment dwarfed all the things I’d thought were important to me back in civilization… I was washed away in experiencing the ‘oneness’ of all things.

“In the aftermath of the experience, I found myself on a roll of following some intuition, an inner voice that pulled me where it seemed I needed to go. I felt in control of my reality in a way I never had before- by letting go of reason and deliberation, silence the paralyzing mental chatter, and just – doing.”

Shortly after his return from California, he and friends went to a local thrift to go “trolling for cool junk.” Max was immediately drawn to an old teapot, but couldn’t justify why he felt so compelled to buy it. He rarely wandered through the house wares section in the store and had never considered himself to be the type of person who owns – or buys – a teapot. “Finally, I decided to go along with my fading post-Tomales Point intuition kick and just let myself be guided – by instinct, by magic, by whatever the hell it is.”

So the teapot went home with Max. “Trying to figure out why this teapot had demanded that I buy it, I brewed some instant teabags in it. The tea wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special, either. Over the next few days, I was not surprised (but was disappointed) when nothing really came of the purchase.”

Then within a week of buying the teapot, Max decided to explore the crawlspace in his house. “And that is just one of the weird things involved in this tale. In eight years of living in the house, years spent exploring every dark and hidden nook and cranny I could find in the Twin Cities area, I had never, ever been into the crawlspace in my own house.”

The crawlspace had an access hatch in the wall, on the way to the basement. He found stuff – two dead mice, plastic sheeting, an old coffee can, rotting shoes. “As I crawled beneath the stairs, I felt something hard in the soft dirt beneath the plastic – a kinda domed bulge, sticking up slightly above the ground level. Maybe it was finally time to find a human skull?”

He pulled the object out- a corroded teapot. “The teapot I’d just found buried under my house was nearly identical to the teapot I’d brought home from the thrift store a few days earlier. Same design. Same size. Same materials. Same hinges. Same spout. One had a chain, the other did not.”
A magic teapot.

In an e-mail, Max added: “I have become a regular experiencer and appreciator of synchronicity … and changed my beliefs about many things in the world. It’s a far weirder and more wonderful place than I’d ever dared believe.”

https://www.teapotshappen.wordpress.com

Max has also contributed two other stories to this blog: Chicago Breakfast Bum and Dominoes.