writing assignment – magic

When I was a kid, I thought magic was all around me. The signs were all there, even though I did not know how to interpret them. The shape of the summer clouds, the cries of the crows in autumn, the drift of the snow, the way the tulips unfurled, these all held great portents.

I remember having long yet silent conversations with the grass snakes that warmed themselves on the rocks at the end of the property. They flicked their tongues against my skin and told me of their long winter dreaming in the closeness of their underground burrows. I regularly spoke with the overgrown goldfish in the pond, who to my reckoning really weren’t goldfish, but thoughtful and wise ancients trapped in these slow and ponderous bodies. I would walk through the woods beside the house and examine the ground underneath the giant toadstools and jack-in-in-the-pulpits for tiny footprints. The fact that I never found any did not mean that fairies did not exist, but merely that they were very, very careful about cleaning up after themselves.

When I was a teenager, I traded this magic of my environment for the magic of books and knowledge. I learned that I never saw the fairies because the toadstools were not in the requisite fairy circle, and in any case the fairies had not made the voyage to the New World. Over time, I learned that the great portents of magic I had once believed in with great faith could be easily explained with science. While the goldfish were ancient by their standards, they were only a few human years old and were quite stupid to boot. And the snakes were not talking to me; they were doing no more than tasting the salt of my skin.

And so the word magic lost all of it’s former power. It became a commodity controlled by Disney, a word to scorn like angels or Santa or True Love, a word that only children and not-too-bright adults believed in. I thought I was a pretty bright adult, because I did not really believe in such things.

But secretly, I hoped.

One summer, this summer, I decided to give science some time off, and put the books away. I sat at the end of a magical island and watched sunsets. I discovered a place where the water surges along natural cracks in the bedrock and marveled at the hollow gurgling sound it made in those deep channels.

And I came together with a group of complete strangers, who silently, kindly, reminded me of those places where creativity lives. As I sat around a campfire with them, watching them take embers and trace words in a dusk that shivered with magic, I realized that I had been the not-too-bright adult.

And so, at summer’s end, I sat alone by a remote lake and watched the clouds for portents. Two crows landed noisily in the pine tree, and remembering the Norse legend I asked which was Thought and which was Memory. I still hadn’t gotten it straight when they flew off. I had a long silent conversation with a large turtle that lived under the dock. A loon surfaced nearby and gave it’s peculiar laugh in greeting when I said hello. And I felt myself unfurl like a spring tulip after a long winter.