On Magic, Part 1
I’ve been letting this collection of thoughts marinate for years & I’m constantly rerouting my beliefs on this….but it’s time to just share, for my own sanity. I’ll call this “Part 1” because it’s something that I think I’ll come to.
Several years ago, one of my children asked me whether Santa was real. Before I could respond, he threw another hard ball at me: “Is Magic real?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, catching my breath.
He met my eyes, searching for something. This particular child of mine is highly literal and tends to see in black and white (which he gets from my husband.) I imagined a future version of himself answering the same question asked by his own children. Would he answer differently?
My answer felt solid, though. I never stopped believing in magic…or if i did, it was only for a little while. Or maybe, it wasn’t that I stopped believing, but that my understanding of it unraveled a bit before coming back together.
There was a time I simply thought “magic” was a world running parallel to ours. Elves working through the night, reindeer flying just out of sight, fairies slipping between moments like fireflies. But then my brain developed and began building a stable map of reality…which is what I am seeing now with my middle son. The prioritization of predictability becomes a key survival instinct. The trade off of neurological streamlining is, of course, the fading of unused pathways. Maybe it’s not that the magic itself disappears. Maybe the pathways just soften, like trails we stop walking, folding neatly back into the landscape behind us.
There was also time when I thought “magic” was performative. A theatrical bit that everyone around me was putting on…a series of magic shows. I appreciated the artistry of these performances, the how did they do that? element as our minds attempt to dissect the anatomy of the trick. I took my kids to a magic show last year and they begged for a magic trick “kit” for Christmas. I’ll never forget watching them take everything out of the box and turning it upside down, as if looking for something else, like magic pixie dust, to fall out. Having to explain to them that this genre of magic was entirely based on illusions was a little disheartening.
And, in more recent years, I’ve thought magic looked like signs and symbols, like rainbows appearing in the sky at “just the right” moment, heart shaped shells on the beach, little tokens of luck you can carry in your pocket just in case. There have been times where I wondered if something unexplainable was an act of God or an act of magic. My favorite quote from the entire Harry Potter series was something Albus Dumberdore said: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry…but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” I painted this quote in my old classroom to remind myself and my students that magic and faith overlap in ways beyond our comprehension. We become very good (obsessive, even) at naming things, and much less comfortable with letting the mysterious remain mysterious.
Let’s call it what it is. I don’t think we “outgrow” magic, I think we rename it. And I’m not particularly interested in explaining it away, just to make it more acceptable. I’ll stand firm in my belief in magic & in the quiet ways our lives connect, in ways we don’t fully understand. Call it what you’d like. I know what it feels like.
