Do You Believe in Magic?

I love the word magic. It conjures up images of fantasy, sparkle, and delight. And yet, a part of me dismisses it as foolish folklore fiction. But I love the experience of magic…

Is there magic in your life? If not, when did you give up on it? When did you decide that life was all grind and no glory? What will it take for you to see that there is magic and wonder all around in every corner of your life?

Young children seem to be bursting with a sense of magic—everything glimmers with freshness, delight, beginner’s mind. Life is full of wonder, and sparks of curiosity are ignited in a rainbow of magical experiences.

But somewhere around age 7 or 8, according to the psychologists, the age of reason begins and the magical child goes into hiding. It seems so sad to lose touch with this part of ourselves for something as rational as reason…Necessary on some level, but sad nonetheless.

By the time we enter adulthood, we have had plenty of practice with reason. We are steeped in it through years of institutional education, often to the detriment of wonder and magic, driving it further from our psyches.

We have a choice, as we mature into fully developed human beings, to bring this back online, into our awareness. To dust off and cultivate the capacity for more and more wonder and magic to be part of our everyday experience. Once we start opening our eyes to it, we see we are surrounded by beauty, wonder, and magic.

Nature is the first place to look: the change from winter to spring to summer to fall to winter. As we spend more time in nature witnessing these events, we see the truly inspiring unfolding of multiple magical events full of beauty and wonder. Look closely right now—shoots of new life are bursting into full bloom!

Feasting our eyes on works of art, our ears on musical compositions, our minds on fabulous literature, offers a cornucopia of beauty, wonder, and magic.

Interacting with another human being, sitting in stillness, understanding how the body functions, how the cosmos moves, how the machine was created. It is all beauty, wonder, and magic.

“There is a constant process of magical creation every second. And this process includes everything you can see, everything you can experience.”
A.H. Almaas

Where is beauty, wonder and magic in your life? Open up—we are all swimming in it.