THE REBIRTH OF MAGIC

Magic. Real, natural magic is all around us if only we care to look....

The thing about magic and witchcraft and all that wonderful stuff is you can believe in it without believing in it, if that contradiction isn't over the top and too silly for words. There is, after all, quite a lot of real magic in the world, like the stuff of beauty when the sun sneaks from its night-time hideaway at the crack of dawn and lights on a brand new flower with its accompanying tribe of worshipping dewdrops, or the light in any woman's eyes when she sees her tiny baby for the very first time and draws it towards her breast. They're real magic yet they have a perfectly logical and non-magical origin in the natural world. But for a great deal of your life it may not have been quite like that. For a great deal of your life you were disillusioned by that mundane thing called living.

Of course, we were all young once. Even me.

When I was a great deal younger I used to believe that if I concentrated hard enough and prayed to the God I was taught really did exist then my grey knitted cuddly elephant would come to life in the night and be there for me come the dawn, warm and breathing and trumpeting the very next day. I used to wonder what his breath would smell like, how his eyes would shine, what games he would want to play with me. And because I was a sad little git I actually spent time trying to encourage that magic into my real world. It was, I thought, a matter of belief in the same way as accepting God was a matter of belief, and when my elephant didn't become animated by dawn the next day the fault was mine for not believing enough, for not having the strength to summon power enough magic. But as I said, I was a great deal younger back then and hadn't learned to be cynical.

Then, later, when I was running a bit late and might not reach school on time (a heinous crime if ever there was one and one that had resulted in corporal punishment for the worst offenders) I used to believe there must be a mechanism involving mental concentration that would result in me instantaneously being transported from where I was to where I wanted to be in the merest of moments �" and this long before Doctor Who and his Tardis, which had its birth on the telly in 1963 in my twentieth year. That didn't work either. I was, occasionally, late for school, though only by minutes and as far as I can remember it went thankfully unnoticed. But the fault for my lateness would have been mine because I lacked sufficient belief in the powers inherent in me, and couldn't transport myself from point a to point b in the twinkling of an eye. I wasn't strong enough for magic.

Magic didn't work, not for my elephant and not for my timing. I learned that much before I learned that being grown-up was no great shakes because being grown up banishes all magic to the realm of fantasy beloved by children, meaning it’s no longer an option for real mortals who sometimes need intervention in their lives. Being grown up is a serious business. You have to live your life in a serious way, pay attention to the minutiae of fiscal matters and generally forget the levity of your growing years. Elephants of the cuddly stuffed variety will never grow a beating heart, and clocks, watches, time-pieces, even egg-timers, are subject to certain natural laws that prohibit them going at an unnatural speed because that's suddenly convenient.

And you spend a great deal too long in the land without magic. You waste too great a portion of your life in the depressing world of the adult and the grown-up.

Until, that is, you start seeing things a bit differently again. You start realising there is magic in the air, real magic. And that has to do with all kinds of natural things, but looked at in your own special way as the passing years give you a fresh slant on what you've seen a billion times before. A sunrise suddenly becomes unique and special, a sunset splendind and golden, a tree majestic, a season special, and the love of your life blossoms as you see beyond the superficial and the obvious and the real to the sheer beauty that lies beneath.

© Peter Rogerson 02.09.10, edited and refreshed 21.01.17

Author's Note

I first wrote this for MySpace, which back then was for bloggers, and in going through an old memory stick I've rediscovered it and don't want it to die just yet, so here it is again with the odd phrase added.