First I believed in magic, and then I didn’t, but that was only because I had learned – or been taught – the wrong definition.

You see, when the faeries existed, back then, when the spirits existed, they really did exist. When a quarter appeared under my pillow (or was it a dime? or was it a note carefully written by someone watching out or me, from another world?) it was physically, but magically was not, by the hand of my father or my mother. When I read C.S. Lewis’ amazing words of hope and of challenge, it was not as if those worlds and those creatures existed; they were there as real and as tangible as my breakfast, and realer, perhaps, and more tangible than most of my lessons.

Why is two plus two true, while a spirit watching over me is not? Because I can hold two oranges in one hand, and two oranges in another? Is it because, when I put my hands together (in prayer or thanksgiving that I have — can you believe it — four pieces of living juice clutched in my wanting fingers?) is it because I hold four objects I can count? Is it because I can trade an orange and receive an apple? Maybe we are comparing apples and oranges. Maybe you are looking at a fruit as something more solid than, probably, it actually is. Certainly, you are looking at a concept of addition as more than a bit magic, which in fact it is, looking at an equation as somehow more substantial that a thought, like the wall of a house, or a brick, or a birth, or a departure. Plus one minus one. Zero.

First, I believed in magic because I didn’t know the trick. That’s what I was later told, at least. I was taught, later, that magic in fact was trickery. That the definition of magic was “lightness of hand”, someone confusing the eye, or deluding the mind. This took place at more or less the same time that I learned gifts were purchased in a store and wrapped; and the magic and the spirit of searching, of reaching out toward someone with love and curiosity, of listening carefully to hear desire, of creating sweet illusion, of becoming part of a story, of taking part in a global illusion of generosity and delight, the magic that had existed was suddenly cheapened or emptied of value: a trick, like telling a little girl she wasn’t her mother’s daughter but an orphan, like telling a little boy that he is loved if he behaves, like telling the mother she is good if her children never stumble, like telling a father that success is measured in what he gives his family.

I was taught that magic existed on the surface of things, as though the reality of an orange was its mottled peel, not its miracle-explosion of sweetness that came from… good lord, where did it come from? Don’t say: the branch of a tree, the flower, the bee, the trunk or root, the soil, the seed, don’t say any of that. Just keep going back and back until you can’t find the orange, can’t find it anywhere, and then say (with the slightest gasp, with your eyes widening): magic!

I was taught that magic was a stock-market transaction, was a Macheavellian political ploy, so that all I needed was enough insider information, all I needed was someone to leak the truth, and I could rip the lace from that pretty fabrication, and there would be another naked mythology, another story, I would be safe from lies, all stories at their heart falsehoods, and all in all is Story.

The beauty is… that there is beauty. Ahhh – here’s the secret: close your eyes; I’ll whisper it. Imagine me standing behind you, with my hands gently on your shoulders. You can feel me lean toward you. Imagine you feel safe. Imagine my voice whispering close to your ear, (shhhh, read these next words in a whisper) so quiet no one else can hear: “This is magic: the beauty is that there was always something beneath it all. And you knew it all along, since you were very young. You arrived here being part of it. You came here with intimate knowledge of it. And even if all the logic of the world can paint the window black… ha ha! it can never paint out the sunlight. Because sunlight is magic. And logic cannot find it.

Once, I thought I was dying. Actually, quite a few times more than once. But one time in particular, when I was young, when I was much closer to the magic that we all know exists, I thought I was dying and it didn’t bother me. Quite the opposite. I had been reading on my parents’ living room sofa, with… I don’t know how I was seated, exactly: if I did, perhaps I wouldn’t be typing here tonight… with my legs up on the back of the couch, maybe? and my head in this odd crooked arrangement, sort of upside down. You know how flexible kids are. I was so engrossed in my reading (it was C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle) that I simply went further up, further up and further in, and suddenly — for those adults who need to get out their black paint and have an explanation, even though it is completely beside the point — maybe I cut off the circulation to my head, because suddenly I felt myself spinning and falling and disappearing and…

… spinning and falling and leaving this all behind. All what? It was… the lights of the world were flickering out. Had flickered out. An instant or forever. Sound? The last thoughts I had… I didn’t have thoughts. The last feeling I felt was

… something opening brilliant beyond, wonder, wondering, wonderful, my spirit leaned into it…

Just as suddenly (for those who want reasons, probably because I fainted and fell out of my neck-constricting pose, probably the little ship righted itself, probably the body didn’t want departure, probably it was nothing but a little trick of the body on the brain) suddenly all of this Here returned. My hands loosely held a book. There was the smooth/rough texture of the upholstery on the skin of my cheek, the slight musty smell of Minnesota-summer fabric. Afternoon light on the wall. The curtain hung sheer and still, without breeze to move it. There was a breath… mine? There were sounds of dinner being prepared in the kitchen, dishes, sink, probably my mother, possibly my father. There was the book in my hands. There was the roughness of the page, minutely rough. There was the book in my hands and the last words I had read came into focus.

I took a quick breath in – it was a gasp. I moved quickly. As though emergency, I moved quickly, to try and remake the moment, to try and place my body how it had been sitting, to lean back into the magic (where was it? the door had closed?) to leave, not out of despair but out of desire, not running from but running toward, not from fear but for knowledge, toward the homecoming.

If there is sleight-of-hand, it is the hands that make it. But where there is magic, it is the soul that creates. I swear, it is the juice of the orange, and just as surely as that juice exists on my tongue, and dribbles down from my lips when I bite into its obvious flesh… just as surely as that sweetness exists, so does the equation that two plus two does not equal four, that two plus two is in fact nothing, that God exists, that the devil is our own trickery and our own denial, and that the impossible is just as tangible as it ever was. 

We just stopped believing in it.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010