Looking for Ordinary Magic

The Pisces in me expected something obviously magical to happen yesterday (Aug 12th) considering there was a planetary parade (syzygy or alignment) involving six planets, a new moon, a solar eclipse, and a Perseid meteor shower all in the same day.

I readied myself by setting an intention in the event the events were waiting with a pitcher full of stardust to pour into my open heart and palms. Unfortunately, or unsurprisingly - if you believe in cosmic inevitably - yesterday was the day after a 3-day migraine. I was raw, exhausted, and mentally limp. If there was any energetic shift yesterday it was a downshift, which is probably what I needed.

Yesterday, despite my expectations, my brain didn’t work very well. I had hoped to feel inspired to write something whimsical - and, in fact, started a piece called “Leaning Into Whimsy” - but what I felt instead was sloggy. It was more than just the average brain fog. It was 95% relative brain humidity. It was like trying to run an uphill marathon in the jungle. Everything I tried to think and do felt so much harder. It was almost as if the universe was on the other side of my thoughts, pushing back.

Around lunchtime, I accomplished a workout, but that sucked up any energy I had in reserves. From that point forward, I was officially functioning on fumes. Whatever I had written earlier in the day couldn’t find its way the further I got down the page. It’s no secret that I’m prone to meandering, but yesterday’s writing was bad. It wasn’t as much a meander as it was stumbling delirium. Oh, there’s a wall there? Oh, there’s a wall there? I spent all day bumping into myself.

At 3 PM, I gave up writing and decided to read something inspirationally whimsical and then take a nap in the hopes I’d wake up refreshed and bursting with a story to write. In our house, inspiration isn’t far. My shelves hold plenty of books on gnomes, fairies, mushrooms, minerals and crystals, and other illustrated reference materials. One shelf supported two books that I’ve had for decades but have only ever mindlessly flipped through. The Art of James Christensen: A Journey of the Imagination and Gnomes by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen.

Thinking A Journey of the Imagination looked the most whimsical, I piled pillows in the darker corner of our couch since my eyes were still sensitive, positioned myself so my legs could support this oversized hardback, and began to flip through the opening pages. The first nine were purely illustrations. Lumpy people with large ridiculous hats, pink and blue faces, mismatched shoes, and fish paraded through forests with fairies, butterflies, squirrels, knights, and all manner of storybook creatures.

Then I came to the copyright page. The top listed out acknowledgements, and I read them. After a lovely dedication to his wife and kids, the author thanked an art history teacher from Brigham Young University. And that ended that for me.

Last week, we visited Utah. The first few days, we stayed in a large, expensive yet cozy cabin mindfully built in the mountains of Sundance.

Those mountains are an extension of the Rockies that I know from Missoula, so I felt quite at home. In the mountains, in a forest, I feel closer to magic. In the mountains, magic is possible and probably there if I look close enough.

In contrast, here, where I live, it’s hard for me to imagine that magic would stick around if it had the ability to be someplace else.

Sundance inspired the feeling of magic that I need.

The magic I need involves sparkles, owls, frogs, crystals, skeleton keys, and hidden doorways. It uses potions made of herbs, roots, and flowers from a garden.

Magic, to me, isn’t spells and conjuring. Well. Yeah. That’s a kind of magic, but I need ordinary magic.

Ordinary magic is the magic we’ve forgotten, but that I’m trying to remember. It’s what at one time was usual, expected, and entirely made by hand. Now we’ve synthesized, manufactured, and commercialized it so much that something like dill seed tea sounds hippie and woo-woo.

Sundance was a nice change of pace.

The city around me at home is over-stimulating. Being in it - on the freeway or any of the main roads, really - feels like an assault on my senses and my general energy field. In the mountains, there’s space for more time. There’s so much to look at, investigate, and explore that there’s no need to doomscroll. My doomscrolling in Sundance was spending a bizarre amount of time watching the gobs of hummingbirds that zoomed around the five sugar-water feeders. Until last week, I think I had seen ten hummingbirds in my entire life. Maybe fifteen. And only three or four at any given time. Here, there were over a hundred. I took it upon myself to refill the large feeders everyday.

It felt nice to slow down and untangle. To settle because there’s no time like the present.

When was the last time you heard that phrase, “There’s no time like the present”?

I wrote that in my journal earlier today and then thought about how it used to mean something entirely different.

When I was younger, my mom, grandparents, or a teacher might say, “There’s no time like the present” to mean “Come on! Let’s get it done because you need to learn time management and responsibility and I’m busy/tired/available right now.” The present or now was urgent. It was made to feel like a hustle. “Let’s get the grocery shopping done right now because I’ve got shit to do later and now is the only time.” The present was more like a small pocket of time that needed to be packed full because all other time would be, too.

Now, to me, “There’s no time like the present” means, “There is no past, there is no future, there is only right now.”

These days, I’m trying to unpack time, to loosen up all the shit jammed into a moment - like trying to untangle Christmast lights or the chain necklace I let get balled up in my jewelry box. You can’t undo it by pulling harder. You have to loosen the knot so the thread, rope, or chain can fall away from itself.

That’s why I moved to Missoula. To get into nature. To slow down. To get away from so many people. To loosen my knots. To fall away from myself.

To allow magic to fill the spaces in the present.

In Sundance life felt magical again. Perhaps it was the elevation. At the resort that was down the mountain from us, the elevation was 6,100 feet above sea level. Here in Petersburg, it’s 130. Since I’m writing from my second story office, I’m perhaps 144 feet above sea level.

Regardless, everything around us in Sundance was alive. Trees, rugged ground cover with delightful little flowers, purple sage bushes, and all those zooming hummingbirds. We hiked and ran trails. I sat outside to do watercolor. We kept the sliding door open to blur the boundary between outside and in.

My body felt good. My heart felt light. When I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw. My glow came from the inside.

Midway through our trip, we moved an hour away to Salt Lake City, into the land of the Mormons. The land of business and institutionalized organization. Of gym bodies and manufactured beauty.

Salt Lake City feels as devoid as its salt lake.

We were able to find areas of natural beauty, wildflowers, and dusty trails, though we had to run past the white, angular temple, visitor center, and horrendously ugly admin building to get to it.

The contrast was stark.

We spent much of our time in Utah talking about the church’s secrets, the trauma so many have suffered, and how each ex-Mormon deals with their own deconstruction.

There’s irony in the “magic” that Mormons pedal and believe in - like reading the word of God off gold tablets inside a hat, becoming a god one day, and earning your own planet after you die if you tithe enough - and yet, the church squashes anything natural like emotions, individuality, and curiosity.

My point isn’t to knock the church, necessarily, or to insult its followers. My point is that I’m not a fan of the Latter Day Saints and it crushed my spirit when I found out that this book I hoped to gain inspiration from was laden with funk of the church. I’m not one that easily separates the artist from the art or the creator from its creation. My every day, now, is spent dealing with some kind of fall out from how that church has hurt the person I love. I’m not about to knowingly and intentionally snuggle up with a book on imagination that was influenced and supported by a group that systematically crushes it.

So, I snuggled up with the book on gnomes. I made sure it wasn’t written or illustrated by a Mormon (it wasn’t - though Rein Poortvliet was raised Calvinist). My only complaint is the outdated patriarchy in the gnome world. Given the book was written in 1976 and the worst offense to my feminism is that the female gnomes mostly stay at home while the men have tool belts and adventures, I was able to find the right amount of magic and inspiration I was looking for.

At 3:45 PM, after reading about how gnomes get help from rabbits and moles to build their underground houses (turns out, there’s a great deal of work involved in digging out the passages, chimney & air vent, as well as the indoor water well and toilet), I closed my eyes for a nap.

Still hoping for obvious magic, I reset my intention in the hopes some sprinkles of something might rain down on me while I slept. My daydreams were disjointed, and I’m not sure how much meaning could be made from any of them. Earlier than I wanted to, I awoke because of the notification from an incoming junk email. It was 4:19, I felt a little bit better, but nothing magical had happened.

An hour later, my partner came home from work, we made eggs, sardines, and ramen for dinner, then sat outside to eat.

Being back in the humidity of Virginia after a delightful week in the dry air of Utah has been tough. Last night, though, we were able to comfortably sit outside, and it was good that we did.

The sunflowers in our garden boxes have been fun to watch grow. Each plant is well over 14-feet tall. Half of the heads are drooped and drying out. Others are still popping up, even on the plants that broke and tipped over from storms we’ve had in the past several weeks.

Early in a sunflower’s life, bees and other pollinators will bop around, finding little bits here and there. The dried heads, though, have attracted yellow finches. While we ate our ramen, we watched four of these little birds hopping around, chirping, and digging out the tasty sunflower seeds.

It reminded us of the hummingbirds.

Like I briefly mentioned earlier, I’ve recently started to lean into whimsy. It’s the magic I can make until I can get back to the place I belong.

Whimsy, for me, feels like intentional randomness and delightfully perfect imperfection. A striped top with a flowery skirt. Unconcerned hair. At the moment, no bra. Underpants with goats on them. An amethyst and citrine crystal pendant during the planetary parade and new moon, just in case.

I’ve even started wearing patchouli. What the hell is going on with me?

In some of my watercolor now, I enjoy drawing not-so-straight lines for leafy leaves, petaly flowers and mushrooms that may or may not be homes for gnomes and mouses. My pigment slips past the wiggly boundaries and sneaks into the space around it because in the grand scheme what really is the difference between the bark of a tree and the blink of a firefly’s butt? It’s all connected. We’re all mostly made of the same stuff. Why be so rigid about it?

In my experience, magical creatures live in the wiggly space where many adults have stopped looking. I’m tired of straight lines and staying within them.

Whimsicality, for me, is a personal act of gentle yet necessary rebellion. I’m the rule follower who runs when the crosswalk timer has “only” 10 seconds left. Attempting whimsy creates this general sense of worry that people won’t see me as a grown-up with life experience or won’t recognize my glowing intelligence.

What will people think if I use words like “petaly”, “mouses”, and “whimsicality”?

But wiggly, earthy, absurd whimsy feels real to me. It feels like ordinary magic. It’s what you would find if you opened me up. It’s what’s going on on my inside.

What’s outside, this circus full of clowns, is loud and fake and full of itself. It makes me want to open my front door a crack and scream out, “What the fuck is even wrong with you?!” and then quickly pull it shut.

Instead, I stand in my yard to investigate the shape of leaves and count the number of petals on various flowers. The purple ones that hang above the huge Hooker’s Green hostas have six petals that, when drooped upside-down, could make a lovely dress or perhaps the perfect rain hat.

Eventually I get around to loosely sketching them. Then I figure out how to capture them using only pigment and water. It’s interesting the rules I’ve placed on art and life, and the things that have helped me break loose. Artists I follow flick extra blops after everything dries - they could be bugs, dusts, tiny fairies, who knows! Those extra flecks, they feel magical to me.

~

While we watched the finches eat the sunflower seeds, I mentioned that we needed to stay up to watch the meteor shower. We agreed that would be the way to get the most magic out of the day.

By 8:30 we were in bed.

This morning, as I drank a glass of water to take my vitamins, I remembered that we forgot. By the time we went on our morning run, the meteor shower was over.

Oh well. Sometimes the magic is simply sleeping well so one as the brains to finally write a little piece about Mormons, gnomes, and everyday ordinary magic.

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