Magic

 

How is it that an ordinary day turns magical?

Most of us live ordinary lives most of the time. Ordinary is pretty good. Ordinary is when nothing really bad happens and lots of mostly small good and not particularly memorable things happen. Sometimes, from day to day, I barely notice that much of anything is really happening at all. I’m just living life. And then, what do you know? It’s spring or something. But I do have to say that it is my good fortune to live a pretty good ordinary life.

And then, suddenly, without warning, I find myself out of the ordinary.

Here’s a story to tell you what I mean. Magic itself is hard to describe, so this story is mostly about the moments before the magical moment and then after the magic has melted away.

** 

On one reasonably warm afternoon I was sitting on a low rock wall just off the north end of the Kaw River Bridge. I looked down at the river running though this patch of the planet that I have come to know well.  Across the way, the levee trail cut in a straight line across my view and then it bent, heading downstream and out of sight. The still bare trees hiding the horizon were beginning to show hints of green. I could almost smell spring, but not quite taste it. Spring was late in coming this year.

Below the trail, the limestone boulders on the face of the levee were essentially their normal color. Under today’s hazy sky, the rocks were a sort of reddish beige. The river rippled along between the levee and the far bank. The day was quite windy. The river reflected the sky as it always does. The interplay between sky and wind and river remains a continual fascination for me. Always changing and still very much the same.

I watched the turkey vultures circling high against the sky. They were soaring with hardly any apparent effort on the updrafts coming off the levee face. Everything was quite satisfactorily beautiful. It’s all just a piece of the simple beauty that I have come to expect to see in the various places where I wander up and down the river. Walkers and runners and bikers passed by me as I sat on the ledge. Presumably they were enjoying their day as I was. Most people would have agreed, at least, that it was a nice day.

I had tried making a few sketches of the scene in front of me with disappointing results, but I was not really disappointed. The drawings really were more a kind of exercise, another way to practice seeing what I was looking at. The river is my frequent subject. The river, really a wider area without clear boundaries, has become one of the places where I like to be. It is interesting to me. It is beautiful. It is a place that is not really about me at all and yet I belong here. The everyday river, an essentially ordinary wonder, is enough for me. But it is also in this place that I sometimes glimpse magic.

After thirty minutes or so of sitting and watching, I was ready to move along. I was on a bicycle that day and I rode off downstream along the levee trail. I rode along the line that I had been looking at just a few minutes earlier. Down below from where I was easily peddling I could see islands of rocks and sand dividing the slow current of the Kaw River. I remember seeing a woman holding onto two dogs on the trail. One of the dogs pulled towards me as I rode passed, and the woman pulled back. But it was only a small mark along my way that day. The world was as I expected it to be.

I hadn’t decided how far I would ride. I had no better place to be for the next few hours, so I simply rode along the top of the levee, both seeing and not seeing the world around me. Seeing everything is simply not possible. The natural world is much too rich for that. But without attention, much of the world becomes a kind of background. A blur. But I usually pay enough attention to see some of the beauty around me. It was a nice day.

And then I spotted a good-sized silver ball down among the levee rocks. Now, that silver ball was indeed out of the ordinary, but hardly magical. Still, I slowed to a stop and then I walked my bike down a nearby gravel path to a small grassy area between the levee and the Kaw. I laid my bicycle down and carefully made my way across a short stretch of limestone rocks. They were just large boulders, reddish beige in color in the hazy sunlight, haphazardly tumbled in front of me. I watched my steps and my balance.

The silver ball turned out to be larger than it appeared from the levee trail above, quite a bit bigger than a basketball. I picked it up. It appeared to be a thin-walled chrome ball, somewhat dulled from the weather and deeply dented in several places.

I had my device along with me so I set the ball back down on a rock and took a few selfies with me reflected in the ball, the trees growing along the river stood in the background of the photos. I made my way back over the rocks and began to amble. I had been in this place many times before. There was a slight trail to follow as I neared the river.

Through a tangle of mostly thin tree trunks and branches, I could see the broken pilings of a railroad bridge that crossed the Kaw about a hundred years ago. The river was low. Spring rains would be welcome

The river – this stretch of the Kaw River and the river bank – is as it is and always changing. That is also how human beings generally experience almost everything that is. Things are familiar. Things change. The world waits for any of us to see it as it is and as it is becoming. And once again, for me, this particular place held out its everyday beauty for me to see.

After watching the sunlight playing on the surface of the Kaw for a while, I turned to walk back to my bike and the levee. 

And now how else should I say it? I simply turned - and then the ordinary world disappeared.

It didn’t happen in an instant. But within a few gradual moments it was as if I entered a kind of enchanted tangled river bottom forest. I lack the words to describe the sensation. Nothing had apparently changed, but I felt as if I was no longer in the familiar place that I knew. I saw a majestic, rough-barked tree with downed limbs around it. The tree must have been growing there for a hundred years. Other trees stood around as sentinels. Large vines as thick as my arms were twining up the tree trunks. 

And beyond all of my transfixion was the pale reddish beige of a hazy sunlit levee. I had seen it all before. It was all entirely the same, except that now it had become wholly magical. I existed within a moment of timeless wonder.

Perhaps I broke the spell by then taking a few pictures. But the magic is not really like that. The magic is not about me at all. I think that I must simply pass through its spell. Or perhaps the magic passes through me. The enchantment is neither bidden nor unbidden. Perhaps I might miss experiencing the magic if I haven’t opened myself to the possibility, but I don’t make the magic. It appears.

I suspect – it is not much more than a hunch, really– that the magic – or whatever you want to call it - is always everywhere. And then sometimes, somehow, I become aware of its presence. I get just a glimpse 

of the magic and then I come back to my life.

And magic really isn’t the right word, either. I don’t think that there is a right word to describe this rare experience. And I so have told you what I can tell.

It was just this: I was tramping through a perfectly good ordinary day, and then I was somewhere else. And then, some moments later, I was back. But I am here to tell you that there was indeed something like magic in between one ordinary moment and the next.

I did take a few pictures, but really only to mark the day. And afterwards, I walked my bike up to the levee trail and rode back towards the bridge. Everything looked just as it had before. The rocks on the face of the levee were still a pale reddish beige. The hazy sun had settled closer towards the western horizon. The magic hadn’t changed anything. Perhaps my experience of magic changes me.

I write now from my recollection only. For only a moment or so it was as if I awoke within something quite extraordinary. And then I was just riding my bicycle back along the levee trail towards the bridge.

And I wish to add this. Looking carefully at life and opening yourself to the natural world might be a way of approaching the magic. Annie Dillard has been one of my guides in this exploration of the mystical within the natural world. I encourage you to read her accounts of similar experiences in ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.’