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Living my life looking for that Magic

I’m a big reader, I love books, I love getting lost in a story, and my fella is the same. Some of the books I read he’s not bothered about, and equally some of the books he reads I’m not either. But the other day he showed me a passage in the latest book he is reading. It was by an author I have never heard of – Robert R. McCammon and the book is called: ” Boy’s Life “:

 

” You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. “

 

 


 

When I read that passage it made me so happy, and sad, all at the same time. Sad because its so true, that the magic is in us as children, and bit by bit it is eroded and washed away by life’s experiences.

But it also made me so happy to read too, since it made me realise what I have been trying to do all my life, in the sort of paintings I have painted, in the sort of people I like to be around, and in the way I try to live my life. I like the magic, I like hanging on to it, and I like to pass it on to others in my artwork. Because, surely, we are all wanting reminders in our lives, of the magic, aren’t we?