Do you believe in magic?

Magic has been a part of my life since I was a kid. I remember watching David Copperfield on television and really believing in what he did. It was never about how he did it. It was about the experience of mystery. In a sense he gave me hope that there was more to life than the mundane. I must have been around 10 years old if I remember correctly. Now I'm 26 years older and I still seek out that experience of mystery. I enjoy watching people's faces as I perform and get a glimpse of that feeling - the shock to your system when you see the impossible.

So it's all an illusion? Perhaps, but a good performance usually points to something deeper. The illusions, or whatever you would like to call them, are just tools that allow real magic to happen. Real magic changes people. Real magic is about being able to see with different eyes, into a realm that is always there, but is easily forgotten. What we call 'reality' is the real illusion..

Think about this time of year, when we all spend money we don't have to get stuff we don't really need, singing songs we don't really understand. In the case of where I live, we sing about sleigh-bells in the snow in the middle of summer.
But behind all of that, the moon still shines and the world still turns. The trees still breath and nature is still and Present, while we try and find parking in a crazy shopping mall.

I have searched all my life to find real magic - to be able to connect with that constantly ellusive mystery. I'm starting to realise that it can be found by learning to be, that it's to be found by not listening to all the noise, but to tune in to the heartbeat and the rhythm of the Universe. To discover that I'm not other, but I am - connected and part of all that I percieve as around me.
The illusion is to see all of that as the mundane - when it is the real magic - and the very meaning of life.

My favourite times of day

Dawn and dusk are my favourite parts of the day. Just before the sun goes to sleep, or as the world is about to wake up. Whenever I've gone for a walk early in the morning, there is something about the freshness of the new day that makes me feel alone, but not a lonely kind of alone, but a peaceful aloneness. The air is fresh and loaded with potential and I feel alert and awake and aware that I'm part of something much bigger than myself, that I'm connected to this world that is waking up. I know that in an hour or two the world will be full of chaos again, the noise of traffic with everyone hypnotically following the beat of business. But for a while I'm at the place where the world was created and everything is new.

Dusk is my other favourite. That time between night and day, darkness and light and I feel like I can stretch out and touch another realm, the place where magic is alive. Between waking and dreaming, concious and unconcious, between matter and spirit, that which is thought to be real and that which is imagined. This is when I like to sit in my garden and half close my eyes, but not all the way. And as my eyes adjust I see the energy that is given off by the plants and trees, and I look down at my hands and I too am surrounded in moving waves of energy. Of course there's the skeptic in me saying that this is only because I'm squinting my eyes slightly, and it's probably true, but I choose to ignore it and enjoy the experience, and my imagination and the real world dance together.

More thoughts on belief

It's interesting that when I use the word 'belief', my immediate thought is about religious beliefs. While the whole idea of imagining I believe something different applies to religion, it also applies to other kinds of beliefs, for instance, what I believe about myself and what I believe I am able to do. I may believe that I'll never be a good writer. Now this may or may not be true, but unless I overcome that belief, I'll never know. So - how do I change that belief? One of the ways is to imagine that I can and then do what a good writer would do - namely write.
(This is one of the reasons I started doing this blogging thing)

Now there will always be some smart ass saying that if I pretend to believe I can fly and jump off a building - well you know how it goes.. hmm, but then again I will be in the air for the rest of my life..

Jokes aside, there are many beliefs I know I have that prevent me from 'reaching my full potential' (I hate that cliche, but i can't think of anything else right now). There are many patterns that have developed over the years, things that people that I respected have said, and the results that seem to prove these beliefs. While what I believe will most of the time be true for me, it doesn't mean it needs to be true. I can change.

That, by the way, is the lesson that bending a fork teaches me. Some things seem solid and unchangable. But if you look at it differently, they can be quite malleable and can quite easily change shape...

May the fork be with you ;)