everything is magic

When I was a kid living in rural North Mississippi, literally on a farm, I would spend many hours entertaining myself by running barefoot through the countryside, chasing lightening bugs, rabbits, cats, or whatever else I encountered while playing. When you are a kid, it's all magic. The moon. The stars. The lightening bugs. The way that sharp kitty claws are concealed in their little fuzzy paws. Happy Meal boxes. The way my feet turned black from running barefoot. Air conditioners. Everything was magic. Not in the Harry Potter sense, but that it all existed outside the grasp of my childhood intellect...I lacked the understanding, the syntax, or the mechanics to wrap my oversized noggin around it. My imagination filled in all the gaps with fantastic voyages of spaceships, muppets, dragons, warriors, robots, and whatever other bits of art that I had consumed to that point...these were the syntax and mechanics of my child mind.

As I got older, I traded magic for fact. And you can never trade it back. Or can you? I was taught two very different takes on why I exist and how it is that I am sitting on this rock looking at my stained feet in the first place. One, religion, says magic isn't real because God is the only true supernatural force in the universe. The other, science, told me that magic isn't real because what we consider to be magic is just that which we lack scientific understanding of for the time being. Science says God doesn't exist. Religion says science is deceiving you and undermining faith. As a child, you have no idea what to believe, but if there's one thing both agree on, it's that magic doesn't exist. Indeed, we are taught that at a certain age, to think of things in terms like "magic" or "supernatural" is to behave childishly. As if that were a taboo in and of itself.

How can you as an adult fight through all this conditioning to get back to place of pure joy and wonder in the world around you. The things that are just so awesome that you can't really wrap your head around it, even when you have an intellectual understanding of how it works. Can the world ever be magic again? 

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