everything is magic
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 3:45PM ;)
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.
I stuck with religion through college, but all that I had learned succeeded in putting too many cracks in beliefs I held dear as a child. I didn't believe in much of anything, and to me this was just unacceptable. So my whole adult life has been spent trying to recapture that lost magic. I turned to film, books, music, games, art and other human expressions of that which can't be explained. I've even crafted some of these things myself as a way to exercise my imagination. Then I began to devour tons of scientific information in the form of articles, documentaries, and visual representations of how the universe "works." Science Fiction got close, but even that existed outside of what I could see and touch on a daily basis. Carl Sagan got closer, articulately and philosophically painting pictures of the cosmic awe. He made it almost spiritual to me. I deeply revere the man and his mind, but the picture...the connection to life itself remained incomplete. The search continued.
It wasn't until recently that I actually attained some portion my lost sense of magic. It came through an artistic expression in the form of a film. Last year, director Terrance Malick released a film that didn't really capture my attention at the time. The film, The Tree of Life, seemed like another hard to grasp arthouse film with a disjointed narrative with far too much impressionism. But recently the film was released digitally and on Blu-Ray, and I gave it a try at the suggestion of a friend. It was one of the best recommendations that I've ever gotten.
The Tree of Life is a film expression of the existential questions that conflict within us throughout our lives. Told from the perspective of a boy growing up in a Texan, Catholic family in the '60s, it asks these questions directly to God. And God answers. Through science. The film cuts from this intimate family drama to scenes of the universe's creation, to the molecular and cellular sparks of life in the primordial. It shows that there is majesty and wonder in the smallest particles of matter to the largest galactic structures. We see how incredible the events that lead to us being on this rock contemplating the existential truly is. It gives a glimpse into how tiny, insignificant, rare, and miraculous each life on this planet is ... from the smallest leaf to the tallest tree. It tells us that there is magic, or God if you prefer, in everything all around us if we only open up our eyes to see it.
The day after seeing the film for the first time, I looked up at the sky and I wept. I don't do this often. Not for loss. Not for tragedy. Not for anything. This isn't a point of pride. I wish I could cry more often, in truth...I just don't. But a sense of awe washed over me when I looked up at the expanse before me, and it was completely overwhelming. I could not contain the feeling that I was so small, and so insignificant, yet not alone. Never alone. In that moment, all the science that I had learned seemed to confirm that there was something bigger than myself, or humanity. It was love, warmth, compassion, and an interconnectivity of every organism on this planet with the cosmos itself. This wasn't necessarily a vision that was in any way related to what Sunday School taught me, but the perfection of it all pointed me towards a moment of faith, nonetheless. The mechanical devices, the micro-machinery, the chemical, the cosmic particles within us that are as old as the universe itself...all these things pointed to a structure that seems too perfect for random chance. I thought about my own mortality and of friends and family long gone. I thought about cosmology, physiology, psychology, philosophy and and every other ology. I thought about my cat, fireflies, trees, and the breeze on my face being generated by that perfect, boundless sky. I could only thank whatever hand was at work in the creation of it all, even if it was simply the function of blind chance. Whatever the case, it exceeded my understanding, and felt like something else entirely. It felt like magic.
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Interesting Stuff Related To The Magic of The Universe...
In addition to The Tree of Life, I recommend checking out some of the things I've posted below to blow your mind at how incredibly awesome the universe and all life in it truly is. From the micro, to the macro.
Micro:
This just absolutely blows my mind. There are tiny little molecular-level machines comprised of amino acids that actually have legs. Legs. Legs with which they tow things around like a little delivery system within a cell, marching along micro-filaments connecting chromosomes and other sub-cellular level structures. While only one of the variety, there are hundreds of thousands of these little guys working in each of the 20-50 trillion cells in your body. And each of those cells have purpose-driven functions, comprising organs that have specific functions. All in concert to give us life. I've been fortunate enough to be relatively intelligent, but this is beyond me.
Macro:
Hubble photo into section of deep space...there are 100s of billions of galaxies in our visible universe.
This is a great 2 min video on the universe's scale. Consider that our sun and its solar system, which is so great that we've only begun to explore it, is only one of the 200-400 billion stars in the milky way...and the milky way is one of 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe...and physicists theorize that there may be many universes. Now, think about the little micro-machine above that's towing around that sack of protein within one of our body's 20-50 trillion cells. Mind=blown.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos - a PBS show from 1978-1980 based on Carl's book of the same name. What a beautiful and adventurous spirit that man had. Also, I highly recommend Contact, a film based on the book of the same name, which explores the political and religious implications of discovering that we might not be alone in the universe, while also touching on the themes of forces and mysteries of the universe that are simply too big for us to understand with science or religion. Magic. It is my all-time-favorite science fiction film.
And then there's this, because it's awesome. If all teacher's could inspire like this, we'd have an entire nation of scientists.
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