The Magic

This month, nature heals us

August, in all her sweltering heat and vibrant life, reaches out to revive us, like an old forgotten garden that had been left largely untended for the last ten years. At first, it may seem that much has died off in this time, but on closer inspection, there are buds and vines that are still alive. Nature, in all her maternal love, reaches out to us, to come back into communion with her. She invites us to reclaim the summers of the inner child, colored by the imagination. To push our hands against the soil as our mothers once did, with curiosity (and more impatience) at what might grow. Never knowing that as we frolicked through our yards, the Magic (as written of in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett) was working itself upon us. When our hands stained yellow picking dandelion bouquets, or we scraped a knee climbing a tree, or sat on the sundeck watching the fireflies emerge at night–these were moments of true presence and awe of simple wonders of life. The child’s mind knows the wind and the trees to be good friends, and brings interesting knobs of wood and rounded pebbles home out of fascination. It is held enthralled by the scent of jasmines and magnolia trees, and holds out until nightfall for the moonflower to open her petals at last. It remembers that we fit perfectly into a natural space, that wonder and the imagination and play is our natural state. Our purpose is not as elusive as it might seem. When we allow ourselves to reclaim the fullness and Magic of this understanding, we too are transformed into something wild and healthy and vibrantly blooming. 

This month brings me on a pilgrimage through ancestral, maternal lands that have summoned me for a second time. There seems to be a theme of revisitation, with different people and circumstances. Though I do not know what new things may await me in familiar spaces, I hope to approach them in a new light, recognizing the Magic, or life force, that courses through all.

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