On Magic...

For those of you patiently waiting for my promised followup to my blog on muses...here it is, and it's all about magic. Forget David Copperfield, Kreskin, Houdini--mere illusionists. Once you know how their tricks are done, the magic vanishes. Harry Potter--fictional.

I'm talking about REAL magic. The kind of magic that, the more you know about it, the deeper is your wonder.

Consider the carrot seed.* Have you ever seen one? Dried up, tiny--almost microscopic. Lifeless, it would seem. Yet that seed takes the sunshine, earth, and rain and turns itself into a delicious, colourful, healthy, crunchy carrot. In that dried up speck is not only all the information needed to grow a carrot, but all the labour needed to make it happen.

A carrot--enabling you to imbibe the sunshine, taste the rain, and become a part of the vibrant world in which you live. Can it get much more magical than that?

Consider the elusive origins of your thoughts and inspiration. Magic.

Contemplate your night dreams. How is it possible to be surprised by your own dreams? How it is that you don't know what will happen next, what's behind the closed door, what words will next be spoken? How is it that you don't know how your own dream will end?

From where do the characters in your dreams come? Complete with bodies and faces and voices and personalities. Strangers--doing things you've never seen done, asking questions you've never asked, giving answers you did not know. Magic.

Wonder about rainbows, and sunlight, radio waves, and love. Cherish your own origin.

Believe in magic...

Eileen Schuh,
Canadian writer

*When the heroine in my Back Tracker series, a young genius and an atheist, is dealt a tragic blow, she finds solace in her memory of Grandma Buckhold's lesson on the magical carrot seed. More info on this series is posted on my website. The Back Tracker Series


www.eileenschuh.com