Isolation Journals Prompt:

What are the people, places, and things that make you believe in magic? The miracles in plain sight? Using parataxis, allowing yourself to move associatively, let images, sounds, and ideas accumulate in a list. If you’d like, begin with the line, “Believe in magic—how could I not?”

I’ve heard it said that magic is science that hasn’t been explained yet. The magic of wonder before the unexplained has been logically defined. That is the best part of my job. The fact that the bulk (the purpose, I say) of my job as an educator is to instill, to model, and to encourage wonder in the youngsters I see each day. As an educator, as an older student of the world, doing that keeps me at least feeling young. There’s so much to wonder about, so much curiosities and mysteries to pursue. 

I love watching birds. I love the sound of their flutter when they fly real close. I love their chirps and their song. You just can’t help wonder and ponder on the magic of it all. That tiny sparrow, with its delicate feathers, manages to flit from one branch to another. And when the birds get together, how magical it seems that they know where to fly together or around each other and not crash into each other in the sky as fast as the fly never in a straight line but almost on an invisible rollercoaster.

Oh, and the magic of fire. How a tiny spark becomes a roaring beautiful fire with its mesmerizing dancing flames. The colors, the curving shapes it transforms into and my goodness the power of its heat. How can you deny the existence in the magic of the miracle of fire. Explained or not, it is pure magic in front of my eyes and wood smoke smelling clothes – so worth it!

And then there’s plants. Having tried to grow many kinds of plants in our yard, or keep the house plants purchased on a hopeful ambitious whim alive, whoo! The miracle of seeing them to flowering stage or happy new leaf forming – if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. Even with the enormous plethora of how-to youTube videos or plant guides to assist in know exactly what I need to do to help my plants thrive, the magic is the “me” having the patience and commitment to see the seed to literal fruition. 

My childhood friend gifted us with a Meyer lemon tree in 2021 shortly after my father passed away. We managed to keep it alive since then, bringing it in in the winter, finally realizing recently that we should trim the branches more than we had been. Only this year, 3 yrs after it came to us as a single stemmed plant, it finally bloomed. If that’s not magic right in front of my eyes, I don’t know what is.