Janet McNeill

<August ‘08>

I’ve written elsewhere about my sensation of being the wealthiest woman in the world. I feel this way for a variety of reasons, I suppose – none of them having anything whatsoever to do with money – but one of them is surely that I am simply a “cheap date,” as it were. I take joy from a hundred things other people don’t even seem to notice.

I see magic everywhere.

For example, to me, gratitude is magic. The more I work on and practice active gratitude for the many blessings of my own life and Life itself, and the wonders of this amazing, wondrous beautiful Earth and Universe, the more I seem to open up to a whole range of other magical phenomena.

Conversation, for example, I find, is surely also quite magical. It can never be predicted or directed or made to go where one has meant for it to go – most often veers wildly off any pathway we’d planned for it – and it too opens things up wide. New thoughts and inspirations are sparked and memories are triggered and whole new avenues of possibility open up. How many times have I had a spark of inspiration for a new project as a result of conversation? Many! It’s magical! (For me, writing is much the same. The pen gets into my hand and gets on its way, and away it goes! Out come all kinds of unexpected thoughts and ideas…)

Silence and solitude are magical, too, I think. They’re spacious and wide and opening – and the thought is coming to me, as I write this, that all of these magical things – the things I’ve now long conceived of as “everyday magic” – are opening things. So the thought as I write this is that magic is about opening. Life is about opening. Closing up – being all closed up – is a form of death…don’t you think??

Well. Other magical things…

Walking is definitely magical. One foot in front of the other, destination unimportant – eyes and mind open – and oh, the things that arise! Ideas, gratitude for the beauty of the Earth – sudden solutions to problems rising to the surface, quite entirely unbidden and un-asked for. Peace. Expansion. The feeling of endless possibility.

Laughter! Friendship! Singing!! Talk about opening – we’re wide open when we sing – wide open and empty and also simultaneously full – filled with endless joy and possibility…

I once began a list of examples of “everyday magic” and in the act of writing it found more and more of them as my hand raced across the page, and what I realized too, as I wrote, was that all of the examples can be seen and understood to be magical, because each one has the potential to be transformative.

Even simple friendliness! The sun shining down on us – a friend or neighbour or even (especially!) a stranger being friendly to us, out of the blue – greeting us with a smile. For sure, I’ve felt the tone of a day change entirely when someone I don’t know has greeted me with a smile and a friendly “Good morning!”

Ah yes, apologies. Utterly, utterly magical and transformative at times. And again, so opening. Breaking up blocks and hardenings and encrusted resentments.

Honesty. Honesty and openness. Omigoodness, eh? If only people could begin to be more honest and open – not walking around all the time harbouring a million secrets and lies (our society seems to me to be built upon secrets and lies – holding a lid down firmly on our potential, or so it seems very much to me). Now, it’s easy for me to say this, because in my case it’s my (Aries) personality that requires me to be open and honest – perhaps too much so, at times, or so it appears, I think, to some of the people in my life….

Resentments are something many of us seem to harbour a lot of – and I think when we learn to do some of the aforementioned magical/transformative things on a regular basis, we also learn to “let go” – yet another magical, transformative, opening-up activity – and since holding onto lots of resentment makes us miserable and hunched and grumpy, it’s definitely magical to learn to “let go” and dump the resentments. They make us ill and miserable, so who needs ‘em???

Well, I reckon I could go on here some more, listing more examples of what I conceive of as “everyday magic,” but I think by now you’ve surely grasped my point. Magic is about transformation – and about opening – and there is plenty of it all around us, once we open up our eyes to it. In fact, the magic is infinite – because that’s what transformation, magic and opening show us. It’s an infinite Universe, so the potential is also infinite. Our potential is infinite. We are infinite!

Holy smokes, eh??

Janet