How I Know That Magic Is Real and That Our Spirits Are Eternal
I delight in scattering packets of joy throughout the world for strangers to find
As I slid into the family car, I noticed how the warm rays of the morning sun had illuminated the gently floating dust motes. They blazed with a muted but magical energy as they drifted across the console. It was as if a miniature, slow-motion fireworks display had been ignited just for us.
“Look!” I said, drawing the attention of my infant daughters. “Fairies! A procession of fairies is marching through the car!”
“WHAT?” my daughters said, leaning forward to have a closer look.
All of us, together, including my wife, sat in silence and watched the dancing parade of fairies for a time. It’s one of the fondest memories of my life. My girls radiated joy and I felt as if I were in the proximity of two infant suns.
The waves of innocent wonder they emitted resonated in my soul. In that moment, I had a thunderous epiphany. It felt like a cage door had swung open to allow a gust of sweet, fresh air to caress my face. In that instant, I realized that magic is real and we’re surrounded by it. All we have to do to experience the full, spectacular beauty of life is to open ourselves to the ever-present wonder of the spirit.
I leave packets of magic scattered throughout the world
It’s a habit of mine to leave out treasures for other people to find. The other day, my daughter came across an old photo.
“What should I do with this?” she asked, sensing it was of value and not wishing to throw it away.
“Go to the library, and place it within the pages of a random book,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because that way, sometime in the future, somebody will open that book and find that picture and be delighted by the discovery.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“Then the picture will be in a safe place forever,” I replied. She still regarded me with skepticism, so I explained, “I do this all the time. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. Imagine, if you go to a library many years from now, and you open a book, and you find a random picture, you might think to yourself, ‘I wonder if my daddy put this here?’ Isn’t that a nice thought?”
“I guess so daddy,” My daughter said. Then she ran off to go and find a place to put the picture. I sensed that she didn’t fully understand the objective of the ritual, but she will.
Of this I’m confident, one day she will.
The story of the frustrated napkin
It delights me to scatter packets of magic for other people to find. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to be there when the prize is discovered. But that’s just an added bonus, for me, the joy is in the making.
I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. I do it by habit now whenever I have a moment to myself. I guess it’s like putting messages in a bottle and sending them downstream. But we don’t always have a bottle… or a stream.
I was awaiting some friends at the college cafeteria. Finding I had a few moments to myself, I grabbed a napkin from the dispenser. In an elegant script that I’m capable of when I really try, I wrote:
“Do you think I wanted to be a napkin? Do you think I wished to spend the entirety of my existence trapped in this dark container, waiting for some buffoon to spill his apple juice upon the counter…”
I finished the note and stuffed it into the middle of the dispenser. By the time my friends arrived, I’d forgotten all about it.
The discovery
There were two girls, Becky and Brook. Becky had a cold, so she kept grabbing napkin after napkin. We’d been chatting for about twenty minutes when I heard her go, “What the heck is this?”
She’d found the frustrated napkin!
I remember her face as she began to read the message. Her eyes went from puzzlement to hilarity. She began to laugh so hard that she started to cry. “Listen to this, listen to this!” she said excitedly. Then she began to read, “Do you think I wanted to be a napkin…” She could barely get through it because she was laughing so hard. She had to gather herself to get enough wind to speak the last few lines through her laughter.
The confession
When the time was right, I admitted that I’d put the napkin there. I explained that I had left it for some random strangers to find, not her. I didn’t want her to think that she was the target of a practical joke. She thought this admission made less sense than if I’d said nothing.
“Wait a minute, you just leave bizarre messages like this around for people to find? Do you always do things like this?”
“Well, they’re not always messages,” I said. “It could be a lot of different things.”
“Oh my god!” she said, and began to cry with laughter again.
Later, when she got up to leave, she took the napkin with her.
Letters from the tooth fairy
My daughters have a special relationship with the tooth fairy. They have been corresponding with her for quite some time. They leave out long letters, and the tooth fairy always provides delightful responses that sometimes require further explanation.
Once we’d assembled enough of these letters from the tooth fairy, my daughters asked me to use them as the basis of a story. So, three nights a week, I compose and read three pages of what’s become a very long manuscript.
The tooth fairy is at the center, but the story has expanded into multiple books that cover most of the magic in the world.
The chapters have been collected in a stack of three-ring binders that sits on the shelf in my daughters’ room. I believe there is something over 1,000 pages now. It turns out, the family dog sometimes leaves to accompany the tooth fairy on her adventures, who knew?
The fairy parents who lost their child
In one of her adventures, the tooth fairy meets an orphaned autumn fairy. They travel together for a time, and the autumn fairy is eventually reunited with her mother.
“But where is my father?” she asked.
“Your father went to look for you.”
As I read this story, my youngest daughter was curled up in the nook of my arm. I could feel her breathing as I read the words. The story absorbed her.
“When you were lost, your father went to find you. He left his body behind. He traveled through the universe. He focused all of the energy of his existence to be with you and he succeeded! If you only think of it, I know that you’ll realize that he was always there. Didn’t you ever turn your cheek to the heat of the sun and feel the comfort of its warmth upon your skin? That was your daddy’s loving caress. Didn’t you ever feel a stir of the spirit at the touch of an autumn breeze? That, too, was the encouragement of enduring affection. Didn’t you know that there is no distance of space or time that can prevent either your father or me from finding you when you need our support? We will both be there, always, whenever you need us. You just have to know where to look.”
My daughter was captivated when I read this and she wiped away a tear at the end. We shared a memorable hug before she went to sleep.
My greatest spell is yet to come
The passage where the orphaned autumn fairy finds out about her parents happens two thirds of the way through the 4th book. This is the most beautiful and best hidden photo that I’ve ever stashed within the pages of a text.
My hope is that many years from now, when my daughter has children of her own, she might stumble across a memory that compels her to read the fairy stories of her youth to her own kids. I expect there will be much within the story that she does not remember. When she gets to the story of the orphaned autumn fairy, she’ll experience it both with the memory of youth and within the context of adult understanding.
I expect that will be impactful in a very nice way.
What I’ve tried to do is place a love letter out in the universe for my daughters to find. Just the potential that they might experience it as I hope is enough to bring me joy.
Our sense of reality is fashioned from our memory. If you can plant the seed of an idea, it becomes as real as anything else through the passage of time. It’s a delight, to me, to sprinkle packets of fairy dust throughout the world. Some of these packets are eternal, and therefore so are we.