The following post is part of what I hope will be an ongoing writing exercise that my friend Kathy and I have decided to undertake together. We are currently choosing topics from a list of prompts that can be found here. I intend to use a varying array of writing styles and techniques, and to limit my editing. Therefore many of these posts may not look anything like the rest of the stuff I write on this blog. I’m okay with that, if you are. I invite those of you with blogs of your own to participate with us! But if you’re not into it that’s okay too. I’ll title these posts differently so they are easy to skip past if you wish to do so. And as always, thanks for reading!

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What is magic?

Is it that sleight of hand that conjures fluffy white flying hopping animals into the world? A black hat and a black wand and a black art? An anti-gravity, anti-science anti-religion? Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in that guy who ties himself up in ropes and chains, inside metal boxes and under water? Do you believe that someone can make an entire building disappear? Is that the definition of magic?

Or is that a bad definition, an incomplete description, a made-up phenomenon that paints an artificial gloss onto the world that already contains so much magic that we cannot see it through the horrible shine? Is it that the word alone has been coated in glitter and rolled down onto the Las Vegas Strip so many times that the meaning has become polluted? Cheap. Like a pair of six dollar rhinestone hoops on the ears of a lonely stripper moving slowly through the middle of a rowdy bachelor party. She is the eye of the storm.

The storm is a gray and black diversion from beauty, and it is its own beauty, brooding and moody. An artist at the apex of his singular genius, he bellows and hurls cloudy passion across a page.  As the storm yawns its end, the flowers bend back up to the clearing sky in relief. They arrive in colors that man cannot fabricate with chemicals and light. They vary at will, they wander as the wild do. And once they arrive, they will never return. They come and go as they please, they live, they stay, they learn to love.

They fall in love. They fall to the fate of that most hallowed emotion. They now know the worry of loss and the profound haunting fear for another. To a child, to a sister, to a lover. They know the true pain found layered deeply within the heart of elation. They know the joy of the view from the top is worth every step of this retched climb. They know the heart of a runner grows full as a tree in Spring, each soft leaf glowing from within, each tiny branch growing mighty by the strength of its elders. It is a metaphor of our evolution, and it is magic.

It is magic.

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• Magic {Prompted} (riverramblings.wordpress.com)