Where is Magic?

Notes across the pond.

This is Notes across the Pond, my collaboration with Maia Toll.

Maia lives across the Atlantic in the fairy coves of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I live in what she describes as ‘some wonderfully foggy place in the U.K.’ (also known as the Cotswolds). We are using our Substacks as pen-friends, exchanging a series of postcards in a written conversation about magic. (You’ll find the first postcard here.)

Maia and I are taking it in turns to publish a postcard and response—so you can follow along here, and also on Maia’s Substack: {un‧kempt} with Maia Toll.

Here’s Maia…

Dear Laura,

For the past month I’ve been thinking about your note, hoarding magic moments to pull from my pockets: the border collie that led my retreat group unerringly through the treacherous bit of a hike in Ireland; the answer to a question found on a Perugina chocolate wrapper half buried in my back garden. I’ve thought about the podcast I wanted to tell you about, the one I listened to after the one about fascia.

And then I awoke a few days back to a WhatsApp from my sister in Israel:

We are fine.

It’s never good when she needs to message we are fine. I tapped the icon for The New York Times: Hamas had invaded Israel. Israel was promising to rain down destruction in return.

My pockets suddenly felt full of nothing more substantial than fluff. In the face of war, what is the point of this thing we call magic? Can a Palestinian mother feed her baby with it? Will a line of salt across a threshold keep out a man with a machine gun? Is the sister of my niece’s friend, who was kidnapped and taken to Gaza, going to do a spell to secure her release?

This is not the first time I’ve pondered how privileged we are to be able to believe. To feel like the intentions we set have a chance of coming into fullness. To be able to claim some sense of self-sovereignty in this wild and untamed world.

As these thoughts were rolling through my mind, a realization crystallized: I was calling two very different types of things magic. The first type of magic was serendipitous and mysterious, it was made up of moments that led to a frisson of connection and the sense of being a part of the larger pattern of life. My role in this first type of magic was that of the delighted observer. The second type of magic moved me from observing to attempting to create: it was when I used intentions and rituals to try to put my imprint on the world. This second type of magic is a more difficult dance because when I put my intentions into the world, they are mixed into a giant cauldron of other people’s intentions and desires, all vying to come to fruition.

A myriad of other thoughts and more subtle distinctions flowed from this, more than I can write in this already overlong postcard.

But the important thing is this: the first kind of magic? It exists everywhere, all the time. It is not afraid of war, and kidnappings, and the ugly underbelly of the human race.

Thinking that made me look up a book I remember from my childhood, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. It’s a collection of drawings and poems by children in the Terezin Concentration Camp.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

-Pavel Friedmann

I needed this reminder that the fluff in my pockets was dandelion seeds ready to be blown to wishes. I needed to remember that we can find magic even in the most dire of circumstances. And that magic can find us, even when we’ve lost hope.

xx Maia

P.S. This is a photo from my trip to Scotland which was magical in so many, many ways

Image by Maia Toll

Dear Maia,

I was so moved by your words. The world has been filled with dreadful spiralling horror in recent weeks and for your family, and countless others, it has drawn far too close—I’m sorry.

Like you, I’ve been wondering where, in a world like this, can magic be found? You describe two kinds of magic: the first a magic of serendipity and connection, and the second a magic of intention and ritual. This distinction is helpful to me, because whilst the second kind of magic is your domain (you’ve spent this past week hosting Witch Camp), my experience so far has really only been of the first kind. Your explanation of magic as making us feel a part of life’s larger pattern reminds me of

Dr Sharon Blackie

’s wonderful book The Enchanted Life (a much-read copy of which sits on my desk). In it, she writes about how through myth, fairytale and folklore we can experience ‘a world in which humans are fully enmeshed’—because the old stories are a way of pulling us closer, into the web of the world.

I spent last weekend in a location I adore, one rich in folklore and fairytale—Dartmoor, in Devon. To help me find my way, I packed both an Ordnance Survey map, and a copy of a gorgeous Folklore Map that covered the same area. Dartmoor is a vast, largely unpopulated National Park—at first glance the Ordnance Survey map of the area might appear almost empty, but looking closer you see it is a landscape teeming with history and significance: there are disused quarries, ruined cottages, stone circles, hill forts, a Roman station, a coffin stone. The Folklore Map teems too—with ghosts, pixies, witches and wisht places (a Devon word meaning eerie or uncanny). My children were fascinated by this, thrilled at the sense that there could be another, stranger realm overlaid across the paths we walked. During our rain-soaked, rainbow-scattered stay, I experienced the skin-prickle of connection time and again, and I think they felt it too. I know that if I could offer them one gift, it would be to feel enmeshed—to know that they too are woven into the web of the world.

Then last week, having shared a post about our trip, I received an unexpected email from my ninety-year-old Grandma. She told me that as a young man my beloved Grandad loved to wild camp on Dartmoor:

‘He’d pack his old service back pack /no tent. I would drop him off on edge of moor. Home I’d come to await his phone call. That could be in 1/2/3 nights time. His joy was to sleep under the stars! If it rained he’d have built a bivouac - a skill learnt when called up in 1945!’

I received my love of Dartmoor as an unknown—but now treasured—inheritance and I offer that same love to my children, for they too are more tightly bound to that misty, mystical place than any of us realised.

In those ancient places where we walk in the footsteps of those who came before us there is magic buried deep in the land, but horror lurks there too. Folklore tells of enchantment and wonder but also of murder and misery. They have always existed together: horror and magic, darkness and light. I want to believe that magic can cut through darkness, like the sudden rainbows that arc across the turbulent Dartmoor clouds. I sense it in the ground below me and in the skies above me. Now that I have started to look for it, I—like you—see it everywhere.

Laura xx