Friday, December 31, 2010

Thoughts That Stretch From One Year Into the Next

Guys, I feel so good right now. I don't know why. I'm not drunk. I haven't inhaled any illicit substances. The only drug I'm on is caffeine. But I feel so excited, like something big is about to happen.

It's New Year's Eve, so that probably makes sense, but past New Year's Eves I haven't felt like this.

Driving home tonight from seeing a movie ("The King's Speech" - SO GOOD), I looked at the rooftops of suburban neighborhoods all shadowy under nightfall and lamplight and I thought, "Magic is everywhere." It's not in some foreign kingdom, and it's not stuck in the pages of some book. It's everywhere.

G.K. Chesterton, a wonderful writer, once said this of George MacDonald, one of my favorite storytellers of all time: "The commonplace allegory takes what it regards as the commonplaces or conventions necessary to ordinary men and women, and tries to make them pleasant or picturesque by dressing them up as princesses or goblins or good fairies. But George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women. The fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside."

I believe that the world is full of magic. We're all of us more than what we tell people we are. More than our jobs or our roles or relationships. More even than our goals or hopes. You may be a queen under some kind of enchantment, a hero at a crossroads, the wise mentor dispensing advice to wayfarers. You may be in need of saving, or you may be the dragon someone needs saving from.

Magic is everywhere. There are doors leading to it all over. It's hidden all around us. It's hidden inside us.

And that makes me so very happy I could dance.

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