The magic that is patiently waiting

After weeks and weeks of feeling pummelled by the daily news, I continue to root myself in the land, walking with quiet attentiveness, senses alert and heart open, despite every impulse to close myself down. I will not add to the voices of anger that seem to be everywhere right now, nor will I fall into the silence of sorrow. Quiet attentiveness is not silence; it's a form of deep listening, an important part of the alchemical process of art-making. Of healing. Of changing, and of making change happen. Without connection to the magic of the natural world, I cannot do my own work in the world -- and so I walk, and listen. And then I go back to the studio and write.

In an interview in Paris Review, the late American novelist and essayist Jim Harrison said:

"Antaeus magazine wanted me to write a piece for their issue about nature. I told them I couldn���t write about nature but that I���d write them a little piece about getting lost and all the profoundly good aspects of being lost -- the immense fresh feeling of really being lost. I said there that my definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness.

"Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it���s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don���t mean just to reality, but to what���s exponentially possible in reality. I don���t think, for instance, that M��rquez is pushing it in One Hundred Years of Solitude -- that was simply his sense of reality. The critics call this magic realism, but they don���t understand the Latin world at all. Just take a trip to Brazil. Go into the jungle and take a look around.

"This old Chippewa I know -- he���s about seventy-five years old -- said to me, 'Did you know that there are people who don���t know that every tree is different from every other tree?' This amazed him. Or don���t know that a nation has a soul as well as a history, or that the ground has ghosts that stay in one area. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction..."

"A living, speaking, real landscape is always full of magic," writes Sylvia Linsteadt. "Magic is the language of elk as they speak to each other through the fog. Magic is the way granite forms over millennia, the way murres lay green eggs. Magic is the sounds of tall grasses in the wind. Magic is the way fog is formed. Magic is the stories people leave behind in the places they inhabit, the spirits, ghosts and gods they talk to. Magic is the towhee poking about in the dirt for worms and seeds, singing her own peculiar tune."

"The world is full of magic things," said William Butler Yeats, "patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.''

The quote by Jim Harrison (1937-2016) is from "The Art of Fiction No. 104" (Paris Review, 1986). The Sylvia Linsteadt quote is from "Of Otters and Words With Roots" (The Gleewoman's Notes, July 2012). The poem in the picture captions is from New & Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, 1993). All rights reserved by the authors. The drawing above is by Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825-1916).