Magic in the Moments
What magical moments have we overlooked?
Sometimes we overlook the simplest opportunities for pleasure because they aren’t familiar or they just aren’t on our radar. Other times we don’t afford ourselves these little potential bits of joy because they seem silly.
But when we take a chance and invite something new, there can be the simplest magic.
My mom had a bonfire waiting for us the night we arrived. The blazed danced out of the redneck firepit. An old washtub carefully attached to the body of an old lawnmower (this one is green and yellow – a sign every farmer knows to be John Deere). The redneck firepit is a gloriously whimsical, completely versatile and clever thing, despite it’s upcycled oddness.
How amazing that my mom can literally roll her firepit to wherever she chooses! I wonder if she’s ever had a fire in the garden. I think it should happen. Why the hell not.
It’s those why the hell nots that make my mom so amazing. And I think she is a beacon in many ways for how to live your life in the present.
My boys were excited to get to hang out with grandma by the fire – it’s a favourite place. Quiet, relaxing, and peaceful. And after the laughter and smores, and magic coloured flames that grandma gets special for them after they’ve cooked all fire-foods of choice (they still love them after all of these years!), they snuck off to the house to lose themselves in their phones.
We adults sat and enjoyed more of the evening. As we sat talking gently, and my mind wandered to the stillness of the night. But for the crackling fire, there was perfect stillness in the night – and yet everything was in motion.
I looked to the sky in complete wonder. The sky was clear and the stars were a sheet of tiny lights inviting is to notice them individually, as constellations, and then as part of the magnificent sky as a whole.
I left my mom and husband by the fire, and walked to an opening in the yard. Further out among the parked cars, camper, and cargo trailers, I felt the sweetness of the night wrap around me. The heatwave we’d been enduring meant the night air was still heavy with the warmth of the day, but in that darkness, it felt like a pool of refreshing comfort.
I looked up in awe and was reminded of a time in grade 6 when my friend Dawn and I had a project of stargazing for school. Every night for seven consecutive nights we were to go to the same place and map several different constellations. Every night after dark my mom took me to their farm and we scurried out wrapped in jackets and blankets with hot cocoa and sat in the cool lawn with our maps and flashlights and tried with all our might to find the consellations above. Little Dipper, Big Dipper, Cassiopeia. Orion’s belt over the shed to the east, twinkling down on us.
I don’t remember what we mapped, but I do remember the friendship, wonder and awe that we shared. And I remember thinking about all of those amazing stars and planet so far away, just balls of gas and dust and fire – not unlike each of us – and feeling such a small part of something so magnificent.
Of course my 11 year old brain processed it as “cool” and “fun” and I think by the end of the 4 days I’d bought into the rhetoric around the classroom that it was “boring”.
This I know: it left an imprint on my soul.
Standing in the darkness again, only miles from where Dawn and I did our stargazing so long ago, I realized there was nothing – nothing preventing me from having that same experience now.
I called to my mom and husband, and invited them to join me. I wanted to share the magnificent drink of darkness between us and the heavens. As they approached, I could see them both pausing with appreciation.
My mom admittedly walks out into that darkness nightly, but I wondered how often she paused to look up.
We stood for a few moments, noticing the familiar constellations, the ones that seemed to create patterns, and good ol’ Orion’s belt. And noticed how beyond the ones that were bright were even more.
Stars for forever.
I asked her, “When was the last time you laid on the ground and gazed up at the stars, Mom?”
She laughed.
Approaching her 75th birthday, she is love, laughter, and life personified. She is committed to her daily walks, gardening and quilting. But her greatest passion is those she loves. She is one of those women that simply chooses to make every day rich and fabulous and then finds it. She doesn’t wait for it to find her.
And so, when she laughed and said, “Never!” it took but seconds before she was laying on the grass next to me.
In the damp grass with my mom holding one hand and my husband holding the other, we relaxed into the ground and fell quiet. The stillness was so safe, comforting and peaceful. The air’s descent into cooling was refreshing. And the darkness between our hearts and the stars seemed to be both forever and miniscule.
This stargazing was for us. In the moment.
I felt pure gratitude to have had this first with my mom, and to be able to rest under these stars with her knowing that every day, every night, since my birth, she and I had been under these same magnificent stars. And that my husband, while only having been married one year, I have shared these stars with him for my lifetime as well. These same stars that Dawn and I peered at 36 years ago, and the same stars that generations well after us will bask under.
Admittedly, I felt a ping of sadness that I hadn’t done this with my mom before this very moment. But then I realized that this moment was when it was meant to be. Had I known sooner, I would likely have invited her sooner. But this was the time. The right time.
A magical time.
We stayed there under the stars for a few minutes, and I don’t know what we talked about, but I do know what I felt. Connection. Presence. Love.
For the moment. For it all.
My friends, what joyful experiences have you been waiting for?
What joyful moments are in your beautiful, magical, magnificent, juicy future?
Whether for you, or to create a shared memory, the time is now to step out into the wild beautiful world and do the things.
And, if you’re grooving on the stargazing idea, there are magical places all over the planet that have been identified as dark sky stargazing locations. Check them out!
Create and embrace your moments, Sister!
Love,
Tanya
