lovely story / very personal and you included your daughter !! i too feel the danger and the finality of things (my father the baptist preacher used to preach about the apocalypse from the book of revelations) / it seems to me we are going thru a portal as a species and as a tribe / this will be a communal experience of some sort / we will all be changed by it / there is the adventure and the mystery / your daughter is perceiving the world as a magical place full of possibility and so do i / portals abound
I’m not a religious person, but it’s funny, I think all the time about what we miss as a secular society in terms of mystery, and how people really need it in some form. (Magic and mystery, not religion.)
yes i agree that's why i mentioned the medieval solstice celebration and the magic of House music in my recent podcast / there was a lot more mystery and magic in the world back then and we have wrung it out and dried it in the sun (the mystery and magic) to make it more usable it seems to me but music can definitely conjure some up
Ooooh gosh, Amber, I've been thinking about these same things - the loss of magic, the attempt to retrieve it - so much. It's part of why I return often to certain books that I read as a kid that *do* have some kind of sticking power, at least for me (Ella Enchanted, say, or Little Women, or the Chrestomanci series, or Tamora Pierce's books). They help me find that feeling again.
But meanwhile, as an adult, I also find myself relying on the writers who are good at putting mystery and magic of some kind on the page and who are good at discussing it too to help me recapture this.
Thank you for writing about this, and for this beautiful essay, and for being a person in the world.
lovely story / very personal and you included your daughter !! i too feel the danger and the finality of things (my father the baptist preacher used to preach about the apocalypse from the book of revelations) / it seems to me we are going thru a portal as a species and as a tribe / this will be a communal experience of some sort / we will all be changed by it / there is the adventure and the mystery / your daughter is perceiving the world as a magical place full of possibility and so do i / portals abound
I’m not a religious person, but it’s funny, I think all the time about what we miss as a secular society in terms of mystery, and how people really need it in some form. (Magic and mystery, not religion.)
yes i agree that's why i mentioned the medieval solstice celebration and the magic of House music in my recent podcast / there was a lot more mystery and magic in the world back then and we have wrung it out and dried it in the sun (the mystery and magic) to make it more usable it seems to me but music can definitely conjure some up
Fabulous. Hit all the right notes. Eager for more…
Ooooh gosh, Amber, I've been thinking about these same things - the loss of magic, the attempt to retrieve it - so much. It's part of why I return often to certain books that I read as a kid that *do* have some kind of sticking power, at least for me (Ella Enchanted, say, or Little Women, or the Chrestomanci series, or Tamora Pierce's books). They help me find that feeling again.
But meanwhile, as an adult, I also find myself relying on the writers who are good at putting mystery and magic of some kind on the page and who are good at discussing it too to help me recapture this.
Thank you for writing about this, and for this beautiful essay, and for being a person in the world.
Aw, thank you for reading it - and YES to Diana Wynne Jones and the books that still do hold reliable magic for adults, too ❤️