I had decided to look for a magic moment every day while we were out there. For me, magic is a feeling of amazement, wonder, or enchantment – something you might not notice if you weren’t looking for it. So I opened my senses up to the possibility of magic.
And oh, my! The magic moments piled up. There were streaks of emerald green in the turquoise blue water: magic! The sunsets: magic!
The tide came in, the tide went out, never stopping. What a wonder! A pod of porpoises jumped out of the water as they passed the kayaks our kids were in. Wow! Wow! Wow!
We managed to get family photos in which everyone looked pretty good – not only magic, but a miracle! Pretty soon, you couldn’t help but see magic all around you.
Now, if you believe in magic, and are on the lookout for it, your mindset changes. You get back in touch with that little child inside of you for whom everything is amazing, wonderful, and worth checking out. Fun is the name of the game. Do you remember that little child you used to be?
Do you know where your inner child is now? Has it been a while since he/she’s been invited to come out and play? It certainly has been for me. Oh sure, sometimes I set aside a play day for myself, when I try a variety of quilty things I wouldn’t normally do, just to see where it leads. But too quickly that becomes serious business. I begin to insist that it has to result in something, don’t you know? Something good, of course, something useful I can incorporate in my next piece of art.
It was about a week into my practice of looking out for magic when the inner child popped up big time. The campground was empty – all the neighbours were gone. The sun was shining brightly and the water was sparkling. I’d just stepped out of the shower when I spied my big straw hat lying on the bed. As I dried myself and pulled on my capris, I started to giggle. That hat reminded me of “Calendar Girls” – a movie about women of a certain age who decide to pose for a pin-up calendar to raise money for a worthy cause. They stripped for the camera, using flower pots, balls of yarn, books, cooking pots, whatever to cover up the “naughty bits.”
I checked it out: yup, that straw hat provided enough coverage. Maybe, with the campground being so empty, this was my big chance to be a calendar girl myself. I appointed the RS to be my photographer (I won’t repeat what his reaction was, but he did it, anyway. He’s my hero, indulging my fantasies.) Hat in hands, I posed in front of the ocean and had my own private calendar shoot.
Why? Why not? Who knows why I did it? Maybe my inner child that day wanted to feel the sun on her bare back, to feel the breeze caressing her shoulders. Maybe my inner child wanted to be free for a bit, to thumb her nose at the strict guidelines that are laid out for old ladies. It was such a little act of insubordination, but it reminded me that it had been too long since my inner child had lured me into letting go and having fun, hang the consequences.
In his book Whistling in the Dark author Frederick Buechner points out that the differences between 8 year olds and 80 year olds [or between 7 and 70] are not as great as we might think. He writes: “Second childhood commonly means something to steer clear of, but it can also mean something else. It can mean that if your spirit is still more or less intact, one of the benefits of being an old crock is that you can enjoy again something of what it's like being a young squirt.
Eight-year-olds like eighty-year-olds have lots of things they'd love to do but can't because their bodies aren't up to it, so they learn to play instead. Eighty-year-olds might do well to take notice. They can play at being eighty-year-olds for instance...
Another thing is that if part of the pleasure of being a child the first time round is that you don't have to prove yourself yet, part of the pleasure of being a child the second time round is that you don't have to prove yourself any longer. You can be who you are and say what you feel, and let the chips fall where they may.
Very young children and very old children also have in common the advantage of being able to sit on the sideline of things. While everybody else is in there jockeying for position and sweating it out, they can lean back, put their feet up, and like the octogenarian King Lear "pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies."
Or become a Calendar Girl for a while.
Since 2013, the year I turned 65, it’s been my practice to create a self-portrait every year, reflecting where I’m at in my emotional and spiritual life. I had another birthday recently, and now I have an idea for my self-portrait. I’ve got an outline, now I have to fill in the blanks. Stay tuned!
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