… on magic (swan and otherwise)
May 02, 2018
When I was in New Orleans last week, I was so excited to see a swan gliding through the waters of Audubon Park.
Sure, maybe he – I believe he was a ‘he’ as it is spring and his protuberance seemed particularly swollen (I’m just showing off. The protuberance is that black thing on his beak, which swells in males during mating season. I imagine this is so the male can gesture, probably with his wings, “Hey ladies! Look at my ginormous beak blob! Aren’t I the dandy!” or something like that)… anyway, I’m going with ‘he’… where was I?
Oh… I was so excited.
Swan Magic is a thing.
Sure, maybe it’s the way they move. Or perhaps that they most often form life partnerships with their mates (when I was little, I believed they got married when the ‘mom’ and the ‘dad’ faced each other, and their necks made the shape of a heart).
My belief in Swan Magic might also stem from a childhood love of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling, which for me had exactly nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with belonging.
When I got home from my trip and saw the image above, I was bowled over once again with this particular creature’s beauty.
For maybe the bazillionth time in my life, I wondered how someone could gaze upon Mother Nature’s work and not believe in magic.
The business and craziness of our everydays often get in the way, I supposed, not for the first time.
And then I remembered a quote, by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson*, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland…
“You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.”
Yep.
So…
Pardon me whilst I continue to believe that a bit of magic has always been mixed – along with thoughts and hopes and perspirations – into the solutions of problems, smallish and biggish, and that it remains an essential ingredient for those yet to be tackled.
And I’m talking my problems…
And your problems…
And those of the world at large.
Because if we can look at a swan – or anything in nature – and see magic, how can we look at our fellow humans and not see the same?
Thanks for readin’.
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*Showing off again, thanks to Wikipedia and other sources that told me that Louis Carroll’s real name was Charles and he was a mathematician. I’m thinking he adopted a pen name because he tended toward nonsense math in his children’s writings and didn’t want to have to prove his work on scrap paper.