Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Unexpected Magic

Outside the windows, the light had faded until the sky is barely divided from the land, a whisper of blue so deep that it fades into black, its edges blurring into the darkness. The windows are open, last resort against the broken fan for the air conditioner that burned out over the weekend here in our offices, and through them the sounds of the highway and the students leaving for the night filter vaguely in.

And, for the first time today, I breathe deeply of the night-scented air and lean back in my chair under the harsh glare of fluorescents. Only one student remains, clicking away on one of the keyboards across the room, and I relax into the gentle rhythms of the music whispering out of the speakers beside my monitor.

Today was no different than a thousand other Mondays; the pressures of people and of promises crowding against me. I do not thrive; I cope. And yet, today, even here in the middle of the clamor of distraction and mundane reality, magic found me in the most unexpected of moments.

Generally speaking, I hate email forwards. They are the equivalent of annoying insects on a warm summer night. I love email as much as I love a nighttime walk, but I just can’t take the annoying irritants that seem to come with it. Several people have landed firmly on my junk email filter, and more than a few others have gotten replies headlined by the link to a snopes.com article telling them in no uncertain terms that their forward had the validity of the Weekly World News story about the batboy being found for the fifty-first time.

So when one of the college counselors sent me an email forward with a video attached, I was less than thrilled. My co-worker, however, urged me to open it; it was “interesting.” Dutifully, I double clicked. I found myself leaning forward, elbows resting on the desk, transported, for a beautiful moment away from the mundane, and into the world of wonder.

The film was a miniature gestamkunstwerk, performance art that moved me beyond my expectations, and certainly beyond the rational. It was the simplest thing; a woman drawing with her fingers in piles of sand over a lighted surface. The tools were crude to say the least: sand, a backlight, and ten fingers. But magic does not rely upon complexities, it relies upon the storehouse of wonder we lock away at puberty and upon our capacity to be touched by the beautiful and remarkable.

I watched as the artist’s fingers traced patterns into the sand, molding it, to the accompaniment of music, into a series of changing patterns, images of beauty that resonated with me, reaching through the endless demands of work and into somewhere more beautiful, more comforting, and more rewarding.

It was just a spark, just something that someone else might have found amusing or ‘neat,’ but for me, it was pure magic. Magic got me through to watch the sky fade into the Florida night, magic reminded me that it is not the complexity of the tools life offers us, but the beauty we create with them.

And, as the night settles in, turning the view outside our windows into an impenetrable darkness that simply reflects the room back to me, I turn back to the video clip, again caught up in the miracle that the flick of a finger, the turn of a wrist, can make such beauty, such possibility, and speak so clearly to me of what might be possible, if only I dare to try…

(the clip was from a website called sandfantasy)