Maples And Magicians

Are you listening closely? I have a secret for you.

And it is the best kind of secret, secrets of the arcane.

For those willing to hear, willing to listen, I’ll share it with you.

Come and listen, my friends, as we venture to the wellspring of earthly magic: the Chicago suburbs.

From the curb, our home looks like a very classic American suburban home: lined grass, landscaping intermixed with native flowers because I’m a sucker for the bees and lightning bugs who dance like fairies, and inherited mismatched windows to remind us that it’s still a fixer upper. We love it. It is home.

But it’s also a beacon of magic.

I asked if you were listening closely, are you?

Because if you were to walk around the back to our deck you’ll find two towering maples lining its edges. They’re fine specimens each, one with leaves of bright green, the other with leaves of a deep red wine. Both well manicured and with an expansive canopy that probably hangs too close to our house for my wife’s liking, they provide an excellent refuge in this summer heat.

That would be enough to write home about—after all, how is such majesty, impossibly rare as it is in this universe, not imbued with magic?

Alas, that would be too simple; these humble trees are so much more. Maybe it’s too many daydreams of walking through Lórien manifesting in my adult brain, but I believe, nay I know these two trees to be pathways to lands of might and magic. Lands that so many of us mere mortals seemed to have forgotten existed.

I happened upon this pathway to the arcane world by chance, as I imagine most great witches and wizards, warlocks and sorceresses do. One such adventure might constitute a fancy, perhaps even a hallucination. Since modern sensibilities have imbued me with a healthy degree of skepticism, particularly in those topics which are metaphysical in nature, I did not stake what remains of my sanity on a single such journey.

Logically, as the modern mind does, I replicated the results of my initial experiment. Much to my simultaneous surprise and expectation, my little reproduction study yielded the exact same results.

Armed with such arcane knowledge and a predisposition to share such knowledge for the good of the masses, I will thus pass on such knowledge to you, my humble audience.

I ask again if you are listening closely. Are you?

There’s a very small, miniscule really, moment, that this portal opens and those with an eye can see into another world.

On a spring day, not too warm but not too cool either, in the waking moments after an overnight rain before the sun gets too high, if you stand at the base of one of these great maples, you can enter a magical world simply by looking…up.

For the briefest of moments, before the denizens of this magical arbor realm turn their attention to their daily whims, the branches above buzz with the chatter of their foreign tongue. In those waning, ever fleeting moments, you catch a glimpse of Gaia’s sons and daughters as they hop from branch to branch, awake and alive on wings more splendid than any angels. You catch a glimpse of an almost alien home, as they rustle away the night's rain, chatting happily as if they were neighbors in some long ago New York Burrow stringing laundry across an alley. It’s a world attuned with itself, focused solely on the solitary moment they inhabit before they depart for their hunts, for their nest building, and for whatever far flung branch they will perch on today, no mission other than to exist.

As I watch, a voyeur in their wondrous lives, I am forced to reflect on what other miniscule moments all around me also contain such magical portals, and why do I, at times when all seems overwhelming, choose to ignore them? For what other quest could be more important?

We’ve all heard the lines.

“Heads down, pencils up.”

“Heads down, get it done.”

“Heads down, don’t make a scene.”

I’ve always been told to keep my head down. Always.

Maybe things would be a little bit brighter if instead of an endless chorus of “heads down”, someone took a moment and said, “look up”.

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A/N:

Welcome to my office. Enjoy my wonderfully grating voice. #Onetake

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