strange magic
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Yo! Please open me in a new tab or in substack because this post is “too long for email”
Hiiii it’s me, Sophie!!
I wrote the first part of this essay over a month ago, and have edited parts since, which is why the timing is way off! Ultimately, after almost scrapping everything I wrote, I re-read it and felt like I had something more resolved to say, so I’m sharing that here today.
Welcome back to Daily Enjoy!! Happy to be here! : - )
Conceptually, the idea of March altogether was predestined to fall flat. I decided I was personally over it before it even began, therefore it didn’t feel right and it was too cold for me. Self-fulfilling prophecy??? Manifestation??
I’m so happy right now because April has felt purely majestic in all of the weird secret ways that March never could’ve. This is not a metaphor for anything. I feel affected!! I feel at least 30% happier doing anything!! Walking to the market to get a beverage!! Checking my mailbox!! Waking up in the morning!! Laughing!! The sun in part has made it happen, but I can feel that something new is in the air already. In an energetic sense.
I was thinking about how to talk about the feeling for the past couple of weeks, and then, right in the midst of the dance floor, “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush came on, and miraculously, it truly felt like I was hearing the song again for the very first time.
“I just know that something good is gonna happen, I don’t know when, but just saying it could even make it happen…”
What!!! I was spinning, I was feeling aqua and magenta inside, ecstatic! It’s hard to put spring into words, but every year it returns, like a distant acquaintance materializing back into my life. I was dancing and listening Cloudbusting, and I was feeling the intensity of potentially her spirit when she wrote the lyrics, and I decided I was receiving a special energetic message, an intention from Kate Bush in that moment.
I felt it all because I’ve felt it many times before and will many times again. I try to think about how special it is to have a moment in which others around me are hearing the words or the melody and responding to it through dancing, what a weird way to express yourself! There’s not many other ways to let these feelings out other than writing them here and it kind of comes off sounding confusing or cliche, but I don’t care!
I felt the magic in the room the other night when Cloudbusting came on and ever since then I’ve tried to ride that wave of euphoria into my everyday life. It reminds me of the unhinged note I haphazardly wrote to myself in the notes app of my phone after a night out with friends last summer. Lol.
Maybe a little all over the place. But I’m hoping a shred of this rainbow feeling I’m trying to communicate comes through. It’s not reserved for nights out or dancing or drinking only, which I feel like I mention frequently here in conjunction with the feeling of freedom. Often, in those moments I feel like I can let loose and feel like the most carefree version of myself, and I feel more present than usual. I started thinking about the connection between feeling present and feeling carefree recently, in that I’ve been spending a lot less time “out” and more just chilling by myself, but feeling more carefree (in a happy way) than I have in a long time! It could be the weight of not carrying any drama related to heartbreak in my consciousness, or the simplicity of feeling like I can see parts of the future a tiny bit more clearly lately. (FYI I recently committed to going to law school here in Richmond so I know where I’ll be this fall! And I’m feeling super really excited about it!!! Please connect me to your law friends!!!!)
Anyhow the subject today is MAGIC. In whatever capacity you believe in it. It’s what I’ve been thinking about, well, a lot in the past couple of weeks. I’ve been thinking about what place and form magic takes in my life, how it…dare I say….manifests? The thought occurred to me this week that I’ll never get my time back as it keeps passing, so I might as well enjoy it and invest it in myself in exactly the ways I want to. That means being kind to others and considerate, but also living only for myself. I’ve written here before about how when I’m starting to believe in slightly kooky things like superstitious “signs”, etc, again, it becomes a slippery slope of thinking everything means something it might or it might not, and the road to me telepathically communicating messages to others through my brain starts to become more and more real to me. Not totally clear on where I stand on the reality of whether or not you can telepathically communicate, and I’m definitely still superstitious. But I’ve realized that passionately believing in these things as guiding me, when they take up brainspace and dictate my choices, doesn’t feel healthy for me. And is really just an undercover way for me to believe that exerting psychic effort aka labor lol will change my life in ways action might be more effective at.
My obsession began when I started getting these strange astrology post/psychic predictions showing up in my twitter feed— messages for the signs:
I got a little *too* into them, the confirmation bias ringing in my ears, the voice of my gut quieted momentarily inside my mind. Often these tweets come adorned for readers to “only take what resonates” which, in that case, I’ll be resonating my ass all the way to financial abundance, true love and harmony in my career!
I visited Joshua Tree for the first time recently and was so affected by the peace and silence, barren-ness of the desert and the wind. Naturally, I had to get some lucky crystals as a souvenir. So at the Joshua Tree Rock Shop I picked out what spoke to me. I always love rose quartz but I found this amazing stone called Angelite.
So the question in particular I’ve been pondering is…when is magic fun and when is it not?
I love the idea of trusting in some benevolent force, guardian angels that guide me throughout my life. It’s a spiritual thing I can think about, even trust in, that makes me feel less alone. I’m not sure that I believe everything in life happens for an exact reason, but I can stay open to experiences that mean something to me, cherish friends and those that are kind to me and take any joyful moment as the freedom inside me. Something lately in the air feels very loaded with insight, magic, tranquility, love and positivity. I’ve been carrying my stones everywhere with me like a security blanket, laying them out like precious tokens on the counter at work, the table at the restaurant, by my head while I sleep.
When I was younger I distinctly remember standing on one of the twin beds in the room my sister Lydia and I shared, and praying to God that if he was real, if he really loved me and was magic and real and good, he’d grant me the ability to fly for a mere moment when I jumped off the bed, as some sort of proof of his existence that would give me bragging rights. Of course, it never worked and so I was left to different devices to contact those from another spiritual realm.
Next, my magical obsession came out through me desperately wanting, needing contact with fairies. So I wrote letters to them, left them honey and gifts out on my front porch, in good faith that they’d respond. I really wanted to write to the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the forest fairies and just figure out how they got it all done. My parents wrote back to me a couple times, which feels endearing now. I love the magic of believing in some divine force that makes time to write me, a mere human (lol), a note and accept the gifts I’d left.
Continuing in my majestic journey, I recently re-read the first book in a series that I loved in elementary school, called “Zenda”…the covers are camp lol !! It’s all about a girl who gets a magic gazing ball on her 13th birthday, and the ball will reveal to her a special magical power she has. What I got from re-reading this book was really just a sense of nostalgia for a past self that truly believed in magic, which ironically, I feel I’m slowly returning to as I age.
So, maybe the point isn’t the end result of a belief in magic or any magical ritual resulting in any actual tangible “thing”… I still believe in magic and that magical, unexplainable things can happen in life, which makes living fun. So, ironically, when I focus too hard on the fortune-telling aspect of magic, (assume the future is concrete enough to even be told) all the fun goes away. What’s been the MOST magical lately is honestly the opposite sentiment, which is to enjoy how much life is surprising me, and how unknown it all is, how much I have changed and will change. The not-knowing really is source of magic. I’ll never get concrete answers! Every person and experience and part of my life is a part of me forever that I carry with me in my heart. And I have no idea what’s going to happen or even what COULD happen tomorrow! That’s what I’m so excited about!!!!!
Thanks for being here,
Lovingly,
Sophie
SophE’s Picks This Week:
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Read her writing in the New Yorker and then her memoir Priestdaddy, and this book brought me to tears it was soooo good. 5/5 stars! I love the way she writes about life and emotions and tbh I haven’t really read anything else like this before! If you love poetry, humorous/sentimental writing and internet humor you’ll enjoy this. Also the cover is super awesome.
Check out my vlog! Lol I’ve been trying to document things in my life using videos because i love them so much and I have somehow un-ironically turned into a vlogger. Watch if u please : - )
Waking up early (7:30-8:00am is my perfect wake-up time. Would love to hear what yours is, seriously)
Drinking a Coke with breakfast. Yep!! Every once in a while it jump starts your day
The complete soundtrack to Spring Awakening the musical and!! the new documentary on HBO that just came out about it. If you’re into theater or are an ex drama kid like me, or you just love friendship!! HIGHLY recommend watching! Jess and I watched it together and it made us both soooo emo in the best way. Also it really helped me dive into my new king and 90s crush Duncan Sheik. LOL
My king These satire stickers I saw at the roller-rink lol
Hi!
Magic! Yes–delightful. As with so many other things in life–spirituality, alcohol, exercise, nicotine gum–my relationship to and perception of magic has shifted and waned, swollen to massive sizes or disappeared altogether, and just as the former examples exist regardless of my pursuit, so does magic and magical energy. My first experiences with magic are the standard childhood trials one goes through, making mud potion in the driveway or concentrating on something long enough to find a coincidental proof of my own powers (i.e. making a certain song on the radio play or racing raindrops on the window of my dad’s mint green Ford Explorer), eventually convincing myself that the yellow tulip I planted at the side of my family’s home was hosting the spirit of my dead grandmother. I spend so much time trying to evoke this openness of childhood, when you leave the house ready for the world’s surprises at any time and everything feels special. And I don’t think that children are this way because they have less knowledge or experience. Or maybe I do? Because when you’re in a state of so much being new it’s easy to recognize the aspects of each individual thing that makes it unique. When a child sees the world they see our reality plus imagination used to explain something that is wholly understood by the average adult person, creating a metaphysical realm for their own sense and theory. I spent a year working in day care and know that it’s so exciting to be given access to the magical headspace of a child that it’s hard to resist enabling, and I get why parents tell their kids that thunder is God farting, or keep up the Santa charade after all these years. I, too, like to play similar little games with myself like not knowing how electricity works.
hahahhahahahhah what I was def never told the god farting thing but that’s hilarious lmao - S
This sense of wonder fades of course, at least it did for me, beat down by judgement and societal pressures and the horrors of adolescence. Adulthood is left seeming bleaker, grayer, with everyday enchantment feeling further out of reach, requiring effort to harness it and pull it through the cloud of worry and responsibility. It’s hard to transcend beyond the limitations of reality when I still have to do my taxes! But with the requirements of being a functioning person existing in the world come the agency of being able to put anything out in to the world that we choose. I don’t believe in the flying in the air sort of magic, I never did, but I do think that there are unexpected pleasures to be generated if we open our minds up, and be intentional about what energies we send out into the universe, the cultivation of our surroundings and the way that we treat those we encounter. I don’t believe in the commodified version of magic, in which it is bestowed upon a select population or set of individuals, but rather in a divine communal pool. Something we all can drink from; a universal supply that is available to anyone that wants to invite in the opportunity for something really special and maybe slightly unexplainable!
Many of the people I work with, mostly developers and business analysts, spend their days thinking in if-thens. For example:
IF I go to the kitchen
THEN I will make my sandwich
But error states demand the small nuances to be cared for as well.
IF I go to the kitchen
AND pickles=false
THEN I will not make my sandwich
I digress and hesitate to even leave that example in here because I don’t like it BUT that’s the frame of mind I’m approaching this next theory with. Because in machine learning the output is entirely dependent on the input, and everything that happens in between is inferred from input after input after input, the same way our own knowledge is accumulated minus things beyond technology like emotion. Not so much a theory, actually, but really just my own realization that life’s input → output is receptive to anything I choose to give it. And I know that there’s a higher likelihood for something truly great if my inputs are love / kindness / enthusiasm, because they feed into the algorithm that exists to produce whatever is coming next year, tomorrow, and 15 minutes from now.
pickles=false!!!! - S
I’m excited for a seasonal transition full of unexpected things and surprise friendships! Hope you all have things that you’re looking forward to.
xo
jess
More Things I’ve Been Enjoying Lately
I saw a man in a red convertible listening to this song outside of the barbershop he owns and it send me soaring!!
he says you’re gonna fly away // glad you’re goin’ my way !!! woah <3 <3
and another song bc this is what I want to be listening to all summer
♡♡♡ And Finally, Happy Happy Birthday to our Beloved Subscribers ♡♡♡
Liza, Cid, Ren, and Rae!!! We love you
