Magic in the Air

22Sep08

Happy Monday, everyone!

Seriously.

I know, I’m being that annoying cheerful person and of all days on a MONDAY. But I’m sitting in my rocking chair, facing the large (unfortunately filthy) picture window in my living room, abstract, angular shapes painted across the blond hardwood by my favourite artist, the sun. I’m surrounded by happy green plants, singing chicadees, the sound of water from the fountain outside on the front porch. The air is crisp and cool, like the first bite into a hard, juicy Macintosh; it colours cheeks and provokes deep intakes of breath, soft eyelids flutter and close.

Yes, I sound like a Disney cartoon. But the portent of autumn always makes me feel alive. It’s the time of year when I feel most keenly, too, my love of books and all things literature, probably because it’s when I used to start going to authors’ gigs and festivals in fairy tale hamlets like Eden Mills, and when I’d begin to curl up with longer, heavier, more substantial tomes like Kristin Lavrensdatter and The Lord of the Rings and Anna Karenina and Al Purdy’s complete poems, accompanied by tea and wool socks and sweater and a flannel blanket. Exotic tea packages (Cloudberry and Crowberry from the arctic, spiced winter tisane from England, Autumn Blush from India) still nest in books on my shelves.

Reading so many writers’ blogs and immersing myself in the publishing world as I insecurely (I know, Alex!) labour over this ebook, passing through bookshops the way a lover lets fingers trace curves, reading good fiction and poetry —

All of this above is the reason for my mood this morning. Lucy curls like a comma on her cedar-filled dogbed in a sunbeam, the kettle has just clicked off, and all over, publishers are making beautiful books; writers are — right now! — entering magic worlds in their imagination, eager fingers rapidly clicking keys. And as long as writers write and want to share it, I’m happy.

My friend Marie, a very talented, published writer, penned this inspiring tidbit a few years ago:

Every wardrobe opens onto Narnia. A little sneeze past the mothballs; a little toe-stubbed stumble over the forgotten rollerskates … a step … into that other world. It does not need to be imagined alive by us; it is always there, just there. We must imagine ourselves alive enough to perceive of it.

Like an unidentified chocolate truffle holding promise, Marie’s morsel is mouthwatering to me. There is magic everywhere, in the most minute details, in the real world, in the grandest of ideas.

To all you writers out there:

It is here. The time is now.

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