Magical Catalysis

Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

—Roald Dahl 

Magic is much different than I once thought it.  Not an all-but-impossible thing, rare and hardly ever seen, but things themselves—a realization and appreciation of things in the world we inhabit, the world that inhabits us, magical as any childhood wizardry.

Just one example, from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:

“The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.”

image: NoteFromTheUniverse