Magic all around us

 

An old grape vine sending support to a new young one

Humans are fascinated by magic tricks. I too enjoy them for fun but when a trickster puts on a holy garb and pulls out a few gold coins from thin air, a trick that most any street magician can do he is sure to create a few new religious disciples. Later after many years when they discover that they had become religious disciples of a fraudster they feel very angry. But do they have anyone but themselves to blame? They were so gullible as to be fooled by a few silly magic tricks while a great magic plays around us all the time that we fail to notice.

Can there be any greater magic than the sunrise and sunset that takes place every day or the movement of the stars or the very processes that create and sustain life every moment of our lives. What greater magic could the Almighty have created? Nevertheless, failing to notice that, we are ready to be taken for a ride when a rabbit is pulled out of a hat.

There is magic all around us if we just open our eyes. In a corner of my garden there is an old grape vine that I planted some twenty years ago. Grape vines are wonderful around homes because they shed leaves in winter to warm a house and shade it in summer to keep it cool in perfect timing with the seasons. Their young new leaves make lovely Greek dolmas and the grapes are a delight especially for children and birds; and grown ups too if they know how to change it into wine. Last year I noticed that the old vine is less vigorous then it used to be,  perhaps because of age, and planted a new sapling next to it. The idea was that it could climb up the old trunk and no one would notice the difference. The new sapling was some distance away and it was in my mind to tie a string on it after it grows up a bit to guide it towards the old vine trunk. Today morning as I went to put seed out for the birds in another corner of the garden, I noticed that a piece of bark has stripped away from the old trunk and fallen towards the new young vine, all by itself with no intervention by me or any other human, just at the right place, so that a string will now not be necessary. It is shown in the photograph. It is a sleight of hand by the oldest Magician of the universe, the Almighty who is throwing star dust all around us at all times to sustain life every moment of our lives, but only if we care to notice. Vincent, a fellow blogger calls it a numinous presence rather than a luminous one, quite rightly so because as He creates light, He also creates dark so that the darkness may be separated from light.