What's the opposite of magic?

Trying to find a word for this past week

I found a lot of magic in October.

I word it this way because it felt very much like an active choice. It didn’t just fall into my lap; it was a decision I made. I could just as easily have not found any magic at all, had I not been looking for it.

By magic I mean awe, wonder, enchantment, the numinous: a state of feeling in connection with and humbled by something larger than yourself. In my last post, I wrote about quitting my steady job in favour of the unknown, having ultimately realised that I wanted to build a life with time and space in it to look for magic. Well, now I do have more time and space in my life, and I’m doing my best to use it wisely.

I found most of the magic in nature. I went out for my morning walk every single day, which sometimes led me to sights like this one:

I gathered and pressed some magnificent autumn leaves, which seem to have been particularly colourful this year:

I made regular trips to my favourite enchanted place, Epping Forest on the London-Essex border:

And for the first time ever, I acknowledged the glut of ancient late-October festivals that honour the dead. I’ve only ever really known about Halloween, and pretty much always dismissed it as a frenzy of commercialism and disposable plastic. But this year I learned about the ancient Christian festivals that follow it, All Saints Day and All Souls Day (which also coincide with the Mexican Día de los Muertos), and Samhain, Halloween’s Celtic precursor, the point in the year at which the veil between this world and the ‘otherworld’ is said to grow thin.

Samhain,

Katherine May

explains in Wintering,¹

was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds, and between two phases of the year, when worshippers were just about to cross a boundary but hadn’t yet done so. Samhain was a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn’t know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold. It was a celebration of limbo.

I love this paragraph because you could pretty much borrow it wholesale to describe my life right now. I’m between careers and at an age where I need to make a decision pretty soon about whether or not I want to have a family. I don’t know what’s coming next or where I’ll be this time next year, but I’m trying not to hurry or panic. It’s a limbo phase, a moment of transition, and I’m trying to celebrate it—to lean into it without wishing it away, to soak in its spaciousness and find out what riches it holds.

So marking Samhain felt symbolic on more than one level. It also felt like the perfect opportunity to scatter the jar of my dad’s ashes I still had on my bookshelf. I took them to the aforementioned forest and distributed them in little hollows, in gaps in the moss, in the exposed root systems of fallen trees, in the spaces under piles of decaying wood. As I did so I thought not just about him, but about the other people I have lost.

It sounds like a sad thing to do, but it wasn’t. It felt expansive and meaningful, especially to be doing it somewhere so full of both life and death. All around me, fungi were consuming dead wood, taking it back into the earth. I admired a huge dead oak tree that looked like a spiralling pair of antlers and another one that looked like a totem pole. The forest reminded me of the fact that death is everywhere, all the time, and always has been. It doesn’t always have to be a source of fear or despair. Sometimes it is beautiful and majestic.

A few days later my mum came to visit, and we took a walk in the forest together. She said she’d like to see some of the ashes I’d scattered, if I could remember where any of them were. But I couldn’t find any. And we agreed that that was as it should be—that really, they were not meant to be found.

So October was slow and thoughtful, intentionally imbued with a lot of meaning. But then, of course, came November.

And with it, other kinds of limbo. The day of the US election, or a ‘liminal space of a day’, as someone I follow on Instagram aptly dubbed it, I waited along with everyone else to find out if the most powerful country in the world would persist with its imperfect status quo or take a turn into something much darker and more fearful.

A few hours after the election was called, I came over a bit nauseous. Soon, I’d been completely taken out by norovirus. The timing seemed very apt, like my whole body was showing its disgust at Donald Trump’s victory. I spent two days in bed, in yet another kind of limbo, waiting for it to repair itself. I was grateful, at least, to know that it would do so, and newly struck by a visceral horror at the thought of the many lives throughout history that were ended by abject conditions like cholera and dysentery. So much for the beauty and majesty of death.

It was curious, how quickly things had turned from magical to not. I found myself wondering what the opposite of magical was, so that I could find a word to describe this new state of affairs. Google suggested ‘muggle’. But my brain kept supplying ‘real’.

Apparently, my brain wanted me to believe that reality had finally been restored after weeks spent in some sort of fantasy land, the same way it used to tell me I was ‘back to reality’ or ‘back in the real world’ when I sat down to my overflowing inbox after a week’s holiday. But why are emails more ‘real’ than rest and recuperation and time to oneself? Why are a horrible stomach bug, a despair-inducing election result and the resulting internet shout-athon more ‘real’ than picking up autumn leaves, or walking in the forest contemplating impermanence, or acknowledging the festivals our ancestors did?

The answer, of course, is that they aren’t. That isn’t to say they aren’t real at all—they just don’t have a monopoly on reality. And it feels more important than ever to remember this.

The thing about men like the one who triumphed on Wednesday—men who care about money and power and their own egos above everything and everyone else, who would make themselves the centre of the world even at the cost of humanity’s future survival, who would like nothing better than to turn all of nature into a giant golf course—is that they don’t tend to stand beneath trees and feel humbled by them. They don’t touch the trunks of those trees and feel themselves in the presence of some kind of non-human wisdom they can never hope to understand. They don’t feel wonder at the sight of a dewy cobweb or the perfect autumn leaf. They don’t open themselves up to nature because they’re too busy trying to exploit it. And vice versa.

It would be pitiable, if it wasn’t so destructive. But it highlights to me how important it is to search for magic, even—perhaps especially—when it seems to be in short supply. Perhaps there’s no satisfactory word for the opposite of magic because magic doesn’t really have an opposite. It’s never truly absent, it just can’t always be found. At such times, it’s our job to keep looking.

1. One day soon I’m going to make it through a Substack essay without throwing in a Katherine May quote. Just not today.