“The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the Earth.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
In my bedroom, there’s a sliver of time in the late afternoon when the sun spills in over everything. The alleyway behind the house comes alive with the sounds of birds and cicadas, and I pause everything just to lie around with my cats, watching dust motes float through the sunbeams. I call it magic hour – my standing date with the sparkling universe.
These small moments are anchors in my day. In neurodivergent speak, we call them “glimmers” – tiny moments of joy or awe that flood the senses and bring everything into alignment. They say neurodivergent folx are more attuned to this kind of childlike wonder, but that doesn’t mean it is in any way exclusive. This capacity for wonder, for seeing beauty in the mundane, is essentially and universally human. Even if we’ve fallen out of the habit, we can make it a part of our daily practice to pause, look around, and let it in.
Of course, life isn’t always magical. It’s stressful, it’s painful, it’s overwhelming. The horrors persist and keep pulling us away from these glimmers. When you’re in the middle of it, it can feel impossible to see life as anything other than hard. So why focus on magic at all? Why try to see life in this way when things are genuinely tough?
Because pain is just a part of the picture. It’s a particularly loud part of the picture – yes, but not the whole shebang. When we lose our connection to the magic around us, we also lose our connection to this larger truth. The stress and pain become all-consuming. They begin to occupy the whole of our reality. But life is vast, unpredictable, and constantly shifting. When we stay open to the magic, we come to know viscerally that even in the middle of all the struggle, the world is beautiful, wild, awesome.
Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the Earth.” We get so used to walking on the Earth, used to the mundane that we forget how miraculous it all is. I think about this a lot. We are a culture so fixated on the intensely extraordinary, the most extreme experiences—the sounds, sights, flavors, ideas, and feelings that’ll blow our socks off—that we overlook the magic of the ordinary. The act of being alive, being aware, being able to communicate, to smile, to breathe!—these are such profound and persistent mysteries of existence that we almost forget to be bewildered by them. It is magical just to exist.
And it’s when life feels most overwhelming that reconnecting to this magic is most important. It’s not about bypassing suffering or “being positive”, it’s about practicing a way of seeing that expands our sense of self. The moments of magic—sun flares around a kitten, the sound of rain on summer leaves, the electricity of the autumn air—are reminders of the deeper rhythms going on beyond stress and struggle.
This is exactly what practice points to: life is infinite, and its richness isn’t canceled out by hard stuff. Through practice, we can retrain ourselves to the full range of experience.
Through artmaking, spontaneous movement, dream yoga, ecstatic dance, psychedelic medicine practice, mantra, deep listening, visualization, even good old seated mindfulness of phenomena, we reconnect with play and awe as core elements of our humanity. These practices are paths back to wonder, back into the experience of ourselves as soft, magical, hilariously unserious beings.
And letting go of seriousness is profound stuff. When we do, we start to move with the world; rigid boundaries start to blur. Curiosity blooms, and the illusion of control that was keeping us tight melts away. Suddenly, everything feels new, and we have no idea what will happen next! Like TS Eliot said, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
The real magic isn’t in the extraordinary. It’s in the wildness that exists under, around, and all through the mundane. That’s where life is waiting for us to play. When we accept the invitation, we stop being wallflowers in our own lives and become part of the unpredictable. Maybe that’s why I love the floating dust moats so much – we have so much in common. I also have no idea where I’m going. I am also part of an infinite magic.
*Tasha is a Buddhist Lama, writer, visual artist, co-host of The Mind Bod Adventure Pod, and Juno-nominated recording artist whose work has been streamed many millions of times around the world. In her practice, meditation and creativity are expressions of the same thing: the quest for meaning and connection. They come together in what she calls the “Contemplo-Creative Path” – a continuous practice of curiosity, deep looking, and love aimed at finding wisdom in the trash fire that is 21st-century life. In practice, her magical mixedness shows up as a deep connection to nature, dreams, embodiment, dance, the ancestral, the liminal, and a committment to the re-indigenization of people, places, and practices.