Watch With Glittering Eyes

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.  Those who don’t believe in the magic will never find it.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was an air force pilot during the Second World War, long before he wrote the classic tales of James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  During his time at war, he probably encountered countless, horrible experiences of death and suffering, all the while having no idea when it would end, or if he would live to see the end.  While attempting a distress landing in the Egyptian desert in September 1940, he gouged the underside of his plane on a boulder and crashed.  He had a fractured skull, a broken nose and temporary blindness, but he pulled himself from the wreck and was found sometime later in the desert.  He was 24, the same age as my daughter today.

I wonder what brought him to write these words   His experience during the Second World War must have been dark, but also a time where the only option was to keep moving forward, chin up.  He had to find a light somewhere, and it seems he found it in the ‘most unlikely places.’  

This is where I have been looking, too.  With movements restricted,  I’ve been finding magic in the places that I pass regularly and in the strangers that I meet along the way.   I’ve been finding it in people I’ve known for ages, in a renewed sense of love for them seen through a lens that has been polished by gratitude, compassion and humility.   This would not have happened without the push-down, slap-around, throw-things-at-me villain called Pandemic. From this harsh landscape, I feel reborn as something new, and I pray, better, having a jolt of time to look within to ask what matters most.   This most unlikely of places reminds me of  another, most unlikely of places – a lowly manger in which a promise of love and redemption was born.  This is the magic that I believe in, and what causes my glittering eyes to spill forth tears of joy more than sadness in these days.   

I wish for my daughter and my sons, my husband, my friends near and far, relatives both real and pretend, and anyone that chose to follow me in this, my inaugural year of sharing this magic – I wish for you all the Joy of Christmas, and the finding of great secrets in 2021.