A Certain Kind of Witchery

I never know when it will happen. It isn’t like voting day or the harvest festival or the full moon. It is unpredictable. Like poetry, or Mary Poppins, or painting with watercolors. All I know is, on certain days a certain kind of witchery is in play. Enchantment settles into the pith of the world, and everything I look at spills cause for wonder.

On such days, the purple of a purple cabbage leaf pulls me into a daze of admiration. Such bold concentration of color in a cruciferous vegetable! The garlic bulb rests on the kitchen counter, poised and shapely as the dome of the Taj. Steamed beets dye the tips of my fingers red. Flames dance on the stovetop, steam rises like a fragrant prophesy over an open pot. Preparing lunch is a festive ritual. 

Outside in the garden, a small mourning dove sits in the sleek glove of her skin, how perfect she is! The passionfruit vine is dappled with the frilly faces of its flowers, the small green plums are reddening on their branches. The brilliant blue cornflowers tumble over each other in heaps of glory, and a conspiracy of ravens takes over our cypress tree. How have I never noticed before — that their blistering voices are raked with beauty?

The hillside paths are riddled with white yarrow, wild blue flax, triplet lilies, orange monkey flowers, delicate pink fairy lanterns — on most days they are easy to miss, but today I am captured. Brought to my knees, again and again by the delicate lasso of their presence. 

On such days I discover that beauty is transgressive. It invades everything. Even telemarketers and traffic jams are purveyors of holiness. So are burnt pots, clogged drains, dark roads and discomfiting moments. On such days disorder cannot daunt me, nor uncertainty. A rigorous gladness takes me by surprise, renders me uncommonly hospitable. On such days my heart refuses nothing.

And anything is possible.