Tales of Ordinary Magic 1

Somerset Meadows is a nice place to live. CJStone sees all sorts of interesting things through his window.

Columns from Kindred Spirit magazine.

“Are you a druid?” she said.

“Pardon? Whatever gave you that idea?” I said, slightly bemused. It’s not often you get asked a question like that. Not in the stairwell of one of the blocks on Somerset Meadows it isn’t.

Her name is Mrs Rivers. She’s quite deaf. She screws up her face and watches my mouth when I talk, but she doesn’t hear what I’m saying. It’s easier and more polite to listen than to talk, so that’s what I do. I listen, and I never did find out what made her think I was a druid.

So she launched into this story, about the time she lived in Salisbury and went to Stonehenge for the solstice. This was in 1964, she said. It was very different in those days. There weren’t any fences and you could mingle freely with the stones. She went with a friend but they got the date wrong so there was no one there. But then they went back the next night and that’s when it all happened.

She was laughing while she told me this.

“And then the druids turned up,” she said. “They all had on those white headdresses, you know, and they were blowing trumpets, up in the air. No one seemed to know what was going on. We were all just milling around waiting for something to happen, and then the sun came up and we all went home.”

I laughed. Not much has changed, I thought. The last time I went to Stonehenge for the solstice the sun came up and we all went home too.

After that Mrs Rivers and I smiled our goodbyes. I carried on down the stairs while she carried on up, and we’ve never had occasion to talk about Stonehenge again.

Somerset Meadows is where I live. It’s a cul-de-sac consisting of a number of red-brick blocks set in spacious communal lawns.

There are no gardens in Somerset Meadows. Every so often a man comes and buzzes round on a sit-down mower cutting the lawn and there are benches lined up on the sunny side of the blocks where people gather in the summer months to drink tea and chat. The small flower beds lining the blocks are tended communally. You get to know your neighbours very well around here. Your neighbours are never very far away.

It’s also full of old people.

I don’t quite know why that should be. It wasn’t designed with old people in mind. Not everyone is old. I just think that, not having gardens to tend, and with a residents association to take care of the external repairs, it tends to suit older people.

Also I think that some people have been here since it was first built, way back in the 60s.

There’s a lot of infirmity and the occasional death to witness.

I’ve been meditating on mortality ever since I came here.

But I liked Mrs Rivers’ story. She went to Stonehenge thirty five years ago, nothing much happened and she still remembers it.

How like life that is.

Well what actually happened is that the sun came up. The sun comes up every day, of course, but we’re not always around to witness it. What made it memorable for Mrs Rivers is that she was at Stonehenge and she saw the druids. They blew their trumpets in the air in the eye of the sun in order to celebrate the moment, turning it from a mundane event into a magical one.

Which reminds us: there’s nothing mundane about a sunrise. It’s a cosmic event, meaning that it takes place in the cosmos. It’s part of the vast interweaving of the universe in its infinite play, complex and precise. It is only our perspective that makes it appear mundane and it is by our intent that we restore it to its magical glory once more.

This is the essence of magic: the time, the place, the people.

In this case, summer solstice sunrise at Stonehenge with Mrs Rivers as a witness.

And by restoring the magical significance of a sunrise to its place in the cosmos, perhaps we restore ourselves too, as witnesses to the interplay of forces before our eyes, in our own very significant lives.