Tips for Living a Magical Life

​In the comments of my last post, Lysette suggested that I write about “seeing the magic in everyday places--perhaps a ‘guide’ to looking for the little details that might easily go overlooked.” And it got me thinking about how to bring more magic into your daily life by paying attention and being intentional.

​ Growing up, I would like to be able to say that I was a child who often went to the woods and wandered around, imagining fairy forts and goblin caves. In fact, there was a wooded park just four blocks from my childhood home, but the forest scared me back then. I had heard another child say that witches went into those woods after dark, and being a good Christian girl I was scared of them. (Today, I’d strip my clothes off and go running into the bracken with a broom, ha!) 

adolf munzer: walpurgis

I also wish I could say that as a child, I was someone who saw the magic that was around me every day, but I tended to get lost in my own head and my own imagination, and miss the wonder that could happen right in front of me. I did stare at clouds and dream of gryphons flying next to the car on road trips, but most often my nose was buried in a book and my ears were covered with headphones, music playing. I didn’t pay attention. 

Photo by Carrie Anne Hunt

Recently, I ventured out on a country drive and went past the farmhouse where I lived during high school, about a half hour away from where I live now. Driving down that rural road, I was struck by the beauty and whimsy of the landscape. There were woods just a short walk from my foursquare home, but I never went to explore them. I do remember one time I went for a walk down the road with a friend after dark. The corn fields were tall around us, and I recall we had this feeling that we were being watched by a not entirely friendly being, even though no one else was around. (There are some wonderful threads floating around the internet about rural American folklore of corn fields, and how they sometimes have spirits that you don’t want to mess with.) Otherwise? I barely ever left my own yard, unless I was in a car going somewhere. 

​I say all of this simply to point out that I know what it’s like to get so caught up in your own head that you miss things. Important things. Magical things. Things that might be right in front of you. I have always been such an “in-your-head” person, it took several years of intentionally trying to pay attention to notice what little I do notice now. And even now, sometimes magic has to whack me in the head to get me to see something. (Example, the goldfinch that literally tapped on my bedroom window.) Sometimes I get a little sad looking back at my childhood and wishing I had spent more time in the wilds. Spent a little more time making up my own stories about the world around me instead of only reading the stories of others. But thinking about that just makes me want to live a more intentional and magically mindful life now.

​So what is it to be magically mindful? Well, first of all, it’s about mindset. The phrase “romanticize your life” or “fictionalize your life” has been floating around the internet lately, and for good reason. It is a wonderful shorthand way to summarize the mindset I am trying to describe. I could go on and on here to you about how this can be done, but the lovely Darling Desi recently made a video that shares it all in such a charming and inspirational way, let’s just watch that first.

To summarize a few points for romanticizing your life:

• Use the good stuff now. Don’t save the beautiful dress for a night out, the good china for family visits.

• Do ridiculous things. Go out in the rain and dance. Make snow angels in the snow. I remember last year when quarantine started and I was really struggling with a deep anxiety, I was sitting out on my back porch when it started to rain. Instead of running inside, I laid down on my back on the porch and let the raindrops hit my skin like tiny wet kisses from weather sprites. It was exhilarating and hilarious. I started giggling despite the dark place I was in.

• Pay attention. Don’t just sit on your phone while you eat your lunch. Savor every bite. For instance, today for lunch I had strawberries, and they were the most delicious I’ve had in ages. I paused for a moment as I ate each bite of those strawberries, savoring them.

• Create wonderful experiences. Make a blanket fort. Go for a picnic no matter what the weather is doing outside (in the rain, in the snow). Make everyday life a little bit of an adventure.

• Pause. Just…pause for a moment to look around and get out of your head. Find a few beautiful things around you that your senses experience. The sound of a loved one in the room next door? The smell of the summer rain?

• Make rituals to look forward to. Maybe you and your spouse can answer a fun and romantic conversational question from a list every night when you get home. Maybe in the morning you can have your first cup of tea in a different mug each day from your extensive collection that mostly just sits hidden in the cupboard.

• Make a list of the little wonderful moments in your day at the end of each day. This will help you start paying attention to moments that can go on your lists, and appreciating them more as they are actually happening. 

When you are starting to intentionally pay attention to these little things in your life, you also start believing in patterns. When petals fall from a tree around you in spring, it’s possible to believe the tree is giving you a gift. When you are feeling unloved or your self-esteem is low, and you see a spiderweb with a pattern that looks like a heart, you know it is a message to you. 

​This past Saturday morning, I went to the woods to take a few pictures. Driving the beautiful rural road on my way to the local Arboretum, there was a moment when the road curved, my music (Faun) swelled, and a flock of birds flew across the sky in perfect timing to the rhythm of the song. If you aren’t paying attention, you won’t notice these little experiences. Or if you do notice, it won’t make you smile and feel like the universe is all coming together euphorically in that moment. 

As a side note, at least for me, I find driving in my car, especially on (non-twisty) rural roads very very often helps put me in a meditative state that helps me approach the rest of the day in a romanticized and mindful way. Find your own version of this practice that works for you, an exercise that brings you into that mindset, and when you find yourself in your head too often, do it!

And by the way, the next piece of advice should be obvious, but it’s also one I want to shout to my childhood self: get out there!! Don’t just expect the magic to come to you once you’re looking for it. Get out and go to it. I shake my head in wonder at all the years of my adult life that I would say that the forest was important to me, but I never actually went to the woods. It wasn’t until I started really getting interested in filling my Instagram with curated and lovely images about four years ago that I began taking my walks in the woods on a regular basis. And now I cannot imagine possibly going for very long at all without them. 

​I mentioned that this past Saturday I went to the forest to take some pictures. I approached my day with a spirit of open-heartedness toward whatever messages the woods wanted to bring me. I am not always able to entirely get into this mindset; after all I do have grumpy days and sad days and days where everything just seems to go wrong. But when I can, I find the most wondrous experiences can happen. For instance, I went to the woods expecting to take photos of late-summer greenwoods, wearing a crown of ferns I made last year. But when I arrived, I was surprised to see vivid fallen leaves scattering the forest floor here and there, far more of them than I expected to see already. So I gathered them up, laid them all out on a fallen tree, and created an ombre piece of land art. I love creating these because they are so fun to put together, they become an offering to the forest that is non-damaging and ephemeral, and they are something for the other travelers on the forest paths to see and be delighted by. 

​Which brings me to my next point. Once you’re living romantically, once you’re living intentionally, once you’re living magically, give back. Find little ways to share that joy and wonder with other people, and to offer your gratitude to nature and the spirits who brought you those magical moments in the first place. A few years ago, my friend Brittany bought me a little jar as part of a birthday gift. In that jar, she’d placed little pieces of dried herbs, and biodegradable glitter. She suggested I take it with me on my walks. When I needed to give an offering back to the woods for a moment of wonder I’ve received, I could scatter some of the contents of the jar. Since then, I’ve refilled the jar several times. One of my favorite offerings is a blend of dried petals from all four of the rose bushes in my garden, torn into little confetti sized pieces. 

​I’ve had a few years now of practicing this sort of intentional, magical, and romanticized life, so I get that it may be easy to respond to my suggestions with hesitancy. “I’ll feel ridiculous,” you might say. Or “I wish I had the time.” Trust me, I get both of these sentiments. My list of things I want to do is forever expanding and never finished, and I also get the feeling of self-consciousness too. That walk I took in the woods this weekend? Yeah, there was a whole jogging club on the trails with me, watching as I posed out in the woods in my long skirt and fern crown. But after a while, you just find it easier and easier to slip into the mindset. You learn that the joy you feel when you live whimsically is worth the stares and the judgment. You figure out little ways to slip intentional moments into your day here and there, no matter how busy you are. Just start somewhere. I promise you, it is so incredibly worth it. 

~*~

​As I was writing out some of the above, I wondered to myself: Would you enjoy a post that was just a checklist with a bunch of ideas for how to bring romance, joy, and intentionality into your daily life? Because I do think I’d enjoy creating such a thing, both for all of you and also for myself as well!