Is the key to happiness to choose it? 

    Is the key to magic to notice it everywhere?

   This is not slight of hand. Magic lives in the exhaled breath of belief. 

   How do you "choose" happiness amid tragedy? How do you "notice" the magic that is always present?

   The truth is, you do not need to be happy amid sadness. Sadness builds its own room. It is best to sit there during the harder chapters of your life. 

   But, it is not difficult to find both happiness and magic in the presence of any three year old child. The one in the picture lives two stories.

   One is in the spacesuit in which he imagines himself an astronaut gliding through a cosmos that is more magical in his imagination than the actual one.

   His other magic appears in the classic tale of The Red Balloon. A balloon befriends a small boy and, with no string tethering him to the child, follows him everywhere. 

   Just a fable? Adults engage the world of magic every day. The word comes from the Magi who conjured by studying the heavens. Was there journey across the desert beneath a guiding star not magical? 

   Children find magic in imagination. So do you. 

   Noticing is important. After looking at the photo several times I was startled by the shadow in the left window. 

   Mary Oliver wrote, "Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous/ to be understood…/Let me keep company always with those who say/ 'Look!' and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads."

   There is more energy in belief than there is in medicine. Both happiness and magic are born from Love.

   Find Love and you discover both.

-Erie Chapman

Mary Oliver may also help you "notice" magic.