On mundane magics: Reconnecting with the childhood belief of the impossible

I’ve believed in fairies since I was a kid.

I came by it honestly enough, with an upbringing that almost predetermined me to believe. I was an only child who spent a lot of time in the woods, so believing in the Good Folk came naturally. I saw them everywhere: pixies in the branches and gnomes in the undergrowth and brownies scurrying away at any hint of movement. When I got older, even when I knew better, I imagined them in the suburbia I lived in, too: mermaids in storm ditches and dryads at the edges of city parks. Our world, bumping up against theirs.

Now, bear with me. This blog hasn’t taken a sharp left turn into the esoteric. But in the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of inner work, and a significant portion of that has been about healing my inner child. In doing so, I’ve found myself turning back to a lot of the things that brought me joy as a child: making friendship bracelets and buying small toys and wearing more colour. Figuring out who I want to be by reconsidering the things that I loved back then.

And the single thing that underlaid all my worldviews and joys as a child was that I fervently, unquestioningly believed in magic.

Something in me was certainly predisposed to superstition: I don’t remember a time that I didn’t save wishbones or throw salt over my shoulder or make a wish at eleven-eleven. I still habitually carry out these small spells of folk magic, probably centuries old. And I often think about the casualness of it—that in our hyper-technological, rational, analytical world, we still (some of us, at least) give space to small moments of ritual.

I don’t truly believe that throwing salt over my shoulder will keep the devil away—but I do, at the same time, and besides, why risk it? Belief is cognitive dissonance.

When I was a kid, I had strategies for looking for fairies. My books about fairies, so excitedly checked out of the local library, told me that the Folk themselves would be hard to spot, so I focused instead on looking for the places where I thought fairies might live: hollows in trees and mossy rocks and the quiet dark places under fallen logs. Among the frogs at the edges of lakes, and under wildflowers, and up that hill lined with birch trees. These places gave me a kind of frisson up my shoulders, a sense of the other, a sort of liminality. 

In the past year, I’ve gotten back into photography (another childhood passion). These spaces are what I find myself continually taking photos of, trying to document that sense of otherness that they still give me today. I am, for example, currently drawn to a stump in my backyard that is covered in mushrooms of all sorts. Huge planes of dryad’s saddle (how appropriate is that name!) fan out the side of it; dead man’s fingers creep up its side, bouquets of polypore surround it. It gives me the same sense of depth and unknowability that those in-between places would give me as a kid. Child me would believe, without a doubt, that that stump was the home of a particularly introverted gnome.

The stump in question.

Gnomes aren’t real, of course. But the stump is, and so is my interest in it. Belief is a practice in paying attention. 

So, I am trying to give space to the cognitive dissonance, and I am trying to pay attention. I will continue to give space to the mundane magic and habitual rituals of my day. And I’ll probably keep looking under the mushrooms on that stump, just in case—even though, of course, fairies aren’t real.

Happy October.