Amelia Draws

Do you ever sit on your porch nursing a cuppa and marvelling at the planes flying across your piece of sky?

Do your thoughts wander to the conversations and fidgeting happening in the seats as people, (quite a few of them), settle in, high above, for the ride.

And then, does the wonder go to the how? How on earth can people be holding off going to the toilet in a huge metal tube above my head? And where are they going? What are they taking with them?

I do wonder this, and I think it’s magical and that planes are magic and no one will convince me otherwise.

Terry Pratchett said of magic that ‘just because one can explain it doesn’t stop it from being magic’. As usual, he is right. Borrow deeper and deeper into an explanation and it just gets weirder and weirder. Utterly magical.

Do you ever stop to contemplate your thoughts? That this squidgy ball of flesh contained by our skulls produces images, words and dialogues. Utterly intangible events from a tangibly excited blob. That’s bloody magic it is.

Or the stars? Balls of gas suspended in long dark and vast distances. You can explain the physics upside and inside out and all around to me. I will listen, but it won’t stop them from being utterly magical.

I think deep down we all know this.

And, where we can explain the stars and the thoughts – well the explanations are in themselves magical, every step of the way.

And that’s a hill I will die upon.