This last week I’ve glimpsed a lot of Big Magic. At a retreat as we wrote our Morning Pages we allowed the writing to take us places we never expected.
Over the weekend each person had a Big Magic moment—a moment of divinity—a point where the pen, the past and the present collided with Big Magic and the divine.
Yesterday, I watched the documentary Iris which tells the story of Iris Apfel, the flamboyantly dressed nonagenarian who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades.
One story in the movie spoke to me in particular.
When she was twelve years old, Iris found a little shop in the basement of an “old rat-trap building” that was run by “a little old man who was very elegant.”
She fell in love with a brooch with filigree and rose-cut diamonds.
She lusted after the brooch and saved and scrimped and sometime later went back. She paid the huge sum of sixty-five cents after haggling for the first time in her life.
This Big Magic moment in Iris’s life led to even more Big Magic moments and a career in fashion and interior design.
Iris Apfel
Gabriel de la Chapelle
I was ten years old and found myself writing a story, inspired by the Big Magic of an excursion to a heritage-listed house. I have never forgotten the feeling of words flowing from my head, through my body, through the pen onto paper. I have never forgotten the physical mark of the pen on my hand. I’ve never forgotten the mark on my soul. I’ve never forgotten the day I first dreamed of being a writer.
We often ask, ‘What’s my purpose?’ and when that purpose is not clear to us at the outset we get frustrated. However, as Gilbert alludes to in this chapter, sometimes our purposes are found in places we never expected. Sometimes our purposes are found in an accidental grace.
Curiosity will take you places along the way and you may even wonder what is you’re meant to do.
Detours can take our story off on tangents, but can actually start to make sense when things collide in one of those magnificent moments that causes you to say, ‘This is what I was made to do.’
I taught English for many years. I encouraged others to write. I read other writers’ work. I wrote academic papers. I wrote. But, I was on a major detour. One I don’t regret at all, but there was another story to be written. Ten years ago, I sat in my office and wrote a letter of resignation. It was time to honour the story promise of my life.
It’s not about one moment of magic. If you’re curious you might just have those moments throughout your life. Maybe, like Iris, you may even get to still have them in your nineties.
As I’ve travelled the Big Magic journey with Elizabeth Gilbert, Amanda, Jodie, and with you, I’ve realised that we all have divinity in us. We all have a touch of the divine Creator and it’s our gift and responsibility to follow our curiosity.
That’s Big Magic. That’s divinity.That’s accidental grace.
Big Magic QUESTION
Has there been a moment that you would say you knew your creative came from a divine source?
Catch Up on our previous posts here.
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