I love life’s random acts of magic. Today I was bicycling, pumping thoughts around in my head, grinding over the same stuff that I’ve been grinding over for what feels like lifetimes, when a acorn fell down on my head. Hard. It stopped my mind immediately and I laughed out loud. Sometimes, life is really clear when it wants to make a point.

There is so much magic in our lives. Just the fact that this acorn decided to let go of its tree and thereby its life at the exact same time I crossed by may seem like a random act of two elements coming together, not even so special statistically, considering the amount of acorns that fall around this time of year. This would be the perspective of the cynic. To me, it was magic, and it was so because I open up to the possibility that it was magic. Like Peter J. Conrad writes:

“The terror of a world without sacredness is the greatest terror.”

To me it really is. Most of the time I don’t feel like life is magical at all –and I suffer tremendously from the way my mind closes like a fist, depriving my perception from any spontaneity whatsoever. When we are so caught up in feeding our storylines and generating speed, we squeeze the juice from our life, blocking our direct and open experience with our Big Fat Trips. Those trips prevent us from relating to the moment and our life as it is: namely as a series of completely new, unprecedented moments. Even if it’s the same face, same dog, same tree, same coffee, the open mind sees the magic in everything.

So how do we connect with our direct experience, that open mind? It can be done in a million ways, from leaving your tv (‘vodka for the mind, as Kris Carr calls it) off for one evening, doing yoga, going to a karaoke bar, making love, writing, whatever works for you. On the most fundamental level this is how we connect with our direct experience: we decide or at least long to be available to ‘it’. This is really all we need to see the magic that is all around us, all the time.
 
Here's to acorns and love!