Welcome to The Magic Lab!
A place to experiment with, share, and re-connect to the magical, mystical unknown that runs through all things.
In the early 90s, while other kids my age were playing with Nintendo, Gak, and Tamagotchis, I was making my own papyrus and writing coded messages to myself using a hieroglyphic rubber stamp set.
If anyone asked seven-year-old me what my favorite store was at the mall, I’d lie and say “Claire’s” or “Limited Too”, but really, it was The Smithsonian Institute Store that held the key to my heart (and my parent’s purse strings).
The best thing about the Smithsonian Store was that you could never predict what toy you’d find, or what you’d learn from it. Why relegate yourself to the same old Lisa Frank sticker books when you could be building pirate ships, painting your own stained glass, or replicating the night sky on your bedroom ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stardust?
As an only child growing up in a neighborhood with no other kids my age, my inner world was my favorite playground, my playmates were Pharaohs and faeries, Queens and witches, butterflies and clouds, and anything I could conjure inside my wonderful, wonderful brain.
The point where my inner world and the outside world crossed over was a laboratory where I conducted constant experiments. What could I create with the tools, the toys, the stories at my disposal? My test subjects were sand, paint, rain, petals, ink, breath, mud, wax, seeds, thread, ideas, feelings, thoughts and imaginings. The infinite combinations of these elements inside the infinite experiments I conducted in my laboratory always yielded the same result: Magic. A satisfying feeling that I was connected to the magical, mystical unknown that runs through all things.
Somewhere along the way, as it often does, my magic-steeped childlike wonder and my desire to explore was replaced by a desire to fit in and seek safety. I traded my hieroglyphics stamps for glitter gel pens, passing my rainbow-colored notes to the popular girls in class rather than ancient coded messages to the make-believe archeologist in my head.
As the years went on, glitter gelly pens became sensible black Bics, then texts, then emails, then DMs and to-do lists. Decades went by and my Magic went into hibernation while I “achieved,” swimming upstream towards the unreachable island of “perfection” where I deemed I might, at last, be safe.
I couldn’t point you towards one “rock bottom” moment, one glaring epiphany where a cartoon lightbulb illuminated over my head, saying, “Perfection is a false construct perpetuated by the Patriarchy! Mystery was the answer to a beautiful life all along!”
What I can say with certainty is that around the time I turned thirty, fissures began to appear in the foundation of my life. The more I listened to my intuition that something was “off,” the more those fissures became cracks. As years passed, the cracks became canyons- canyons into which I began to throw away everything that did not serve me. I threw away a decade-long career I’d spent a lifetime building. I threw away the idea that I had to be married or have children by a certain age. I threw away friendships that made me feel small. I threw away relationships - romantic and otherwise - that tried to control, rather than love, me.
Once I got rid of all the clutter that was keeping me trapped, I began to feel a mysterious combination of exposure and expansiveness…My life took on a quiet, almost holy quality as I healed, questioned, and re-built my identity from scratch. Without the pursuit of perfection to numb my experience, I began to feel everything, including magic, again.
I’ve learned that Magic, while always present, is best heard, seen, felt in stillness.
In the flickering of a candle.
The faint smell of roses on a breeze.
The plop of a tear as it falls on your cheek, too heavy for your eyelash.
Your childhood sweetheart’s favorite song piping through the speakers at the grocery store.
As the calendar turns from one year to another, as ice and hearts begin to crack open at the first signs of a thaw, I find myself aching for a place to re-connect with Magic. To explore it, test it, create it, nurture it, and share it. This is that place.
Welcome to The Magic Lab. I’m so glad you’re here.