The word magic, my imaginary friend, conjures up mental images that run the gamut from Harry Potteresque to stage-magician-sawing-a-lady-in-half – perhaps my title is not aptly chosen. For who among us does not weary of the new-agey earnestness of spell casting books, cries of “it was magical’ applied to every conceivable posting on social media – and, after all, all we not all a little tired of illusion and sleight-of-hand, especially as practised by politicians?

Forgive my foray into the dictionary here – the Oxford Dictionary of English, naturally – which offers up these predictable definitions of magic in numbers one and number two places, respectively:

The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

Mysterious tricks, such as making things disappear and reappear, performed as entertainment.

But scroll a little further, and you will find this:

A quality of being beautiful and delightful in a way that seems remote from daily life.

Worth repeating, that one; “a quality of being beautiful and delightful in a way that seems remote from daily life.” For this is what I mean when I speak of magic, and wild magic carries an aura of unpredictability about it as well. The writer Guy Gavriel Kay speaks of this in his books of the Fionavar Tapestry, where he writes that wild magic introduces the element of randomness, which brings choice to the lives of all creatures…for without that randomness (both good and evil) we should be condemned to live out our scripts precisely as the playwright wrote them.

Where words fail me, I resort to imagery of one kind of a wild magic, for here is place that seems far from the troubles and cares of everyday life, where beauty and delight reside in every turn of the path.

I suspect, though, that there are many kinds of wild magic – surely falling in love is one? Falling in love, making a friend, the company of animals of all kinds, the energy of the sunrise, the mystery of the stars…Shared smiles, small kindnesses, a good book or a compelling movie, the act of listening to another with one’s full attention, silence when required and speaking out when imperative…A sense of joy and wonder at the world, tempered by the recognition that our striving for justice and fairness must never cease, for that very randomness of the wild magic means that other beings may need our care and attention.

The world could use a little more wild magic, I believe, though one does not require a wand or a book of spells to summon it. It resides in all of us, somewhere – though perhaps some places are more conducive than others to rekindling that sense of wonder. And as beautiful and remote from daily life it may be, in the end, one ought remember it in every day …for this, this is what brings meaning to our lives. May you have wild magic, my friends.