...

I stopped by some conservation land to walk around a little bit. Just for a few minutes, after therapy and before going grocery shopping, to sit on a bench and look at plants. Where I live now is the first time I've lived so far from the woods - the place before this was also pretty non-woodsy, but had patches of trees mimicking the woods convincingly enough to not be disorienting - and I think it's wearing on me a bit. I like it here a lot, but it is weird not being able to step out the door and walk into a forest.

I love autumn. I always forget how much I love the fall, and then it rolls around and my spirits soar and I think, "Oh, that's right! It's my favorite season!" I always feel the most energetic and like myself in early to mid fall, before the dead pre-winter. (And not just because of Halloween, although I do absolutely adore Halloween.) The leaves are starting to turn and goldenrod is in bloom, so there's warm golden touches everywhere... ahh, it's so nice. It puts me in a good mood.

As I was walking back to the car, I saw a wonderful sight! A single leaf hanging in the air about three feet off the ground. Presumably caught on a strand of spider silk, but the light was such that no matter what angle I looked at it from it appeared to be simply floating there. Just a single small slightly-shriveled brown-yellow leaf, suspended in the air... it was maybe an inch long, curled in at the edges, with that papery look a recently-dead leaf gets. I tried to take pictures of it, but my phone camera isn't very good and it's hard to actually see the leaf in them or tell that it's in the air, since it's a small leaf in a leafy environment.

It was a nice thing to see. I was tempted to wave my hand over it to break the (presumed) thread holding it in the air; kind of a strange impulse, really. I did not do it - I was careful not to touch it or put my hands anywhere near where the thread would be, to make sure I left it floating there - and thought it was interesting that my instinctive reaction to seeing something odd and lovely was to ruin it. Why would I do that...? I think part of me wanted to see if it was really magic after all, to brush away spider thread only to discover that it was really a magic spell, and part of me wanted to do that to prove to myself it wasn't magic? Well, it's easy to speculate about one's subconscious, but hard to really know. Anything I come up with will sound approximately right, and none of it will be quite true, since it wasn't an impulse spurred by a conscious thought.

After I did not act on that weird impulse, I thought about Umineko - how something is magic as long as you don't explain it, but all magic has to have an explanation. In that framework, the leaf is suspended by magic and as long as I don't break the thread holding it in place it will remain magic...

I hope someone else got to see that leaf, too. I wonder what the spider will do with it.

Two possible tangents here. Tangent one: The Yard Is Full Of Spiders (In Unusual Quantity, For Unknown Reasons). Tangent two: Just So You Know, I Don't Really Believe In Magic.

I don't really have much to say about too many spiders - another time, maybe - so I guess I'll go with number two. Just so you know, I don't really believe in magic.

I feel like saying that at all is a bit of an odd thing. For other people who do not believe in magic it sounds just like saying "I don't believe in the Easter Bunny" - like "yeah, dude, I kind of figured"; but in the social environments I often find myself in it is something worth specifying, since it is not uncommon for people to believe in magic of some kind.

I am, to be specific, a very firm atheist and have been for my entire life; in the sense that I affirmatively believe that magic, spirits, ghosts, gods, God, karma, the soul, manifestation, mystical energy, and all other things supernatural, paranormal, spiritual, and/or holy are Not Real. To me at least there's a difference between "I don't believe in God" and "I believe God does not exist", but it's a little hard to articulate properly.

Atheism isn't something I talk about... at all? I don't have much to say about it, and there's not many circumstances where it comes up. If someone is talking about their religious or spiritual beliefs or experiences there's no reason to go "I THINK THAT'S FAKE"; that's very rude, actually, and besides the point. If it's important to someone, then it's important to them. Religion and spirituality are a very vulnerable and personal and often sensitive subject for people! It's important to me to not be obnoxious or rude or anything. I think it's interesting to hear about other people's beliefs and experiences anyway.

If somebody says they have experienced something, then I do believe that they had that experience. If someone says they feel the comforting presence of a spirit when they pray or hear the voice of God or feel less pain when they charge their crystals, then I don't think they're lying. Those experiences are real to them, regardless of the source or the reasoning or whatever. That's how I feel in general about things I don't really understand or believe in; if something feels real to somebody then it is real to them. It is affecting their feelings and mind and wellbeing and behavior as if it were real. (For example, people who hear voices really are hearing those voices, even if the voices are coming from their own mind.) And, since they are the ones having those experiences and not me, it doesn't really matter to them what I think or believe about that! It's important to be respectful and polite to people, because people and their feelings are real and they're important.

There are traditions and religions and beliefs that I find more interesting than others, and some I think sound more sensible or plausible than others or that I like the idea of, but none that I think are "real" outside of subjective human experience.

[I wrote quite a long ramble here about being raised Christian and then deleted it because I thought it was too much personal information.]

Whoa! That was some rambling.

The important thing is that I saw a cool leaf, and I found it striking, and I thought about magic.

Speaking of magic, I wonder how the third Now You See Me movie is doing. It's been in the works for ages I think. I should check on that. I love those movies...