I wished upon a star....and I discovered magic

by Alfonsina Betancourt

“There is a need to really try bring myth and magic back into our lives.”

— Depak Chopra

Looking at the stars: one of the favorite pastimes of my childhood.  There was something always so incredible and enchanting about it. That sense of us being so little among the universe, the fact that it always changed and at the same time remained eternal and universal. I could not even count the number of hours I spent looking for a shooting star or a comet with the sole intention of making a wish because it seemed that that rare appearance could only symbolize that something special was about to happen. Growing up, we lived on a hill on the outskirts of a big city with a gorgeous view of The Avila, a mountain that, at approximately  9 thousand feet high, offered constant Kodak opportunities. But the best part of our location is that the altitude and the fact that it was far from commercial areas or highways offered a privileged point of view of the celestial map.

One day my mother brought home an astronomy book that I took possession of without even asking. I loved learning from the constellations and started recognizing the patterns. By learning the names of some of the stars, I got intrigued by their mythological origins, and that is how my love for Greek Mythology was born.  Now that I think about it in retrospect, what drew me into Mythology were the stories, the characters how they showed something universal about our human nature in a very magical setting. 

Although long gone are the days when I thought I needed to write a compilation of Greek mythology books and I don’t look at the stars with the same frequency, there is something still so incredibly moving when I look into the sky and see that stars in all of its glory.  It is almost like a call to forget my mundane existence and blend with the universe. 

In the book “Synchrodestiny” by Deepak Chopra,  he talked about Joseph Campbell (one of my childhood heroes) and the importance of mythology as a source of magic, ritual, and imagination in our lives. When we believe things happen for a reason, that we meet people because they have an important significance in our lives, when we want to look for signs the universe tells us there is a master plan and every encounter is linked to our destiny, we do it because we believe in magic. In magic as if something does not seem plausible, then it is. In magic, as if something that seems impossible might suddenly become a possibility. Magic as the best source of miracles. I believe there are things that do not matter if they are true or not; it only matters if we believe they are.

Hearing that part of the audiobook made me remember my Greek Mythology phase and who I was then. I was a teenager, and as a typical adolescent, I thought everything was possible and that there was a whole galaxy of opportunities in front of me. I saw it in the stars, I saw in the myths, I saw it every time I connected with another soul. I did believe in magic then.

Then I grew up, and life throws you a lot of curve balls, and there are moments when you think the universe must have a very weird sense of humor because you don’t understand what is going on; how could there be such a cruel plan? And sometimes, it has been really difficult, and many times it has been very beautiful, and regardless of the situation, I have never stopped believing in magic.

Years ago, we were invited by some friends to a chalet in a Czech mountain near the Poland border. No cities were around, and I instinctively. we were enjoying the cool summer looked up while. The sky was such a spectacle of stars, so many that made it almost impossible to recognize constellations. My eyes were glued to the sky when suddenly I saw it. The biggest, greenest, slowest shooting star I had ever seen. It glided through the sky, and at some point, it exploded before faintly continuing its track.  The stargazer in me got awed. The romantic in me got swept away. The rational in me decided that it was time to stop the wine. But suddenly, several meteors appeared, several of them per minute. At one point, I even felt afraid and unprotected under the amount of atmospheric explosions over our heads. One of my friends decided she did not want to look up. She was convinced we were probably drunk because those things never happened. She never checked; she never felt the curiosity to prove us wrong.

That day I learned that we need to pay attention if we want to see. Sometimes we are rewarded with finding what we are looking for. Sometimes we are surprised by what we did not even know existed, and sometimes we discover that regardless of how much time has passed and how experienced and wise we think we have become, we still want to be the young soul that never stops believing in magic. I still try to chase shooting stars, but when I realize that even on cloudy days or when the full moon shows up and the stars disappear, there is a high probability that my dreams will come true, I know I am evidence of a great miracle, of a wonderful myth, and the recipient of the greatest act of magic. I don’t even need to look up to realize that because even with my eyes closed, I feel magic touching my skin, like fairy dust and internal fire simultaneously.