The Magic that Remains

As I write this, I am looking at photographs of flowers from my garden that only weeks ago were vibrant with color and life. Now, beneath the relentless summer sun of Las Vegas, many of their petals have faded, curled, and fallen away. The same garden that felt abundant in spring appears stressed and weathered beneath the sizzling desert heat. For a moment, it is tempting to see only what has been lost. Yet the flowers have not truly disappeared. Their season of blooming has simply passed, while the plants that gave rise to them continue quietly beneath the surface. They are living the season they are in. Spring asks for blossoms; summer asks for endurance. Both are equally necessary to the life of a garden.

Curiously, the same fierce sun that taxes the flowers also gifts us some of the most breathtaking sunrises of the year. The skies over Las Vegas seem to know what is coming. Brilliant pinks, fiery oranges, and impossible shades of gold against the blue sky spread across the horizon, heralding the intense heat that will soon settle over the city. There is beauty in the warning and magic in the endurance that follows. 

We are no different. There are seasons in our lives when we bloom effortlessly and seasons that ask us simply to survive the heat and trust that unseen work is still taking place beneath the surface. Eckhart Tolle teaches us to inhabit the present moment rather than resist it, and the garden asks the same of us: to stop mourning the missing petals long enough to appreciate the strength of the roots. Not every season is meant for blooming. Some are meant for growing deeper.

This understanding found its way quietly into Searching for Faerie, Finding Me. The young girl believes she has a friend faerie beyond herself — celebrating nature and joy in the meadows. She eventually feels the loss of Faerie - and in her search for her familiar friend, she instead finds herself. Faerie was never lost at all as it was her all along, waiting patiently to be remembered. The faerie was the quiet light, the courage, the wonder, and the magic that remained within her whether she was blooming spectacularly or simply enduring the difficult seasons she found herself in.

Searching for Faerie, Finding Me

We’ve been taught to celebrate the season of flowers because they are beautiful and easy to admire. We celebrate the blossoms, the achievements, and the moments when life is vibrant and visible. But nature teaches a deeper truth: the real magic was never in the vibrant bloom. It was in the roots making the magic - continuing the work unseen beneath the surface. It was in what remained when the flowers faded and the seasons changed - the Lumos Vita. I first encountered the concept of Lumos Vita — the Light of Life — through Brian Scott's talk on activating the magic within us. He described it as the light that exists within every person, and I recognized it immediately. To me, Lumos Vita is that enduring inner light that remains through every season of life: through blooming and fading, beginnings and endings, joy and hardship. It is the light that survives disappointment, grief, monotony, and time itself. It is there in the roots waiting patiently beneath the soil. It is there in the summer sunrise setting the Las Vegas sky ablaze before the heat of the day arrives. It is there in us during seasons of creativity and seasons of endurance, during times when we feel vibrant and visible and during times when we feel hidden beneath the surface. That is what the directive always was - that the magic we spend our lives searching for has never lived outside of us. It has always been there, quietly glowing within. Lumos Vita. The light that remains when the petals fall. The magic that remains.