Made out of magic

Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast.  Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing.  Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people.
So it must be all around us.  In this garden – in all the places.
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

I took these photos of my Sophia while we were away in Koh Samui.  The gardens there were so alive, so green, all the colours magnified and vibrant in the sunshine.  Sophia loved the frangipani flowers most of all.  Each day she would rescue a fallen bloom from beneath one of the trees, and carry it around with her.  And I love that she was doing just that while I was taking these shots.  She saw so much beauty in everything, and would point out to me the smallest shell on the sand, carefully saving it in her bucket.  Even the pebbles lining the edge of the gardens were something very special to her, and one in particular she kept with her all the way back home to Melbourne.  Each thing full of it’s own magic, and worth holding on to.

And while Sophia found her treasures, I tried to capture the magic in her – her smile, her eyes, her joy, her – right now.  I sometimes wish I could put her in my pocket, and keep her safe.  The hundred little things I see in her that make my heart happy, all rolled up into the amazing person she is becoming.

And I look at the world through her eyes, and I see the magic too.

M x