The Magic of What Happens

28 August 2025 | BY ANDJELKA JANKOVIC | Life

I know it's not an island for one

I once spent an Irish winter in a West Cork farmhouse writing my first book.

It looked like the charming Rosehill Cottage from The Holiday with a wood-burning stove, teapots and cooking pots hanging from the kitchen ceiling, a conservatory with plants, flower pots and herbs, rambling ivy and bird feeders hanging from every window, plus a bathtub with a skylight and an infrared sauna (that last bit, when I was manifesting somewhere to house sit, the Universe seriously delivered).

After I’d gathered firewood for the day, lit a fire, made porridge, and had taken the dog for a misty countryside walk (everything in Ireland feels like a movie scene), I would settle in for the day ahead in the glasshouse on a big armchair with sheepskin rugs, in double socks with a steaming cup of Barry’s tea, an instrumental song on repeat and a purring cat at my side.

It was here that I watched birds for the first time in my life.

Outside the window where I wrote, I observed that if I put food out for them, they would show up.

If I didn’t, they didn’t.

If you feed the birds, the birds will come.

I know — this is remarkably straightforward. But it changed my life.

Now replace ‘birds’ with ‘hope’, inner fortitude, your creative work, or ‘magic’.

The simple act of feeding something brings the very thing you are beckoning. To write (or paint or compose or dance) is to give your life permanence, to admit something really happened.

I was in rapture the moment I arrived in Ireland. It was June, and the flowers (many as big as my head) were in full bloom. My word of the year was flourishing, so this felt very apt. For the Summer Solstice, I visited sacred sites in Mayo, and it was in Clew Bay that I experienced my first stone circle (a peak Claire from Outlander moment) and met the first grandmother hawthorn tree. Standing alone in a field, I approached her and made an offering of an orange and a piece of my hair tied around a branch. When I touched the tree, twisted with lichen and thick with spongy moss, something deep inside me remembered something I didn’t even know I knew. My soul was home.

It was pure draíocht.

Draíocht is the Irish word for ‘magic’.

And the inspiration for my new writing home — The Magic of What Happens on Substack.

If you’re a longtime Life Curator reader, or new here, the archive will stay up, but all my new pieces are on Substack.

The name is a riff from a 12th-century Irish story about ‘the music of what happens’ involving the famed Celtic hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill.

The Magic of What Happens is a window into my life through sharing fascinating concepts, ideas, revelations, rituals, practices, poems and quotes, as well as beautiful questions (of course). A favourite piece I have recently written is A Witch Is A Wise Woman, a deep dive into the witch archetype and my obsession with wanting to know when the divine feminine started being feared (featuring a pilgrimage I went on in Scotland following the sites of witchhunts).

I also share an occasional Life Lately piece detailing what books, movies, songs and recipes are rocking my world, along with what I am pondering, struggling with, and getting to the other side of. And for those who keep up with my annual ‘word of the year’ posts: Honour and A New Word for 2025.

Okay, story time.

When I was writing the first draft of my manuscript in rural Ireland, the darkness would set in from 3 pm, and the wind would be howling, yet I was surprisingly unafraid. I was in a chrysalis, trying to honour the voice inside that said: “Now. Write now.” It turns out trying to birth something unnameable comes with a lot of self-imposed pressure and biscuit breaks.

Winter is the void. Where everything ends and everything begins. The void is vast. It is bleak and it is lonely. And in the inwardness, you are mulch. Gathering resources for the flowering. And slowly dying to everything that was you before the cold took hold.

Sorry I didn’t text you back for a month. Darkness took me. And I strayed out of thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth. But I’m good now. How are you? — Josh Carlos

I was saying to my friend Anne at a yoga class with a live cello playing (the sound of heaven surely), “I feel like I’m dying.” She said, “You are.” “Winter is a time of death. You’re shedding stuff you can’t bring with you.”

If you feel like you’re dying, you are. You are evolving and growing, and the trees do it every year. So can you.

It is actually quite reassuring to have your experience mirrored in the season that you are in. Coming undone is a part of nature. David Whyte, in a lecture he gave, was speaking of the need for stillness and silence. He said it is how the creative muse speaks to you. This was especially soothing to hear as my inner critic always has a field day whenever I don’t produce something or make progress on a project. A lot of hot tangles in my head (as Elizabeth Gilbert calls it). And although my angst can be very loud, it doesn’t get the final say. We all get to a point of “I can’t do this” — the trick is to not make a permanent home there and redo the curtains.

The greatest assignment is to be nice to myself in these moments, to celebrate this simple fact that I am indeed alive, let alone filled with even a small desire to sit down and tend to the words on the page. — Marlee Grace

I often think about Bon Iver, who is Justin Vernon (known as the guy who recorded that one genius album alone in the Wisconsin woods). That’s the myth, anyway. I thought Justin Vernon chopped firewood all day and then effortlessly purged his soul into nine perfect tracks to record For Emma, Forever Ago in one magic night. He did not. Justin actually retreated to his family’s hunting cabin to recover from a fallout with his band, his first girlfriend, and an illness. He was in nature, did odd jobs for his father, who would periodically drop in, and, in Justin’s words, also watched a lot of DVDs and drank. This is where he got the idea to call his band ‘Bon Iver’ after watching the cult 90s show Northern Exposure. One particular scene gripped him, where the people go out into the town square when it first snows and greet each other by exclaiming “Bon Hiver!” (“Good Winter!”). He dropped the ‘h’ and that’s how we got Bon Iver, and I can’t imagine a world without his music.

I was trying to write my own For Emma, Forever Ago.

A time capsule for a specific period of my life. And it was not going super well.

The creative process is mythical, and it is certainly not seamless magic. There’s a lot of intense emotion and self-doubt. Moments of panic and then streaks of entrancement when you forget to have lunch, and then it’s midnight, and you have perfectly articulated your Scottish love affair into permanence. As Rupi Kaur wrote so beautifully, ‘when the story ends, we begin to feel all of it.’

When I talk about ‘magic’, I mean those “did that just really happen?” moments in our lives — synchronicities that occur without your doing, chance encounters, signs, invitations, advice from strangers, and manifestations that make people go ‘WOW’. I’m talking about the perfect line in a poem, an answer that comes out of left field, a piece of music that swells in your chest, a download from nature, or words heard in a voice that is not your own. Doorways appear in walls, confidence swells in your heart, and you are handed a lantern to make your path brighter.

This is ‘the magic of what happens’.

I try to capture them in words so I can relay them to you, as helpful trail markers or just good fodder for your journey.

This kind of magic, or ‘eternal unexplainableness’ as Irish philosopher John Moriarty called it, happens to me frequently, and the secret sauce I’m noticing is to let go and let the Universe UNIVERSE. The right word, gesture, lyric, or kindness can carry you through even the bleakest of moments. Let it find you. Life always finds a way.

The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. ― Carlos Castaneda

We all need aliveness.

Feed yours.

Join me on The Magic of What Happens.

—

The art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

— John O’Donohue