When the people who claim to love animals doomed the elephants and shut down the circuses and killed the ponies and tried to ban the carriage horses from their beautiful park in New York, I wrote that we are in danger of losing the magic in our world.

I am sure many people dislike me for my  views, but I dread the political correctness that has swept through our culture, animal and people and is driving the magic out of our world.

A woman wrote me yesterday to say that the read my new book “Talking To Animals” and was deeply offended by my defense of the New York Carriage Horses, she said she was a long-time reader of my books and my blog but would no longer read both, as I was not the person she thought I was.

I felt badly for her, my blog is definitely not the place for her, but I would hate to live a life where I never hear an opinion different from mine, or can’t bear a different way of thinking, or considered a view that was not the same as mine. It seems like a disease to me, and I hope I never catch it.

There are all sorts of ways to look at the world, and it’s just like getting a dog: there are many good ways to do it.

One reason I love my new Achromat lens and am working hard to learn how to use it is that the geniuses who invented it, and the creative people who have brought it back say one of their goals is to capture some of the magic and ethereal wonder that remains in the world, the very magic being driven away by ideologues on all sides and by the legions of the angry and the aggrieved that have taken over our public spaces.

Yesterday, I took my lens out into the woods with the dogs and with Maria and I felt the magic out there, the otherworldly quality of the deep woods, the peace and contemplation one feels there that is so hard to find in our disconnected world. I am excited to try to capture some magic. Magic is one of the foundations of spirituality.

This photo captured that for me, the dogs in the light, the softness and beautiful cocoon of the woods, the embrace of Mother Earth.

This one is for all the children and adults who still believe in magic, who fight for the carriage horses and the magic they bring, for the elephants now being slaughtered because there is no work for them, for the people who loved them and cared for them, for the ponies who once gave rides to children, and for the children who will never see an elephant or a circus again.

And for the sanctity and purity of nature.

When we lose our sense of magic, we lose a great part of what it means to be human.