For those who don't read fantasy (and those who do): Contemplate this.

In 1817, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein, the story of a obsessed scientist who creates life from the remains of various corpses. This work is said to be the first fully realized science fiction novel.

The story of Victor Frankenstein and his created creature spawned a whole genre of writing and has been made into several films. The idea of man being given the god-like power to create another human being never seems to get old.

But the truth is that people do have the power to create life.

I found out recently that two of my friends are pregnant. As I have lived my entire life never having created a human, the ease with which others are doing it seems amazing to me. More magical than biological.

Anthropologists believe that early in human evolution woman were worshiped for their creative powers as it was not well-understood during the transitional period from more instinctive animal-like human thinking to the development of less instinctive and more logic driven thinking patterns, how women were able to produce children. To me, it is no less miraculous given the knowledge that it is not only women, but a pair of humans who create a child. A small group project so to speak. Let's just whip up another person, shall we? It's not exactly making a sandwich or even creme brulee. In fact, it's harder than rocket science.

The idea of child bearing as miraculous continues to provide fodder for fiction. In 2006, the film Children of Men portrayed a near future where women have stopped giving birth. The end of humanity is nigh. In that film, when a woman does conceive and bear a child, it is seen as so miraculous that soldiers fighting in the streets in the midst of all out war stop and stand aside in awe as this new mother passes by.

We're a strange lot who don't believe in magic when it happens all around us all the time. Babies are born, lightning explodes from the sky, trees bear fruit, we feel joy, we fall in love, our brains capture the information collected by our senses and create an impression of the world, we build cities destroying nature to do so, nature takes the earth back bit by bit. Those of you who don't believe in magic will say, "This isn't magic. it's science." We've come to take these things for granted. Just as we come to take for granted the relationships in our lives that last the longest and give us the most.

Sad really, when you think about it. In an effort to be intellectual, we are blinded to the magic all around us. Thank goodness there is fiction that lets us safely believe in magic, while maintaining our intellectual affectations

Otherwise we might forget the experience of wonder.