Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Every single thing I must do—any hint of a demand—grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone.

Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works.

Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own knowing, our own meanings.

Our bodies have answers to questions that we don’t know how to ask.

But the problem is maintaining that wide-open heart, living with the vulnerability it brings. The problem is walking through life as a soft being whose skin is permeable. The problem is that you will need to take care of yourself if you live that way.

I appreciate the value of the monastic tradition, and I understand that some insights can come only from true solitude, but I also see very clearly how it prizes masculine knowledge over feminine, diminishing the wisdom of those of us who by necessity are anchored to the everyday.

Strangely, in the aftermath, I don’t feel like a survivor. I feel as though I’ve embarrassed myself.

I need to let go of the part of me that knows better, the part of me that thinks I’m doing it right, the part of me that wants everyone else to believe I’m perfect.

It is a strange business, this unlearning. I am not a beginner. I am further back than that, burdened with the work of forgetting what I thought I already knew.

There are moments when we must address our losses, without being fully conscious of what is lost.

High tides happen when the moon is close, and when she is far away, and low tides occur in the spaces between. The sun is just a helper, amplifying the moon, but it does have a very real influence on our perception of the tides. A day as we know it is twenty-four hours long, but the moon orbits the earth in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes. This means that from where we’re standing, the tides shift by roughly an hour each day, moving restlessly through the mornings and afternoons, as if they are trying to escape us.

But most of all, I miss the sense of worship that comes when I get into the sea. I miss the feeling that I am entering a vast cathedral, and, rather than sitting in its dry pews, that I am merging with it. I miss how when I feel the pull of the tides, I am also feeling the pull of the whole world, of the moon and the sun; that I am part of a chain of interconnection that crosses galaxies.

I want to feel that raw, elemental awe that my ancestors felt, rather than my tame, explained modern version.

We are a forgetful species, obsessed with the endless succession of tasks that hover over our days, and negligent of the grand celestial drama unfolding around us. And here I am, remembering.

There was once a chain of understanding that stretched across generations, but that was broken long ago. All I have inherited is the forgetting.

When I try to understand what it is that I believe, I’m like a child caught in play. There is no solidity. Sensation gathers in my peripheral vision, but dissipates when I turn to look at it directly. It does not survive my scrutiny, any attempts to systematise or analyse. It is a different kind of belief, a different kind of feeling. It requires faith, and I have always been short on that.

I often think that ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads,

Rather than to say any prayer, I needed to take care of this place, to make a gesture towards an invisible continuity of yearning. The mysteries it holds are not revelations or miracles, but the flow of unknowing across the centuries, the connection of wanting to understand.

We have let the sea show us a fragment of its power, and in return, we’ve shown it our power and our will and our sheer exuberant joy.

There are some very good reasons for being selective in our spiritual beliefs: religions tend to be tainted with the worldly prejudices of those who minister them, and it’s worthwhile sifting these out to find the gems of beautiful thought contained within them. But for those who, like me, only ever want to sift, there’s a real risk of justifying our worst behaviour.

I tend to think that God is not a person, but the sum total of all of us, across time.

The ZPO was founded on three tenets: Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action.

I can no longer contact anyone who was there, and it seems that I am the only one left, treasuring the uncanny sense I had that night that something had happened to us, as a collective, something that was of lasting importance.

I don’t think they mean to menace us, it’s just that we’re invisible to them, a thing of such scale that we’re beyond perception.

We are more moth than we know: small, frustrated, capable of only tickling a world that we wish would feel our heft.

I was not working because I couldn’t bear to turn in anything that so clearly revealed my imperfection.

I no longer see myself as the girl who is so innately destructive that she might leave a trail of charred earth in her wake, but I do know that I am on first-name terms with burning, with blazing high and burning out.

I didn’t yet know, at that age, how to know nothing. I knew only how to pretend I knew everything.

Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion.

Lauren Olamina, the heroine of Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed series, makes a god out of change itself, “the only lasting truth in the world.” For her, the sacred is found in adaptation.

But it now seems to me that we humans have capacity for more: for another layer of experience, for an extra depth of understanding. I no longer understand why we would not reach for this.

This is not just a matter of knowledge, but also a matter of desire. We have forgotten how to want one good dress over fifty disposable ones. We have forgotten how to crave each new food as it comes into season. We must learn to know with our hands rather than our heads.

We have run as far as we can from the hardships of previous ages, and now we need to find a balance between what we know and what we knew.

Perhaps that is what we’re meant to do: remake our stories until we finally find the one that fits.

If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.

We don’t preserve our natural landscapes by turning them into a museum. We heal these rifts by inviting back gentleness into our relationship with the earth, by allowing meaning to take hold again.

That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else.