Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

We are working now to maintain the basics of survival. It is an endless, thankless labour. It sometimes feels as though we are stoking a giant machine that will eventually consume us anyway. We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home. We can see no way out of it. Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

These were my holy relics, my liturgy, the collection of memories I kept safe so that I could roll them around my mind. They made my stomach tingle, like something was imminent, something could happen.

When I walk, I fall through three layers of experience. The first is all about the surface of my skin, the immediate feedback of my senses. It is often twitchy and uncomfortable: my boots are too tight; there’s a twig in my sock. My backpack won’t sit square on my shoulders. My walking is stop-start in that phase, curtailed by an endless series of adjustments. I am never sure if I really want to go the distance. But if I walk on through that, those sensations eventually fade and they’re replaced by bubbling thought, a burgeoning of ideas and insights, a sense of joyous chatter in the mind. This is the point in a walk when the interior of my mind feels luxuriant, a place so pleasurable to inhabit that I never want my legs to stop. It’s a creative space, a place where problems are solved in unfathomable ways, the answers arriving like truths known all along. If I carry on walking, eventually that fades, too. Perhaps it is low blood sugar, or perhaps the popcorn brain burns itself out eventually, but at some point I reach a very different state of mind, a place beyond words in which I feel quiet and empty. This is my favourite phase of all, an open space in which I am nothing for a while, just an existence with moving parts and a map in my hand, whose feet know the route and do not need my interference. Nothing happens here, or so it seems. But in its aftermath, I find my most profound insights, whole shifts in the meanings and understandings that underpin who I am. In this s...

We have to fight for our ability to pay attention. It is not given. It does not assert itself as a need until it’s far too late. I am only just beginning to understand that my burnout was the result of multiple losses, each one of which seemed so small that I thought it didn’t matter. I willingly surrendered my meditation time because I thought it would be a vanity to demand it. I gave up reading and time alone and long, hot baths and walking. I gave up silence, and standing in the garden at sunrise. I let those moments become overrun by work and care, and I was surprised to find that, without them, there was nothing left of me.

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. Here I am, back in that cycle of fuel, of conflagration, and of scorched earth. The loss that it brings—the complete collapse of self—is always agonising, but there’s something I secretly like about it, too. After all, the bare ground invites a new kindling. To have nothing to lose, you have to first lose everything.

But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.