Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Slowly and slyly it had crept into me, this conviction of . . . what? That something is there, something vast and wise and beautiful that pervades all of life. Something that is present, attentive, behind the everyday. A frequency of consciousness at the low end of the dial, amid the static. A stratum of experience waiting to be uncovered. It is the “oceanic feeling” that puzzled Freud, “a feeling of something limitless, unbounded” that existed in some people, but not in the father of psychoanalysis. Freud thought it was likely to be a function of the evolved mind, certainly not a perception of the numinous. I share his discomfort, but I can’t agree. I have been trying to suppress the feeling for years. I kept telling myself that I was seeking a humanistic delight in the natural world, but that never felt quite like the truth. Slowly it expanded to become an uprising in me: fervent, persistent, seditious. It massed outside my walls, shouting and waving banners. I couldn’t put it down.