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February 13 - February 16, 2024
It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception.
always seemed compromised, this place where the wild thrived between twists of rusted metal and barbed wire. The nature on TV was
But still I absorbed the lesson. Beauty was impractical. It was not for everyday folk like us.
But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need
would be lying if I pretended not to find the idea of a new stone circle ersatz.
She loved the idea of her strange stones being installed in polite suburban gardens, bringing with them a hint of otherness.
Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works.
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.
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.
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,
the patriarchal way that we frame spiritual development, the way that men get enlightenment and women get to look after them as they do so, all the while getting mocked for the compromised practices they create in the scraps of time that remain.
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.
You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert.
If I took something from that day, it was not to avoid swimming in high winds; it was to avoid making a fool of myself in front of the kind of men who sit on the beach drinking beer and commenting.
the part of me that thinks I’m doing it right, the part of me that wants everyone else to believe I’m perfect. I’m not learning
There are two giant waves travelling endlessly around the earth, and twice a day we see their full volume. We barely sense the scale of what is really happening, because we only ever witness it locally. We rarely stop to think that they join us to the entire planet, and to the space beyond it.
This life I have made is too small. It doesn’t allow enough in: enough ideas, enough beliefs, enough encounters with the exuberant magic of existence.
It strikes me that a Lammas loaf is a therapeutic project: an hour or so of working dough in the hands is a ritual all of its own.
It was the simple work of willing hands, an act of listening, a commitment to seeing a place that had become invisible.
may not have a divine voice whispering in my ear to render it all clear, but I’m fairly certain that God—however you conceive of them—didn’t plan for any of us to be racist. Every one of us has some kind of work to do.
When I learned about the water cycle in school, it seemed straightforward: a matter of evaporation, rain, rivers, and seas. But only recently did I begin to understand what that preserved: the water endures, sublimating between states, becoming brackish, being cleansed, infiltrating into the soil. Between water and our bodies there is effortless communication, both engaged in an endless saturated exchange.
It is the same water, then and now. It is the same sea that flows across the whole world. It is just one of the ways in which we’re all connected.
Too often, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we can live whole lives in the absence of suffering.
He never seems more than a conduit here, painting cats because that is simply what he does. He is the brush. He is the ink. The cats are creating themselves. When the time comes, they save him.
Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to
disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves.
Writing kept coming back to me, punching its way out of whatever grave I dug
Kate is a Yorkshire native whose own writing has often explored the meaning of being a Northerner.
We have forgotten how to crave each new food as it comes into season.
But this learning seems to be a perpetual cycle of forgetting. Every year I lose half of what I took in, as if my brain, in an act of energy preservation, flushes out superfluous facts during winter. The following year I will return to dimly remembered plants and say, “This one smells like cologne,” or “This one’s leaves taste of onion,” but I will have no memory of the name.
The alchemy comes in understanding the truth that seems so easily hidden: that everything is interconnected. That there is only one whole. That we exist within a system that includes every degraded human act and every beautiful one, every blade of grass and every mountain; that shines and snaps and varies like the surface of the sea. We as individuals contain it all. We hold within us the potential for the greatest
listen. Each of us is a particle of this greater entity. Each one of us contains it all.
We are awed in principle by what is out there, but we prefer to keep that awe theoretical unless it drops into our laps. Meteors sit perfectly on the cusp of the mundane and the rare. They are there, but only if we seek them out. We know that if we encounter them, it will be a remarkable experience, perhaps even one we will remember for years to come. But because of that very ordinariness,
The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.
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
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We heal these rifts by inviting back gentleness into our relationship with the earth, by allowing meaning to take hold again. We should encourage enchantment to bolt like a weed.
was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for.
