Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death, and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbours who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. 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. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology, grand stories unfolding around you as you go about your daily business, transcendence happening in real time. Even in the day-to-day, you could not avoid reflecting on the big moral and ethical questions of life, because they would be present, unavoidable. Over a lifetime, you would approach these ideas in a million different ways. Our most familiar places would become maps of myth and wisdom, blooming around us like fractals, inviting us into an ever more nuanced engagement with meaning.

Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and reveals the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness.

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. They don’t translate across minds. It falls on us to keep them.

We must resist the tendency of our minds to tell us that we have already assimilated that experience once and for all, a fixed idea that we can box up and stand upon to reach the next important thing. We have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and to allow ourselves to learn something.

Ritual is different from worship: a matter of instinct rather than construction, a gesture that lets us weave significance in the moment. It is so undemanding, so simple, almost passive. You follow the steps, and they take you down to find what you need.

Every one of us has some kind of work to do. A spiritual practice that blankets us in the analgesic of self-acceptance is just a bandage for our narcissism. Congregations—ones that are allowed to express diversity of thought—hold us to account.

Too often, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we can live whole lives in the absence of suffering. We are told that uniform happiness is the only desirable experience. But this in itself is a disenchantment.

I didn’t yet know, at that age, how to know nothing. I knew only how to pretend I knew everything. It was a relief to admit that I was fallible. This humbling was like water poured over fire. I started from scratch, and it was surprisingly enjoyable to do so.

Above all, I learned what happens when you turn away from play. The most beautiful reaches of your attention degrade within you, leaving behind a residue of bitterness and frustration. In playlessness, your adult self is not nurtured, but strangled. And deep play—that play that connects across months and years, that fosters its own arcane missions, that delves into the minutiae of being—is hard to find again.

When we look for enchantment to give us direct, concrete revelations, we miss the point. It is too big for us to swallow all at once.

The sound mirrors externalise an invisible process and show us the narrow range of our own perception. There is so much, always, that we don’t see. There is so much that we don’t hear. The air is full of information. We just have to find the right way to listen.

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. If we start to re-enchant the most fundamental parts of our existence—the food, the objects that we use, the places we inhabit—we can begin to restore our connection between our bodies and the land. This can’t be achieved in the abstract. We must learn to become better keepers of the things that matter.

Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. 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 act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations. I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for. That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.