Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making.

The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

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.

These were my holy relics, my liturgy, the collection of memories I kept safe so that I could roll them around my mind.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again.

I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me,

But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it.

That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.

It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

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

It seems to me that this was a very different way of knowing, one that was embedded in the body rather than hived off into the mind, and which was fundamentally more complex than our current habits of thought.

It permits only fun and excludes all the untidier human feelings.

The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a complete sensory environment, whispering with sounds that nourish rather than enervate, with scents that carry information more significant than “nasty” or “nice.”

Rilke’s God wants to run through us like water through a pipe.

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 let those moments become overrun by work and care, and I was surprised to find that, without them, there was nothing left of me.

And so really, beneath it all, what I tell the moon is this: I wish I knew how to keep my people safe. I wish I knew what to do.

Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder.

Brains are “plastic” organs—they modify their neural pathways according to how we want to use them—and

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.

I often think that ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads, performing a set of actions that root us into our being again.

I am enthralled by the reality of people again, that wonderful, terrifying, engulfing human noise that I’ve missed so much.

The two of us have woven enchantment, reconnecting this place to its old meanings and finding new ones of our own. It didn’t take much. It was the simple work of willing hands, an act of listening, a commitment to seeing a place that had become invisible.

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.

I’ve noticed how often we do that, cherry-picking the comforting parts of complex religious traditions—usually the aspects that tell us everything’s okay—and ignoring the counterbalancing obligations, particularly those that involve careful introspection.

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

He gave me everything I needed, then and now: the simple faith in water, the thrill of pitching forwards into the unknown, the knowledge that wonder can be transferred through the skin. But most of all, he showed me what it was to be held by other hands, to be thrown into uncertainty, and to know I would be caught again.

hierophany.

During intermission, I told a man I knew that I used to live here. “This is where I’m from,” I said. It was no great claim to make, but I wanted to make it all the same, to show how this place could be loved.

I hadn’t noticed when that last tie had been cut. Is that how nostalgia is made: A yearning for somewhere you no longer want to be, but which seems, in an instant, perfect?

In summer months, I am in the business of catching moths. Where there is a lit bulb and an open window, I am there too, cupping my hands around a fluttering form that’s determined to hurl itself against the light. Both H and Bert are afraid of them—they are too quick, too intent. 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. I will not have them batted with a newspaper, so I clamber over the kitchen table and balance on the backs of chairs to reach them before setting them loose into the night. It is a thankless task, because soon they are back again, bumping against the glass. It must be such a bafflement to them, this invisible barrier between desire and possibility.

Fire is the shadow side of enchantment, the dark, gleaming sorcery from which we can’t tear our gaze. It shows us the wild danger that still resides in nature, the power it retains to devour and destroy. It is impolite, contagious, capable of catching from house to house while we stand helpless. It licks our palms like a moth in cupped hands.

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.

There is a gaping void where I used to rest my mind.

The last thing propping up the sky is our eternal vigilance.

There it all was: a whole galaxy of knowledge on those shelves. And not just there, either. It was there in the college library and the department library, in the giant University Library that was supposed to hold every single book in copyright. I had been to libraries before, but not like these. Everything was laid out, waiting for me. I wanted to assimilate all of it. I wanted, one day, to own a set of shelves like these.

Here was a different kind of reading: disciplined, complex, unfathomable. Books that had to be assigned, searched for in long drawers of index cards, located on a shelf, and then, somehow, read and understood. This was the impossible part, because each book was nearly impenetrable, texts so dense with learning that they felt like intellectual black holes, informational molasses. Every single paragraph, every single sentence, depended on a backlog of knowledge to support my understanding. I could barely break in.

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.

Perhaps I shouldn’t fear this present-day burnout after all. It shows me only that I’m ready to be made again. How have I allowed this great pleasure in my life—the act of sitting quietly with a book and drinking in its words—to become so heavy, so freighted with obligation? Somewhere along the line, I lost the sense of playfulness that drew me towards it in the first place. No wonder my reading went on strike.

I always thought that my future self would have ranks of books like my professor, all of them read and understood, an achievement in the past tense that proved I had become something. I now see that this was not what she showed me. She offered me instead the act of kn...

The next world is so tantalising, lying across a million unread pages, and in which I am nothing, nobody, new.

Cernunnos. This ancient deity appears in artefacts across Celtic Europe. Part human, part stag, he is associated with fertility and abundance, but also with contact with the true wild, the dark, unknowable places where death and creation are intertwined, the machinations of nature that will always be other to the human mind.

That’s because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. 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. Play is a 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. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.

The boy who drew cats seemed unable to lose his play, even in the face of disapproving authority. He is, I think, a kind of beacon for how it ought to be done: gentle defiance. A flow towards the acts we love.

They meant asserting the awkward right to time, space, and solitude; making a shameful claim on my own creativity. They meant learning to trust my long-forgotten gut instinct and to feel a yearning for my own work. They meant putting aside time to do things that seemed pointless to the outside world. They meant confronting my stultifying terror of failure and learning to enjoy eviscerating mediocre, mistake-ridden work. It was long and slow and uncertain, and often quite boring. I did not feel very much like the boy who drew cats, gravitating irresistibly towards my craft. I felt like someone fighting their way through undergrowth to reach a place they only vaguely remembered. That place was the core of me. Every moment was worth it.

We all find our play in different places, after all. Some of us in the search for follies, some of us in the stories they suggest. What matters is that we play at all, that we nurture that particular quality of attention, that we keep up the dialogue between our play and others’. It is a flame that is worth shielding, if only because it allows us to read the contours of the land, to sense the heat pooling beneath the soil.

Fire is only as safe as our behaviour around it, I always tell Bert. We bring this unruly force into our lives to remind ourselves of what enchantment means: a practice at the edges of the power that sears through all existence. It will never, ever be ours to control. It will always demand our respect, our careful conduct, our close attention.

firmament. 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. It teaches us in constellations, and invites us to undertake the slow, lifelong work of assimilating a moment.

Flying feels like an intermission in the real business of living.

“Turbulence,” I say. “Nothing to worry about.” I remember how I learned to trust those sudden drops in altitude by measuring what is spilled. The water barely judders in my bottle. The flight attendants continue on their way up their aisle without a flinch. In the vast reaches of the open skies, these jolts that trouble us so much are nothing at all, an infinitesimally small descent in relation to where we have climbed. But the human body is mistrustful of falls, and so we brace all the same. The problem is that air is strange to us. We do not understand its formlessness, its transparency. Its meanings pass too easily through our fingers.