Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

We just have to find the right way to listen.

A little farther along the peninsula is Prospect Cottage, the black-tarred shack where Derek Jarman retreated in his final years. Dying of AIDS, the director transformed the house into a text, covering the walls in books and paintings and poetry.

Lost souls have long retreated to the seaside to take the air. But only here, where concrete ears manifest the invisible, does the purpose become clear. The air is a place of letting go. Its business is dispersal, the dissipation of fog, the scattering of seeds. Subtly, imperceptibly, air brings in the new.

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.

The greatest part of them is not the skill itself but the culture that surrounds it. Those blackberries and damsons like to be asked first before they’re pulled from their branch. That’s how you’ll know when they’re ripe. You take only what you need, transform it into something good, and give away a portion of what you’ve made. You have, after all, received it as a gift. It would be selfish not to pass it on.

God has always been a name whispered between us.

There are twelve regular meteor showers reliably happening above our heads each year, and yet few of us ever make the effort to watch. I know, I know: it’s hard. They happen late at night, and when it’s dark and cold, and we live surrounded by light pollution and can barely see the sky at all. And there are clouds and rainstorms, and there’s work in the morning. But still: meteors. Shooting stars. Those streaks of light we find so magical that we invest them with our wishes. Surely that’s a sight worthy of effort?

We are awed in principle by what is out there, but we prefer to keep that awe theoretical unless it drops into our laps.

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, we defer going out to look for them. After all, no one else is doing it. It’s not an event, like a solar eclipse. We would feel silly for making a fuss about it. It would be a childish thing, and we are adults. We don’t concern ourselves with shooting stars.

I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. 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. I...

Hierophany—that revelation of the sacred—is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare i...

Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.

We don’t destroy colonial attitudes about the landscape by erasing people from it altogether, and forbidding their ever-morphing acts of meaning-making. We don’t preserve our natural landscapes by turning them into a museum.