Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

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. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching.

I don’t want that life anymore. I want what Julian Jaynes’s ancients had: to be able to talk to god. Not in a personal sense, to a distant figure who is unfathomably wise, but to have a direct encounter with the flow of things, a communication without words. I want to let something break in me, some dam that has been shoring up this shamefully atavistic sense of the magic behind all things, the tingle of intelligence that was always waiting for me when I came to tap in. I want to feel that raw, elemental awe that my ancestors felt, rather than my tame, explained modern version. I want to prise open the confines of my skull and let in a flood of light and air and mystery. I want this time of change to change me. I want to absorb its might, its giant waves travelling around the planet. I want to retain what the quiet reveals, the small voices whose whispers can be heard only when everything falls silent.

I have been wondering how to speak to a God like mine—this idea that I have drawn from thin air, from my own unstable perceptions. I have reached the point in my life when I need the sense of contact with a consciousness wiser than my own, less frustrated and afraid. I want to be able to talk and to feel certain that someone is listening. But the belief itself wavers. Sometimes I believe that I believe. Sometimes even that is too much for me to assimilate. I feel foolish about the whole thing. I don’t know how to do this.

In this moment, it seems to me that talking to God does not require faith, but practice. It is a doing rather than a believing, an act of devotion reciprocated in the same way it is made: mutely, through the hands and the feet, the myriad attentions of the body.

We share that attraction towards the brightest object in our field of view, an equal fascination with candles and conflagrations. We sense the danger, but we can’t look away. In fact we are drawn to circle it endlessly, getting closer and closer until it consumes us. Even when we think the sky might be falling, we stay to watch. It is elemental to us, this alertness, this panicked, flitting attention.

Writing kept coming back to me, punching its way out of whatever grave I dug it. It loomed insistent at my window. It rattled my door. I just couldn’t kill it: there was no silver bullet, no stake, no incantation that would slay it. Writing had plans for me, and my resistance was futile.

Writing, for me, is a way of making the airy matter of thought feel real. I can open up a notebook and solidify my feelings, which otherwise seem to float around my head, ill-defined, mutable. It is a necessary act of anchoring.

I don’t have to believe in God as a person. I can believe in this instead: the entire mesh of existence binding us together in ways we perceive only if we listen. Each of us is a particle of this greater entity. Each one of us contains it all.