Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder.

Agree. Is that so because the world is changing fast or because we are getting older?

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

Yes yes yes

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.

the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

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. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all—not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing.

Enchantment Comes from our engagement with something, not necessarily with beauty. It's also usually easily achieved when we are children, as we grow up we try to disregard those feelings as something that is unadult

But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in the silt of a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.

Taking off your shoes is an act of contact, too. You make a direct sensory link to the ground beneath your feet. It is humble in the etymological sense of the word: “of the soil.” Take off your shoes, and you are earthed.

Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it—sometimes I think the vast majority—is somatic, the concern of the body.

for the right to feel curiosity again, without the sense that it would only make everything harder. These feel like small, stupid things to ask for when there is so much suffering in the world, but behind them is the wider mesh in which I’m embedded.

I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching.

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.

A part of me is always suspicious of groups. I am by nature a solitary animal. I like to do things my way, and in my own good time. I’m resistant to timetables and demands on my attention, and to the kind of politics that always seem to arise between adults who join clubs.

Me too

But more and more I crave being part of a congregation, a group of people with whom I can gather to reflect and contemplate, to hear the ways that others have solved this puzzling problem of existence. Most of all, I want them to hold me to account, to keep me on track, to urge me towards doing good. Holding spiritual beliefs on my own is lonely.

She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry.

I hope we can all rise above the urge for petty revenge. I hope, most of all, that we can learn to soften into this time and into each other. To merge again, somehow.

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.

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