Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.

We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home. We can see no way out of it. 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.

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. I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come, to sense them and experience them and integrate them, rather than to merely administrate them. As I grow older, this begins to feel like a desperate lack. 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. It’s not just that the world needs to change—I need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again. 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 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. Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.

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.

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. “May I disappear,” wrote Simone Weil. “When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.” 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.

Maybe I have stalled. Perhaps I am depressed, but it does not feel like other depressions I have encountered. I feel none of the self-loathing that once buckled my knees, none of the urge towards destruction. I am still very much afloat, and in fact strangely content. I am just slow, that’s all. I am just empty. I theorise that it’s a kind of pandemic hangover, my wits dulled from too little stimulation, my sensitivities heightened by the lack of demand. I liked the social truce that lockdown brought, but I was also restless and bored. Now I seem to be stuck there. Bored, restless, empty-headed and bodily resistant to changing it. Stillness has settled into my muscles and I don’t know how to feel fluid again.

Some are even naming it: burnout. We are, all of us, charred remains, nothing left of us but blackened bones. It is a state of being in which I have some expertise. Autistic people are intimate with burnout, particularly those who, like me, were not diagnosed until late into adulthood. 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. For me, the years trying to conceal my sensory distress and social dislocation in everyday life meant that I bounced in and out of burnout.

Burnout is something that I carefully guard against, now that I understand its source. I thought I might have learned how to prevent it. But no. It has come for me again; I can control only so much.

How do we worship now? How do we get past the blunt knowing of our disenchanted age and tap back into the magic that we used to perceive everywhere? I wanted to touch the stones and for them to return a tingle of meaning laid down over millennia. Instead, they seemed to shrug me off. Make your own meaning, they said. We can’t do that for you. I used to know a woman who made standing stones. Jean Lowe waited until her husband had retired and her children had left home before enrolling in art school to study ceramics. Vases and cups were not for her: she crafted rock, reverting her clay to its elemental form, re-wilding the smooth material through the application of fire.

stones remind me how far I have come—and how much weight I can carry without being dragged under.

There are butterflies, the drone of crickets and bees, flitting goldfinches. The air around me is alive. True, it’s nothing like a wilderness. I never lose sight of the rooftops of nearby houses, and the whine of the nearby main road is ever present. But the grass is whispering even louder, and in the distance there’s a glimpse of the sea—cornflower blue today. Not another living soul is up here. The last thing I notice amid all this movement are the stones. All eight of them standing upright in a circle, and a flat one in the middle that reminds me of a sacrificial altar.

The ground feels cool, and barefoot, I walk slowly, careful to land each tread safely. This place feels safe. It’s pleasurable to watch the blown grass creating abstract patterns as it sways and billows. There are so many butterflies. I feel my attention settling for the first time in a long while, in this place that is infinite with detail, with layers and layers of life arrayed before my eyes. 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.

I notice a movement at the far corner of the field, and I see a woman at the edge of the woods. She is trying not to watch me, but I can see that she is waiting her turn. Perhaps she is as embarrassed as I am to be in need of a little time amid these new stones, their meaning not yet sanctified by the ages. I buckle on my sandals again and nod to her as I pass, pretending that we are both walkers rather than pilgrims, pretending that we don’t both crave.

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

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 will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that’s experiential, the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it—name it—and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life’s work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove that you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.

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 have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and to allow ourselves to learn something. And that is easier said than done.

“Go to the limits of your longing,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Book of Hours. These, he says, are the words we dimly hear as we are made and sent out into the world. They are whispered by a God who can so often seem absent, but who in fact is just waiting for us to sense divine proximity. Rilke’s God wants to run through us like water through a pipe. It’s an encounter found only at the extremes of experience, in “beauty and terror,” in the practice of passion. “Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in,” we are told.

the problem is maintaining that wide-open heart, living with the vulnerability it brings. The problem is walking through life as a soft being whose skin is permeable. The problem is that you will need to take care of yourself if you live that way. The other problem is that wounds can heal and cracks can fill in. And that life, quite often, is too painful already. Sometimes there is nothing we can do but close up again, draw in, protect ourselves. Mostly we don’t even notice as this happens.

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 am only just beginning to understand that my burnout was the result of multiple losses, each one of which seemed so small that I thought it didn’t matter. I willingly surrendered my meditation time because I thought it would be a vanity to demand it. I gave up reading and time alone and long, hot baths and walking. I gave up silence, and standing in the garden at sunrise. 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. “Don’t let yourself lose me,” says Rilke’s God. I feel a little short-changed by this. I need to know how to avoid the loss in the first place. I need instructions for re-enchantment.

Lately I have returned to my silent conversations with the moon. I go outside each night when everyone is sleeping, and I try to transmit the depth of my longing for my own self back again, for time not to work, but to simply exist; for the right to feel curiosity again, without the sense that it would only make everything harder.

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 want to throw up my hands and say, Let’s stop this here. I’m clearly not cut out to be a swimmer. But I know that’s just my ego talking. I’ve been thrown off-balance, as I so often am. It takes humility to get through a process like this, and that’s what I’m trying to gather about me right now. If I want to swim better, I need to know nothing—be nothing—for a while. I need to put myself into somebody else’s hands and allow them to reform me. I need to let go of the part of me that knows better, the part of me that thinks I’m doing it right, the part of me that wants everyone else to believe I’m perfect. I’m not learning so much as unlearning. • • • It is a strange business, this unlearning.

I’m not sure you can do this gradually. Instead, I think you have to keep turning up and waiting for a revelation. That’s what seems to happen in my class: one week, a swimmer will be as stuttering as I am, and the next, quite suddenly, they will produce an effortless stroke and cut through the water like clockwork. Every now and then, I glimpse this in myself. For a few luxurious seconds, my mind and body will cooperate, and I will feel the lightness of it, the sense that many rhythms are synchronising into something that feels like a flow. But it soon collapses.

My learning is like the swing of a pendulum, lurching from one extreme to the other, but gradually it begins to stabilise. Fewer and fewer things go wrong. I begin to have insight into what I ought to do. There is one single glorious week when I swim a whole length with my legs and my arms all working together, and Wendy leans over the edge of the pool to say, “I think you’ve got it.” I go home, hopeful that I am, after all, a swimmer. I start to wonder if I shouldn’t sign up for some grand gesture, a race or a sponsored long-distance swim, just to make sure I keep on pushing towards my goal.

Here I am, once again dismantled. There are moments when we must address our losses, without being fully conscious of what is lost. Somehow I must find my way to step back into the water, if only because I remember there was once enchantment there, if only because I am not sure who I am without it. But the water is not to blame. It only shows the shape of the problem, having surged to fill it. It is this negative space—this absence—that I need to understand.

As the earth rotates, the sea reaches towards the moon, causing a high tide at the closest point. A simultaneous high tide rises at the opposite point on the globe, too, the farthest point from the moon. This one is a little more counterintuitive: here, the moon does not exert enough gravity to pull the water inwards, and so the tide bulges in the other direction, freed from all constraints. High tides happen when the moon is close, and when she is far away, and low tides occur in the spaces between. The sun is just a helper, amplifying the moon, but it does have a very real influence on our perception of the tides. A day as we know it is twenty-four hours long, but the moon orbits the earth in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes. This means that from where we’re standing, the tides shift by roughly an hour each day, moving restlessly through the mornings and afternoons, as if they are trying to escape us.

I also miss the community that came with it, the group of women I used to swim with a few times a week, the way we all felt brave together. I miss the ten minutes of intense joyous chatter, the sense of release, of our stresses held in the mesh of collective concern, even if for a few short moments. I miss the wisdom of the group, the sense that I could bring any problem there and have it gently probed and understood, with solutions offered as the gifts of lived experience. I miss the days when I could feel held by the water and held by the people I swam with, all at once; and when I felt useful enough to hold them in return. But most of all, I miss the sense of worship that comes when I get into the sea. I miss the feeling that I am entering a vast cathedral, and, rather than sitting in its dry pews, that I am merging with it. I miss how when I feel the pull of the tides, I am also feeling the pull of the whole world, of the moon and the sun; that I am part of a chain of interconnection that crosses galaxies.

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. 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.

The water reflects only your troubled face. You are the one who fills the well. 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. 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. At this point in time, ritual is exactly what I need. The world is unfurling all around me after too many seasons held unnaturally in bud, and as everyone surges outwards in some relief, I am still held in tight.

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.

Here we are, swimming in deep time. We have let the sea show us a fragment of its power, and in return, we’ve shown it our power and our will and our sheer exuberant joy. That night, when I lie in bed, I can still feel that swell rising and falling in me. 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. I hate organised fun. Overall, I prefer to make my own ad hoc arrangements with a couple of close friends. 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. I want to be part of a group that makes me return to ideas that bewilder and challenge me. I realise that this is contradictory, but I do believe that congregations can be loose enough to hold people like me, those who will attend unreliably and prefer to lurk on the sidelines.

That is the work I crave: the sense of contact. The possibility that it might change me in ways that I can’t predict. The possibility that I might one day do better.

We have not understood this earth’s full potency until we have recognised fire. 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. Fire brings us back into contact with the cycle of life, with the limits of our control, and with the full spectrum of human feeling. It teaches us hard lessons and burns through our fragile illusions. Without it, we are living only a surface existence, a shallow terrain. We must assimilate fire to become whole again.

French doors opening out onto a sunlit terrace draped in wisteria. The woman who opened the door was friendly and helpful, but at the same time nakedly clever in a way that I had never yet encountered. As we talked, she exuded entitlement to seriousness and a simple acceptance of intellectual work that made her an exotic bird in my eyes, rare and fascinating. I didn’t know it was possible to want to be this.

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.

this was not what she showed me. She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry. I don’t want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.

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

You do not need to walk in the wilderness to make contact with the wild. If you know your stories—if you understand the mythologies of your land—then you can leap from a sunlit stroll with your dog into the ancient, chthonic wood.

I see deep play everywhere, expressed in infinite ways. It captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely even recognise in children. 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.

Deep play—those big, immersive, unprofitable processes in which we invest our whole identity—is fundamental to me, and yet mine looks dry to the outside world, colourless.

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. We should teach this to our children.

The skills of deep play took far longer to learn than anything I’d studied before. 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.

Deep play is a labyrinth and not a maze, a twisting path with no destination. The walking is the thing. You are the walk. There is no end to it. Your only reward is more of the same—more wells to fill with your attention, more fires to tend. And every now and then, for reasons beyond your control, those fires will go out.

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.

Sometimes we are visited by destruction. Other times, it seems, the world flexes its claws and lets us feel its hot breath, just to remind us how small we are, how helpless.

A change is coming, whether or not I am paying attention. Life is no longer the same. I can feel it in the people around me: the scramble to get away from it, the terror that it might touch us, the urge to stay high and dry. I can feel us calcifying, separating, drawing in. I hope the change brings justice rather than suffering, connection rather than more rancour. 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. To melt back into the landscapes that hold us, and that are still releasing the wisdom of millennia, quietly, slowly, if only we can learn to listen.