Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

Perhaps this is what I’m seeking, too, the ability to step into the world’s flux, to travel with it rather than rasping against it, to let my own form dance across

We are not the passive recipients of the numinous, but the active constructors of a pantheon. We make the change, and it makes us. Entering into that exchange—knowing the depths of permanence and the restlessness of movement—is the work of a lifetime.

We adapt. We evolve. We rebuild and remake and renew. We listen to what it has to tell us, and undertake the work of integrating the new knowledge. Sometimes we read it in books. Sometimes we read it elsewhere, in scents carried on the air and the flight paths of birds. Sometimes we need to feel the tingle of magic to remind us what we believe.

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.

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.

It would have to be the right clifftop at the right time and in the right season, but mountains have never been my domain. When I say I have no head for heights, I mean it quite literally: the fragile balance of fluid in my ears is entirely toppled at altitude. I had to be nearly carried down from that first mountain I climbed as a Girl Guide, my vision spinning.

Certainly we do not have to enchant these shadows. We could choose to leave them merely explained. But it now seems to me that we humans have capacity for more: for another layer of experience, for an extra depth of understanding. I no longer understand why we would not reach for this.

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.

tutor is unpacking his equipment and talking us through how it is used, the different forms it can take. “I’m glad to see no one is taking notes,” he says. “Today’s all about the experience.” Distrustful of my own memory, I take photos instead, the same as I do on walks. I can go back through them later and probably make notes.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer makes a powerful case for a return to the indigenous understanding of the land, based on careful stewardship, deep knowledge, and reciprocity. When we know the detail of the places we inhabit—when we tend them with our own hands and walk them with our own feet—we enter into a conversation with our places that is mutually nourishing. We learn to listen to the ways in which they speak to us, and to find a way to reply so that they can understand. This congress is a series of gifts shared, rather than any kind of simple transaction. Behind it all is a sense of enchantment, a belief that sentience flows through all the inhabitants of the natural world, both animate and inanimate, and a calling to enter a continuous state of wonder at its functioning and flow.

One way to work towards this stewardship is to be skilled within our own landscape, to foster ways of tending to its needs as we meet our own. We are, I think, only too painfully aware of these lost skills. Native Americans are still living a history that saw these practices forcibly taken from them.

relearning them will be a life’s work. They range from being able to hold a paring knife correctly to learning to read the weather.

This is not just a matter of knowledge, but also a matter of desire. 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.

We have run as far as we can from the hardships of previous ages, and now we need to find a balance between what we know and what we knew. 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.

The natural world never stops giving you details to observe. But this learning seems to be a perpetual cycle of forgetting. Every year I lose half of what I took in, as if my brain, in an act of energy preservation, flushes out superfluous facts during winter.

we need to double down on the storytelling, and find new ways to tell out our meanings. Perhaps that is what we’re meant to do: remake our stories until we finally find the one that fits.

We, who so often think we’re cultureless, can unpack a galaxy of stories from one garden weed. But the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us, and to reconnect with the other stories, too, which are all waiting for us in our gardens and surging up from the cracks in the pavement. We must tell them to our children, so that they can’t imagine living without them. Telling them is an act of belonging, a way of pushing taproots deep into the ground. In a world full of restless and displaced people, it’s an act of welcome, too. When we tell the stories of the things that inhabit our land, we help newcomers to read the deep terrain around them and perhaps to feel a little more at home. And storytelling is always an exchange: when we listen to what is told to us, we enrich our mythology. We get closer to the big beautiful metaphorical whole.

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. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. 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 is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time. But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect.