Kai Crawford’s Reviews > The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday > Status Update

Many people prefer to walk along traditional pilgrim routes, following in the steps of countless other people. I believe it is possible to turn any favourite walk into a pilgrimage, however big or little you want to make it. It could be a circular walk, a walk to a favourite destination or building, a singing walk or a silent meditation, alone or with others.

Heaven forbid that any other creature should be allowed to inconvenience the masters and possessors of nature. We'd kill them rather than let them have the leavings in our dustbins. We live in barren, lonely sterility. Wipe out entire species, create for ourselves a world occupied only by humans, rather than suffer such indignity.

Here's the thing about enchantment: it doesn't require magic, but it certainly requires attention. Enchantment isn't about magical thinking, it's about being fully present in the world.

Isn't this true for so many of us? That there is a single kind of landscape in which we feel a sense of homecoming, a particular type of landscape in which we feel so much more whole?

How many of us occupy a ground of being in which reverence and respect for an animate world around us overwhelms the cultural programming which tells us that our individual human lives are the only things that matter, where wonder, not knowledge, is the foundation of possibility, and mystery is something to sit with, not to solve.

What is missing from the lives of so many of us is an ongoing sense of meaningful participation in a world in which we believe matters. Which we maybe even hold to be sacred. Most of us experience moments that are rich with meaning in our lives. But how many of us feel that the very fabric of our lives is woven from such moments?

The understanding that everything is alive, everything is vivid, everything has its own path, and the intersection of our paths is life's greatest blessing.

The stars are no longer cold, unknowable objects, scattered shining but ultimately lifeless across the vast empty distances of black space. They are active participants in their own journeys of becoming.

If the world is alive, if nature has consciousness, then I am not just some singular solitary being plunked on a lump of inert matter, surrounded by inert space in an inert universe. Everything around me is alive. I am standing in the midst of an aliveness, and that aliveness deserves my attention, respect, care. It deserves my all and my reverence.

Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit. No tree means a man's life. No snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him, nor can he speak things like stones, springs, plants, and animals. - CG Young