Enchantment

I believe that enchantment is an attitude of mind which can be cultivated, a way of approaching the world which anyone can learn to adopt: the enchanted life is possible for everybody.

Enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.

The enchanted life is one which is intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination – but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community. It flourishes on work that has heart and meaning; it respects the instinctive knowledge and playfulness of children. It understands the myths we live by; thrives on poetry, song and dance. It loves the folkloric, the handcrafted, the practice of traditional skills. It respects wild things, recognises the wisdom of the crow, seeks out the medicine of plants. It rummages and roots on the wild edges, but comes home to an enchanted home and garden. It is engaged with the small, the local, the ethical; enchanted living is slow living.

Ultimately, to live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again. This is an active choice, a leap of faith which is necessary not just for our own sakes, but for the sake of the wide, wild Earth in whose being and becoming we are so profoundly and beautifully entangled.

1. Everything around you is alive: believe it. Tell stories to stones, sing to trees, start conversations with birds. Build relationships. You’ll never be lonely again.
2. To be fully in your body is to be fully alive. Get out of your head and into the world.
3. Look for the wonder wherever you go. Be all your life, as American poet Mary Oliver suggested, ‘a bride married to amazement’.
4. Embrace mystery – don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.
5. Cultivate your mythic imagination: the inner and outer landscape of myth.
6. Know your place. Learn to belong, because wherever you go, there you are. There’s nowhere else real to be.
7. Cleave to the local and the ethical. Cultivate community spirit, and autonomy.
8. Slow down.
9. Create. Buy handmade. Live folklorically.
10. Don’t have a career: have a life. Find your calling – but above all, find your meaning in the community of the world.
11. Foster meaningful ritual; make each day a ceremony, or make a ceremony in each day.
12. Cherish otherness, in all its forms; confront in yourself, and explore, the forms of otherness which make you uncomfortable or afraid.
13. Treasure change: it’s the stuff from which lives are forged. Stop looking for the eternal and immutable, and enter into the daily dance with the transitory.

If the world is alive, if nature has consciousness, then I am not just some singular, solitary being plonked on a lump of inert matter surrounded by inert space in an inert universe. Everything around me is alive – there is no such thing as ‘inert’. I am standing in the midst of an aliveness, and that aliveness deserves my attention, my respect, my care. It deserves my awe and my reverence. 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. The insects and birds and animals are singing themselves into being; this autumn land is dreaming and I am a part of that dreaming. That beautiful emerald-bodied dragonfly over there by the beehive is no longer a soulless creature, capable only of mechanically carrying out the simplest of genetically preprogrammed tasks. It has its own purpose and path. It is a participant in the unfolding of the world, just as I am; a unique expression of the prodigious, indiscriminately varied life of the cosmos, no more and no less than I am. I see a dragonfly; what does it ‘see’ when it sees me? There are patterns and webs and weavings – lines of becoming all around me that I cannot ever begin to imagine I understand. The world is alive, and in the infinite extravagance of its multi-faceted aliveness it is full of mystery again.

What could be more enchanted than that?

If I were a place, I would be an island. I’ve lived on islands; I know how they are. I know how they get under your skin, and I know how it is that some of them can flay that skin right off you, leaving you naked and exposed in ways you never imagined you could possibly bear. I lived on such an island once: a land of sea and stone. A wild, inhospitable beauty that would break your heart – and it broke mine, for sure. That island shaped me, and the memory of it shapes me still. I’ll carry it with me always, for some places will not permit their forgetting. The island I would be carries the possibility of that wild inhospitality. Its weather would of course be affected by the day on which you approached it, but it would depend much more on the kind of vessel you came sailing in. Come in a simple wooden coracle, and it’s yours for the taking. Come in a pirate ship, or a flashy rich-man’s yacht, and it’ll wreck you on its beaches without a second thought.

My island’s edges might be fraught with danger, but its interior would be lush and green. You’d have to scale the mountains to get there – mountains forged from age-old gneiss, carved and curved like the secret folds of an animal’s pale-grey brain. These are dark mountains, not easy to cross, but behind them you’d find the treasure you sought: hidden green valleys loud with tumbling water, and the thick oak forest where the old gods still dwell. Follow the river to the heart of the wood: a woman lives there, in a cottage whose walls are studded with shells. A fox sleeps by her hearth, a raven roosts in a dark corner, and a sealskin hangs on the back of her door.

This is the island I would be.

This world does not belong to us. The world is a great dreaming being which shelters other beings, and we are just one among a countless number of species who live in her and of her. Once, we had contracts with the plants and animals who share this world with us. We would treat them with respect; like them, we would take only what we needed from this earth and no more, and they would share their wisdom and medicine with us. They’d be companions on our journey through a life that can sometimes be hard, but whose loads are always lightened by communion.

We’ve come so far from that old wisdom. We want to know the stars, to solve all the great mysteries of the universe – but we don’t even know ourselves, or how to be in relationship with the land, animals and plants around us. To alter that state of affairs, we need not only to act differently, but to be different. If we can re-enchant ourselves – fall in love with this complex and mysterious, animate world all over again – then we might stand a chance.

Begin, if you will, with a tree. Congratulate a young, fragile willow on its summer growth. Watch the first turn of the leaves of an old ash, all scars and stories, as she begins to grow autumn-sleepy, just as you are. Feel the dreadful heave at the roots of the tall birch after the winter storm, and wonder what sense it is that tells you how the deep roots had nearly lost their hold, down there past the iron lick of the lower soil and onto the fractured rock. Do you hear the bruising of the deep roots, find yourself wanting to reach out and touch the bark of the tree that withstood the wind – knowing that you too have withstood a storm or two in your time? The graceful birch, that lady of the woods whose silver-white bark is like no other’s, and you.