Enchantment
Extracts from my 2018 book, The Enchanted Life
We’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve travelled a long way from the natural world that is our home, and the sense of enchantment we once knew there, when we were children.
We’ve all felt it: that nagging sense of something missing, something fundamentally wrong at the heart of our lives, a sense of profound disconnection from the wider world around us. We feel it in our burned-out, stressed-out bodies, in our anxiety-ridden thought patterns, in our broken and dysfunctional relationships, in the sense of futility which haunts our days, in the breakdown of communities and the increasingly frightening breakdown of social order, even in countries we’ve previously believed to be immune.
We’ve fallen asleep. We’ve forgotten where we came from, and where we truly belong; we’ve stopped believing that there is anything beyond us, maybe even that there’s something greater and worth fighting for. More than this, though, we’ve forgotten our calling: forgotten that the purpose of the journey we’re on is to discover the rare pearl which was always intended to be our unique gift to the world.
It’s time to remember who we are. In our hearts, we’ve known for a long time that something is wrong. We’ve seen the veil shifting, caught glimpses of the finer reality which lies behind it. It’s time to finally wake up, read the letter, set off on the long journey home. It’s time to change.
At the heart of this book is a focus on the practical things we can do, the small and large changes we can make to the way we inhabit and experience the world, which will allow us to grow into a state of 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. In this book I’ll share with you my own experiences, and the experiences of several men and women from around the world, as they demonstrate how we can bring enchantment into every aspect of our daily lives. Because 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 presented here 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.
What does it actually mean, to be enchanted? How do you do it? What are the components of an enchanted frame of mind? What is actually going on inside us when we’re enchanted – what is the lived experience of it for us as individuals? As a psychologist, these questions interest me much more. And as a human being planted in a world which is in various and varying states of growing crisis, they seem to me to be infinitely more essential. …
I believe that the state of enchantment has four major comÂponents:
It is founded upon a sense of fully participating in a living world – a feeling of belonging rather than separation.
It incorporates feelings of wonder, and curiosity. To be enchanted is to be comfortable with the fact that not everything can be explained; to tolerate, even welcome, the presence of mystery.
Enchantment is not all in the head, it is very much a function of our lived, embodied experience in the world.
Enchantment is an emanation of the mythic imagination, and is founded on an acknowledgement of myth and story as living principles in the world.
It’s time to remember who we are. In our hearts, we’ve known for a long time that something is wrong. We’ve seen the veil shifting, caught glimpses of the finer reality which lies behind it. It’s time to finally wake up, read the letter, set off on the long journey home. It’s time to change.
MANIFESTO FOR AN ENCHANTED LIFE
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 .