Re-enchantment

Encountering wisdom in mystery

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

For much of my life, I felt disconnected, as if something was missing within me. Ultimately, I’ve concluded that my childhood assessment was correct, but that it was not unique to me. What was missing was an intimate relationship with nature, or as Brooke Wiliams frames it, the widespread loss of enchantment.

Raised in a typical middle class suburban home, most of my existence was contained indoors or in a vehicle on a paved road. There was far too much air conditioned sterility between my body and the wild. When we did venture out into wild spaces, everything felt righted. The world made sense. I made sense. I lacked any language or cultural norms to do more than deduce that I was an “outdoorsy” person. Much later in life, I would come to recognize the nourishment of such communion.

“...enchantment refers not only to those ‘feelings of pleasure and delight’ that we are grateful to experience, but also to the state of being in which our ancestors lived prior to what we call modernity. For thousands of years, many gods guided our lives, communicating with us through our dreams and subtle and not-so-subtle clues from the wild world into which we were integrally enmeshed.”

- Brooke Williams, Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-enchantment

Within my socialized Western lens on the world, I picked up pretty rocks to keep. I captured lizards, scooped up tadpoles, and picked flowers without a second thought. Nature was a setting inside my life. I took what felt good and never even considered the consequences.

The commodification of nature boils everything down to a self-centered transaction in a neverending competition. Prior to colonization and the proliferation of this mindset, humankind maintained a very different relationship with nature. As Robert Riversong reflects, “For most non-Western cultures, nature is truly alive, and every entity within it is endowed with agency, intelligence and wisdom.”

When I see all other beings, all of nature, in this way, I delight in the rocks, the lizards, the wondrous lifecycle of frogs in a desert, and the irrational beauty of wildflowers. I leave them to remain a vital part of the ecosystem. I listen. I offer praise. I am myself transformed by the interaction and recognize this as a gift.

Jay Griffiths describes that universal impact of an open heart in nature: “Wilderness is a ferocious intoxication which sweeps over your senses with rinsing vitality, leaving you stripped to the vivid, your senses rubbed until they shine. It is an untouched place which touches you deeply and its aftermath - when landscape becomes innerscape - leaves you elated, awed and changed utterly.”

Re-enchantment is a return to our birthright, to our belonging within a vast and wondrous web of life, and our intrinsic and sacred connection to all other beings.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Albert Einstein

I appreciate Brooke Williams’ invitation to find our way back to the whole of nature in its beauty. In this Year of Authoring Beauty, we have been on an adjacent journey of continually attuning to curiosity, awe, and the often overlooked magnificence that tethers our lives to present meaning.

“I do not believe in, never have believed in, any ‘transcendental’ spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to ‘explain’ life, give it ‘meaning.’” - Oliver Sacks

Williams traces his re-enchantment back to a vivid dream of a dragonfly, the first thread in an expansive tapestry of transformative encounters. I crossed that threshold myself only four years ago under a madrona tree in the Texas desert. I held great respect and adoration for the wild before that day, but after that day every being beyond me became sovereign. I was walking through their mysterious, miraculous world.

Williams might summarize his own experience within a re-enchanted body as:

• Embracing synchronicity over coincidence

• Seeing other beings as subjects, as opposed to objects

• Seeking wisdom and finding truth in natural history

• Accepting the limits of science, and the possibilities beyond

• Practicing active rather than passive attention

Given the history of humankind, it would seem that our innate default is one of enchantment. We are predisposed to a benevolent kinship with all other beings, but we have been estranged in so many ways that continue to perpetuate disconnection.

To bridge such a divide, perhaps we can begin by simply expanding our practices for human intimacy to encompass so much more. Reach out to say hello, listen for a response, share quality time and offerings, praise openly, and try to do no harm.

“Go out into nature. Nature is not our enemy, it is our home; in fact, it sustains us and is in every one of us. All living things are our relatives and belong with us in the biosphere. Out of doors we learn very quickly that there is another rhythm and a different agenda from the frenetic human pace and program. Feel the rain and wind on your face, smell the fragrance of soil and ocean, gaze at the spectacle of the myriad stars in clear air or countless animals making their annual migration. Doing so will rekindle that sense of wonder and excitement we all had as children discovering the world and will engender a feeling of peace and harmony at being in balance with the natural world that is our home.”

- David Suzuki

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