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The dream of my life

Is to lie down

by a slow river

And stare at the

light in the trees—

To learn something

by being nothing

A little while

but the rich

Lens of attention.

— Entering the Kingdom by Mary Oliver

Enchantment— (noun) is a state of wonder or delightful contentment experienced.

- 22nd November—My 24th year. Shadow theatre. Projecting films. Eating soup. The theme was “mythology,” though nothing in the costumes or the stories was as exacting as the moments when my attention settled on a single task. Those were the hours that seemed to compress time, that made the rest of the evening; the masks, the candles, the conversation, fade into the background.

Dis + enchantment— A "re" (turn) to enchantment insinuates that somewhere along the road, we lost the battle that granted us enchantment, and we now, live without it. Weber used the German word Entzauberung , translated into English as “disenchantment” but which literally means “de-magic-ation.” More generally, the word connotes the breaking of a magic spell. To Weber, the advent of the enlightenment and scientific rationalism negated theological and supernatural interpretations of the world which could now be intellectualized. The world then died once again. Becoming devoid of allure and mystery.

- When I first read Weber at eighteen, I remember feeling vaguely irritated. Disenchanted? That word felt inadequate. I was experiencing my first love, it was a colder summer than usual and the quiet voltage of being alive in a body that still surprised me. If the world had been de-magicked, no one had informed me.

Re + enchantment— The current state of our world post dis+enchantment is desperately trying to re+enchant itself. Re-enchantment sounds like a cope, a subjective undertaking, a mystery to be solved and sought after. Re-enchantment might not require returning to spirits, gods or cosmologies, but something that has been with us all along; and is especially with you right now, as your eyes trail over this page. Mindfulness.

- The word re-enchantment conjures semantic satiation. It's overuse; becoming increasingly co-opted by neoliberalism and the spiritual wellness industrial complex. A now taken down online course by Advaya life, promises it's students re-enchantment. "A Season of Re-Enchantment Become a advaya+ member today! Unlock a world of enchanting and transformative courses to awaken your spirit and inspire purposeful action. You're invited to join advaya with 50% off an annual membership." Behind an almost 200 dollar paywall, you find yourself re-enchanted! Yuck.

In many places the story is told and received as though something depended on it. I do not know whether anything does, I know only that the telling carries a weight not present in the versions of stories we "pay" attention to today. The room alters. People lean forward. One senses that to misplace a detail would be to disturb more than memory. Attention (deep listening and thoughtful telling) here is an ecological and spiritual necessity.

To be re-enchanted is to witness again.

What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.

What is there to do but look again. Not to recover a lost magic, nor to persuade ourselves that the world has been secretly enchanted all along, but to correct the thinness with which we so often meet it.

The evening rays falls across my living-room table. The subway is a giant metal caterpillar taking me to school. A breeze moves through a stand of willows and the leaves answer in their small, dry voices. Nothing announces itself as miraculous. Nothing asks to be believed in. It asks only that we remain.

To look carefully is not a romantic gesture. It is a practice requiring that we suspend the reflex to assign, to assert, to translate. We allow the thing—sun, wind, breath—to retain its density. Don't rush to connote.

At the same time, we soften. We breathe in. We know we are breathing in. The act of attention becomes a willingness to accompany an invitation to the object of our attention, that I am here and now. When we are present, the ordinary transfigures. The object ceases to be merely itself—you could say that you have cast a spell, but the magic is that we have stopped looking past it.

Maybe “re-enchantment” is too theatrical a word. What happens is quieter. The leaves wave in gestures, The lace curtains still catch the light, and we are here to experience it.

The question of wether this re-enchantment can redeem the age is uncertain. I'm thinking It may not. But to refuse this attention is to suffer a diminished world. To practice it-steadily, (it takes a lot of practice) without spectacle-is to live mindfully, intentionally and enchantedly. CHANGE IT

But this has no bearing on our ability to engage with reality with intense focus, attention, engagement and even wonder. The world is enchanted and enchanting. There are good questions to ask and worthwhile ways to spend a life in service of those, to the ends of satisfying our curiosity and sharing love and compassion for our fellow conscious travelers, on this fleeting moment we have together.

folks predicate their understanding of an "enchanted world" on cultural narratives and not on a simple yet often overlooked appreciation of the natural world. The Romantics in particular were interested in "magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces", and while I myself am interested in those things, we don't need the narratives under which these topics are subsumed to simply pay the right kind of attention to the beautiful owl in the illustration in this article, for example.

Re-enchantment is a question of attention