Enchantment

 

Stormy Skies  over Ft Foster
CC Jean Stimmell: 2013

When I was young, I wasn’t religious. After I got back from Vietnam, God was dead. Enchantment was a foreign concept to me. A rare exception was when I found myself caught amid a raging storm. At that moment, I became awe-struck, shrunk to an insignificant speck in the eye of a force immeasurably larger than I was. 

Mircea Eliade called this transformation hierophany, which happens when the mundane transforms into the sacred. He pointed out that in indigenous cultures, hierophanies are everywhere, not just in big storms but in every aspect of nature, even a solitary flower blooming or a single bee buzzing.

The notion of becoming one with nature was too touchy-feely for me growing up in the 1950s, as it was for most folks. As a result, hierophanies became practically extinct, reduced to the ‘same flat reality”^⁠1 by Western logic, reason, and science.

Now Katherine May has come along with her best-selling book, “Enchantment,” to help us rediscover the miracles of everyday existence. You could say she is attempting to bring hierophany back into our lives.

“ Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology, grand stories unfolding around you as you go about your daily business, transcendence happening in real time. Even in the day-to-day, you could not avoid reflecting on the big moral and ethical questions of life, because they would be present, unavoidable. Over a lifetime, you would approach these ideas in a million different ways. Our most familiar places would become maps of myth and wisdom.”^⁠2

As I’ve grown older, I’ve incrementally become more spiritual under the influence of mentors like Carl Jung. I became immersed in Buddhism in my forties, establishing a regular meditation practice for many years. However, as Katherine May confessed, my life still felt flat. The gist of her book is about how she came to realize that her everyday life, rather than being mundane and boring, was throbbing with sacredness.

Looking back on my life as she did, it became apparent that I had become oblivious to the nuts and bolts reality of everyday life. In fact, I had taken my daily life experiences so much for granted that I no longer saw them at all. 

Reading her book has been another step in my spiritual odyssey, unlocking an enchanted world I could always sense but never get my hands around. Standard resumes, family trees, and social media bios never helped. Now I see my true identity is directly related to my sense of place, a one-of-a-kind creation that continues to coalesce from living 78 years at the intersection of Northwood and Pittsfield.

Intimations of this revelation have been blowing in the wind for some time, driven partly by the natural urge to reminisce in my old age. I’m noticing now that whenever I drive around in my neck of the woods, stories continually float up in my mind about what once happened at each point in my journey: the place I first kissed a girlfriend with bad breath, drank hard cider with an old farmer named Alf, or was bedazzled by drooping, jewel-encrusted birch trees after an ice storm.

Katherine May would say that by acknowledging the importance of my stories, I am validating my sense of place, making it sacred. In a fundamental sense, I’m dreaming my life into existence as I drive along, an experience that sounds nutty to us in NH but is how Aboriginal Bush people in Australia have always lived– as do indigenous people around the world.^⁠3

Native people, from the beginning, have been able to survive and triumph by having deep knowledge of their environment and the ability to stay in cadence with its ever-fluctuating rhythms. The Aboriginals in Australia call this mode of living ‘Dreamtime’ because –to them – they are continually dreaming their lives into existence. Consequently, because they always live in the present, the past and the future don’t exist.

That sounds strange to our modern ears, but science and quantum physics have now confirmed, beyond a doubt, that is how the universe works. Indigenous people live that truth, understanding that knowledge isn’t a thing but a continuing unveiling as reality is created anew in each moment.

Looked at in this way, our lives are enchanted just as Katherine May suggests – if we could only get out of our heads and become one with the moment.

xxx

¹ May, Katherine. Enchantment (p. 31). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

² Ibid

³ https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/understanding-aboriginal-dreaming-and-the-dreamtime/#:~:text=Dreamtime%20or%20Dreaming%20for%20Australian,all%20people%20and%20all%20things.