A Grief Spell for Cultivating Enchantment in Disenchanting Times

Enchantment is a practice, and a collective one. We will have to return our attention to the places of beauty and pleasure and joy and magic and empowerment. We will have to do it again and again. This is not a solitary practice. We will have to lean on each other - human and more than.

Our enchantment is a form of nourishment. Our enchantment is medicine. Even experiencing just a few moments of this world’s beauty can reorient us. Our enchantment resources us, nourishes our capacity to hold complexity, and to respond creatively to activation and heartbreak. When we are able to sense ourselves and the world as full of magic, even ... See more

The violence of colonialism and capitalism has always sought to erase the inherent value of the world. Empire continues targeting those with deep and wide understandings of kinship, uprooting people from the lands they love, destroying their olive groves, using weapons of sexual and gender violence, and mass murdering those who resist. Our collecti... See more

Enchantment is not apolitical. Disenchantment from ourselves and the world is a tool of colonialism.

Our enchantment with the world can coexist with our DIS-enchantment with violent systems and ideologies. Our grief and love for this world and one another can actually disrupt spells that keep us complicit and passive and disempowered. When we become disenchanted with business as usual, we make room for the world and other ways of being in it that ... See more

Grief is a portal, an altared state, through which we can come to experience more magical understandings of this world and ourselves, as we realize our immersion in a world that is multidimensional, mysterious, animate, always changing.

Grief and enchantment with the world are not mutually exclusive. Rage and enchantment are not mutually exclusive. Our sense of possibility and magic can swell as our hearts shatter

Cultivating enchantment is not about avoiding pain or upset or achieving an unchanging, constantly inspired state. It’s about loving the world when it hurts. Living in a constant state of oblivious bliss is not enchantment, it’s profound mis-attunement with ourselves and the world. Loving the world means being willing to be heartbroken by the world... See more

When I use the word enchantment, I mean a bunch of things...

I mean a sense of curiosity, imagination, delight, pleasure, wonder, and awe in the ways we sense ourselves, the world, and what’s possible.

I mean a more deeply embodied sensing of the life, animacies, and worlds around us that colonialism and capitalism seek to flatten and erase.

I mean a... See more