Enchantment

Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you.

On the other hand, there are some ways in which the bicameral mind makes more sense to me than the ill-fitting accounts I’ve been taught to believe about myself. I often receive emotions and insights that seem to arrive with no heredity in conscious thought, and I have to undergo a process of tracing them backwards to understand where they came fro

I relieve myself of the duty to search for language. I let myself feel instead.

As a child, I would look out of the window on a nighttime drive and think the moon was following us. From my vantage point, she seemed to be chasing us along the sky, breathlessly trying to keep up.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood.

I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

More often than not, I find that I already hold all the ideas from which my enchantment is made.

for. That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.

Leaving a trace is not necessarily the same as doing harm, especially when it merely involves the shifting of stones from one place to another. Making these connections will surely usher us into more careful stewardship of the land on which we walk.