Enchantment

needed to do something active to stop my mind from focusing on my body rather than on what was being said. I needed to write it down, or else to get up and pace the room.

I was already there before the pandemic; I already knew that I could not bend myself into a shape set for entirely different lives. I had already reformulated and compromised and found ways to integrate small meditations into busy days, to honour the quality of attention that comes only when you take care of another person’s needs, and to break eve

They are small skills, but they are mine, and I’m determined to pass them on. The greatest part of them is not the skill itself but the culture that surrounds it.

the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us, and to reconnect with the other stories, too,

But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it.

I am unlearning all of life, and how I used to live it. The pandemic brings a disordered, panicked unravelling. There is no time to reckon with it, only to act. That action forms a continuous chain across the whole of the next year, and more, and onwards. After a while I cannot remember how to do anything else. Like the swimming lessons, one form o

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality.

I miss the days when I could feel held by the water and held by the people I swam with, all at once; and when I felt useful enough to hold them in return.

I am entirely disinterested in stories that didn’t happen, in the interior lives of people who don’t exist. I am overtaken by apathy.